A Slow Meander Through Life

Thursday, November 24, 2005

Survival of the Fittest

Here's a thought.
I used to