The ESRI and the True Nature of Education

First published in the Western People on Monday.

The Economic and Social Research Institute, the ESRI, have published a report about the Leaving Cert. The report, titled “Leaving School in Ireland: A Longitudinal Study of Post-School Transitions”, is a sequel to the Institute’s 2011 hit, “From Leaving Certificate to Leaving School: A Longitudinal Study of Sixth Year Students.”

This year’s report is shorter than the 2011 version – it is seventy-four thousand words long, five thousand shorter than before. One would like to think it’s shorter become some editor, with his cigarette, eyeshade and blue pencil, returned the first draft to the authors with instructions to “punch it up a little bit,” but hope may be in vain.

As may be any hopes of the authors that anyone would read their reports. Seventy thousand words qualifies as novel-length – who on earth is going to plough through all that, and why? A look at what appeared in the press last week would suggest that not only does the ESRI’s Leaving Cert Report tell us nothing we don’t already know, it is based on some painfully naïve suppositions about how the great world turns around.

The ESRI report tells us that social class is a major factor in whether or not a child goes to university, a revelation equal in shock to hearing that night follows day or water is wet.

Some years ago, possibly as many as twenty, Fintan O’Toole wrote a genuinely magnificent column in the Irish Times about the nature of social class. He considered two children, both born on the same day, and rolled dice at each pivotal stage in their development to see what their luck would be like in life.

At birth, the middle class kid rolled a six and the working class kid rolled a one. By the time the kids were in school the gap was of the order of 24-4 or 30-6 and will never be bridged. That’s how the world turns, and has done for as long as humanity has recorded its own history.

The ESRI report does address the problem of students learning off answers for the Leaving Cert, but not quite in the way you might expect. Should the State make an effort to make the foremost exam in the State less predictable than clockwork and taxes?

Why, sure they could do that but the ESRI would be much happier if “discussion could usefully focus on the potential role of project work and team work within senior cycle in equipping young people with the kinds of skills they need for lifelong learning and the labour market.”

This is the sort of stuff we have to listen to all the time about education. Forget all those fuddy-duddy notions about learning stuff you didn’t know. Project work and teamwork are very much where it’s at.

Reading these sorts of theories, you would be forgiven for wondering if some of the theorists have ever worked on a project or in a team, because the chief thing you learn from working on a project or in a team is that Hell is other people.

Projects aren’t collaborative efforts. The majority of people on a project aren’t pushed. They’ll do enough to keep the boss off their backs but after that, well, life is for living, not projects, as far as they’re concerned.

One person on the project will do more than half the work, for different reasons – enthusiasm, natural leadership, fear, whatever. But as sure as God made little green apples there will also be at least one person on the project who won’t do a tap, not even under threat of violence. He or she has figured out that the leader and/or the others will crumble and cover for him rather than shop him to the bosses. And that sort of Machiavellianism is not a lesson that we should be teaching our children.

The other thing you have to wonder about these educational theorists is if they ever met a child. They seem to have a very vague idea of how children operate. The theorists will tell you that, rather than hammering home times tables and handing out mountains of homework, if you just open the child’s minds to the wonders of mathematics, they’ll light up like tiny stars on every point of the co-ordinated plane.

The theorists tell you that people shiver and break out in hives at the very mention of the world “maths” because the teachers are teaching it badly. The theorists may be assured that if the maths teachers knew a better way to teach maths they would do, for the same reason they walk into the classroom, rather than hop.

The current vogue in teaching maths seems determined to make what was once straightforward complex, for no apparent reason. Its proponents say it’s because it encourages the children. But being confused isn’t the same as thinking, a fundamental point the theorists seem to miss.

The US equivalent of our Project Maths is called the Common Core. One of the Common Core support materials outlines an old school maths question – “If 3(y-1)=8, what is y?” – and goes on to say it’s no good because “this question is an example of solving equations as a series of mechanical steps.”

How is that a bad thing? All maths is built on one single sentence, written by Euclid of Alexandria, three or four hundred years before the birth of Christ. “A point is that of which there is no part” is the sentence with which Euclid opens his book, The Elements. Euclid took the smallest thing there is, a thing can cannot be broken into smaller parts, and built a whole mathematical world on it, in a series of mechanical steps.

Reader, if it was good enough for Euclid, it’s good enough for you. If you got your Leaving Cert results last week, congratulations and the best of luck to you. If you’re facing into the Leaving next year, there is one little-known and under-exploited trick that will stand to you. Keep doing your homework. Everything falls into place after that.

Hey, Kids - Leave Those Teachers Alone

First published in the Western People on Monday.

This week is the mid-term break for many schools in the County Mayo. So while people who work have the blessing of a bank holiday today, tomorrow we go back to work while teachers and pupils either lie in or are kicked out of bed by outraged parents and told to clean the gutters or mow the lawn, as appropriate to their station.

We all remember what it was like to be in school as a pupil – if you didn’t, you’re making quite the achievement in even reading this paper – but relatively few know what it’s like to be at the top of the class, looking back at the children looking hungrily up at you. Reader, let’s spare a moment this morning to think of the teachers.

It’s fashionable among some people to say they succeeded despite their teachers, rather than because of them. This is a particularly miserable attitude, but it is by no means uncommon. For instance, during one of those clubby radio shows that RTÉ do so often during the summer, Miriam O’Callaghan interviewed the journalists Sam Smyth and Eamon McCann.

McCann, a Derryman, is a graduate of St Columb’s College, a school that is remarkable for the amount of influential people who have been educated there – Séamus Heaney, God be good to him, and John Hume are both alumni of St Columb’s, and there are many more who have made their mark on the city, the country and the world. Miriam asked McCann if he thought St Columb’s had much influence on him.

No, said McCann. He is the fine man he is today despite, rather than because of, his schooling.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, of course, but McCann seemed blissfully unaware of the irony of his disdain for the school that educated him when he went on to mourn the absence of Latin in modern curricula, on the basis that the learning of the ancient language is good for teaching accuracy, mental discipline and giving a taste of the richness of human history.

This is ironic because, if it weren’t for St Columb’s and the teachers therein, where would McCann have learned his Latin in the first place? When the children of Derry were going home in the rain or running up the dark lane it is unlikely they were speaking Latin while doing it. McCann has his teachers to thank for his Latin and his subsequent grasp of grammar, though he seems to little appreciate it.

This is the sort of revelation that only comes with age (or not at all, in McCann’s case). When you’re a young person behind the desk, everything is, like, such a drag. A child who will happily rattle off the Manchester United first XI or can dash off the Kardashian family tree on the back of a copybook may have zero interest in naming the principle rivers and towns in Ireland or being able to recite The Old Woman of the Roads. Something’s got to give.

The worst mistake a teacher can make is thinking that there’s a way for the kids to treat you as one of themselves. There really isn’t, and that’s not the teacher’s purpose. The teacher’s purpose is not to get the children to do what they want, but to get them to do what they must.

Sometimes it seems that the Department forgets this distinction. Different academics publish papers about engaging with the child and that’s all fine but you have to remember that what a child wants to engage in is not what the teacher wants the child to engage in.

Some people say the great teachers are the ones who let the love of the subject shine through. Sometimes, with the major subjects of Irish, English or Maths the gifted and inspired teacher can be swept away by the beauty of a poem by Raifteirí, a short story by Michael McLaverty or the otherworldly beauty of those beautiful, clean lines that only exist on the limitless horizon of the Euclidean plane.

And all that’s true, but those aren’t the only teachers who are great. The great teachers are also those who teach subjects that will not help get a job, but will give joy for evermore. Think of the music teachers and PE teachers, who teach the joys of the eternal battle between the tonic and dominant chords and the incredible benefit of being able to kick with both feet.

And there are also the teachers who know that a real world exists beyond the schoolroom and it can be far more frightening and difficult to deal with than the Tuiseal Ginideach, mischievous trickster though the Tuiseal Ginideach certainly is. Anyone who has had difficulties and was quietly helped by a teacher will remember that kind act until it’s time to turn our backs to this world and prepare to face the next.

So spare a thought, then, for teachers. Every year the department makes their job harder by messing with the subjects and trying devious ways to cut junior teachers’ pay to appease senior members of the union. Every year teachers’ friends mock them for having it easy with those big, long holidays and that blissfully short working day.

But none of the rest of us will have a computer that will talk back and try to get all the other computers on its side, just for devilment. We can take five or ten minutes for a wander around the office when we like. We’re not on duty all the time, with sixty hungry eyes waiting for us to slip up.

But neither are we those who hand on the flame, problematic curricula or no, to another generation. For every ten or twenty children who are just counting the days there will be one who will be lit up by what he or she hears from their teacher, and has a job, a gift or perhaps a source of comfort and joy for the rest of their lives. How many of us can say that we contribute something similar to society?

On the Learning of Irish

You’ve bitten the bullet. You’ve seen David McWilliams flicking his fringe while talking Irish with some múinteoir gaelscoile on The Pope’s Children, and you decide that you want some of that. It’s the off-season for classes – not that they’re worth a damn anyway, on An Spailpín’s experience – so you make your way to Eason’s or Hodges Figgis and you decide you’ll buy a book, and try to tackle the ancient language of the Gael that way.

You stand at the shelf that Hodges Figgis allocate to books in Irish – not many, but still the most in the capital city of this republic – and there she is, giving you the come hither look, or, she might say herself, an cuma tar anseo, a chuisle mo chroí. It’s Sharon Ní Bheoláin, and she’s the face of Turas Teanga, RTÉ’s most recent attempt at the painless instillation of Irish into the national psyche.

You have a vague memory of the show being on, but you must have been doing something else at the time. You buy the DVD box-set for fifty lids, go home and watch the first episode. You never watch it ever again, and leave it shamefully at the back of the press, along with that interior decoration book and the The Essential Heart on CD.

Turas Teanga epitomised all that was wrong in Irish language teaching. Because there seems to be an idea abroad that the slightest suggestion that any effort on the part of the prospective students would have same prospective students fleeing the premises in the manner of several nymphs surprised while bathing, what you have instead is beautiful Sharon driving around some beautiful scenery in a beautiful open-topped car intercut with some bucks turning hay and speaking Irish in impenetrable accents. What on earth is the point?

To An Spailpín’s mind, any question of learning a language is a question of building a vocabulary and understanding grammar. An Spailpín has read of sages who can pick up languages just like that – a gift enjoyed by caddish hero of the Flashman novels, for instance – but for mortals, things don’t come that easy, and you’ve going to have to sit down with your dictionary, grammar and workbook and put in the hours. But once you’re prepared to accept that, there is hope. Of a kind.

The ace, king, queen and jack of Irish grammars is a book called Réchúrsa Gramadaí, written – or compiled, even – by Brian Mac Giolla Phádraig. It’s a beast of a grammar, and answers all the questions you could possibly have – provided you’re sufficiently fluent to read the thing, because it’s written entirely in Irish. An Spailpín remembers flicking through a copy in secondary school and when I beheld a sample Leaving Cert question from 1936, I felt as that character in Chesterton’s Lepanto, who found his God forgotten and sought no more a sign. Had I had a Bible written in the original Coptic Greek it could not have been more useless than Réchúrsa Gramadaí was to a schoolboy whose first language was English.

An Spailpín still remembers the sense of being hopelessly lost and confused between all those urús, séimhiús and I-haven’t-got-a-clues that moved in and out of the miles of non-standard prose we had to hack through in those classrooms, responding to forces of I knew not what. A voluminous memory and what I suspect was a certainly antipathy on the part of the examiners won me a C in the Honours paper, and after that year’s Matriculation it was slán leat to the Gaeilge for ever.

Returning wasn’t easy, as it’s remarkably difficult to find good books of Irish tuition. It’s been said that there are more writers of Irish than there are readers and a quick visit to the bookstore will quickly suggest that notion is based in reality. Most of the books are aimed at children, of course, because they are forced to buy the books for school. Good egg for the author, but not so much fun for an adult learner, whose interest in súgradh, milseáin and lá cois farraige has hopefully receded.

The best book of tuition in the language, in the basics of how the language works, is “Cruinnscríobh na Gaeilge,” by Ciarán Mac Murchaidh. In his introduction, Mac Murchaidh remarks that previous grammars have been a little too comprehensive, and he’s hoping to come up with a more user-friendly edition. And he succeeds admirably – working through the book I saw for the first time where all those h’s were coming from, and why they were there. I even found out what An Tuisil Ginideach was, something I honestly never knew in fourteen years of Irish in school. I tell you most solemnly, watchers of the skies with new planets swimming into their ken were only in the ha’penny place with An Spailpín Fánach.

There’s only one problem with Cruinnscríobh na Gaeilge. It’s written in Irish. Grand if you have that Gaeilge bhriste that was always considered better than Béarla cliste, but if your Irish is so rusty now that you can no longer see the metal beneath, Cruinnscíobh na Gaeilge is no good to you at all.

The Christian Brothers’ famous New Irish Grammar is a possible solution. It’s in English, and therefore accessible. It appears to be modelled on the famous Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, and it’s pretty by God comprehensive – sadists and terrorists the Brothers may have been, but they didn’t believe in phoning it in either. It is hard to imagine any question of Irish grammar that is not answered somewhere within the pages of the Christian Brothers’ New Irish Grammar.

The only problem, of course, is that while it’s all very good as a reference, trying to use the New Irish Grammar as textbook is like trying to learn a language from a dictionary. That’s just not the way languages, or human brains, work.

So it’s hats off and sound the trumpets for Ms Donna Wong. Donna, as you may have gathered from her handle, ain’t from round here. Ms Wong was studying Irish in San Francisco and now teaches it in Golden State College. As she remarked in an interview with Beo.ie last year, Ms Wong had such difficulty finding an Irish textbook in English that she wrote one herself.

A Learner’s Guide to Irish is the result, and An Spailpín Fánach heartily recommends it to anyone tackling a return to Irish. Once you begin to recognise the word mutations that are so much a part of Irish and so alien to English, the mountain will become considerably less terrifying. It still has to be climbed, but at least now you have a guide on whom you can rely. And what more can we ask for?

Of course, it’s a point of shame for the nation that this essential service, a basic textbook on the supposed first language of the State, needed a foreigner to write it and, had a foreigner not written it, would be waiting to be written yet. Were the body politic worth a damn, they’d make Ms Wong a freewoman of Dublin. Instead, they’ll probably be too busy shouldering each other out of the way trying to get into a photocall with Paul O’Connell at Croke Park.

But no matter. Irish has been for idealists for some time. If you’re looking for reward or thanks, you’ll need to look elsewhere for a hobby. But knowing some Irish does make Irish people feel more whole, or can do, certainly. If you doubt it, click on this link to Liam Ó Maonlaí singing ‘Sí Do Mhaimeo at a Fleadh a few years ago. If it means nothing, it means nothing and that’s fair enough. But if it registers at all, maybe a twenty bucks towards Donna Wong’s book wouldn’t be a bad idea as spring approaches, with its marvellous promise of growth and renewal, fás agus athbheochán.

FOCAL SCOIR: I noticed, while looking up stuff for this (because your diligent Spailpín does his homework you know), I was disappointed to discover that Réchúrsa Gramadaí is no longer in print. This is another source of national shame – even though the book may have blighted my childhood, that does not mean that it’s not very valuable. All it means is it should be kept well away from children. Like firearms or votes. I hope it’s back in print soon. For the nation’s sake.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Irish, teaching, Gaeilge

On the Teaching of Irish

An Spailpín is interested to note Conradh na Gaeilge’s suggestions about improving the teaching of Irish in schools, as published yesterday and reported in the Irish Times this morning. The proposals are fine, as far as they go; the problem is of course that as long as the syllabus remains as misguided as it is any proposals along the lines of those of Conradh na Gaeilge’s are exercises in deck-chair re-arranging on doomed ships from the Harland and Wolff shipyard. However, to re-invent the Irish language syllabus would require things like courage, vision, commitment and logical consistency, none of which are concepts traditionally associated with Dáil Éireann or the inhabitants therein.

An Spailpín Fánach is also just rotten enough to remark that Conradh na Gaeilge might be better served attending to the problems in their own house. Your humble correspondent signed up for one of Conradh’s own classes some years ago – the ardleibhéal, no less – and the experience was a disappointing one. In fact, were it not for the fact that his friends are now insisting that your slightly bitter quillsman accentuate the positive I would posit a view that the only reason Conradh runs classes is to make easy dough, but as I say, I eliminate the negative in these things anymore and let all this little stuff go.

One of the reasons why the Conradh classes, and any other classes I’ve attended, have been wastes of time is the absence of set texts, and this asinine idea currently in vogue for the “spoken language.” What this means in effect is that teachers can just gas away for two hours and then toddle off home, happy that they’ve done their bit for the language.

Well, life isn’t that easy. Learning another language isn’t for cissies, and learning one as complicated as Irish takes a certain amount of guts. One of the reasons why Irish is so difficult is because of the mutations of the words – words change according to the grammatical function they perform in a sentence in a way that is utterly alien to English constructions. It’s quite common in Latin, but dumbing down means that we try and keep exposure to that from our children’s innocent eyes as well. We can’t risk thinking breaking out, you know.

An Spailpín Fánach’s chief memory of Irish from his schooldays – and those schooldays last fourteen long years, let’s not forget – is of Irish essays being returned with corrections in red ink that indicated h’s missing in some places and h’s to spare in others, the whole thing peppered with missing fadas, making that days pensées looking like they’d been caught in a blood-coloured blizzard. By the time the Leaving Cert rolled around, I had given up all hope of ever figuring out what went where, and I approached the upcoming examination in the same stoic manner as an infantryman going over to the top at the Somme – I knew that if I made it safely to the other side I was damned if I was ever coming back to this God-forsaken vision of Hell.

Children start learning Irish at the age of four. It’s a fifty-fifty shot if they’re even fully toilet-trained and we, in our wisdom, expect them to pick their way through a sentence as euphonically pleasing and grammatically complex as “ná bac le mac an bhacaigh agus ní bhacfaidh mac an bhacaigh leat.” We are an optimistic race.

Irish grammar is complicated. Full stop. Most people’s memories of Irish at school are of being hopelessly lost in its thickets, or else of simply counting the days until the Leaving Cert when they’d never have to look at another leabhar or focal ever again. So, nice and all as it would be to think that one could just painlessly soak the language up, as porter is imbibed on Saturday night, that’s not the way the world works, and all the wishing in the world won’t make it so.

The Government, insofar as it gives the language any consideration at all, is interested only in not rocking boats – not rocking the traditional pieties about part of what we are and aren’t the Gaelscoileanna great, and not rocking the gravy trains to the Gaeltachts and subsequently losing seats in the election. After that, they couldn’t give a rooty-toot-toot.

If you do give a rooty-toot-toot, if in this age of concepts of patriotism going no further than ringing Dessie Cahill to tell him how deeply proud you are to see rugby and soccer in Croke Park, then God help you. However, An Spailpín is stricken with the same sickness, so call back in a few days to this strange space and we’ll see what we can to do to learn our language correctly. In the meantime, An Spailpín respectfully suggests to Mary Hanafin and her underlings in the Department of Education that perhaps she could take Mr David Lee Roth’s advice, and employ hotter teachers. This is the Podge and Rodge generation after all.

Technorati Tags: Ireland, Irish, teaching, Gaeilge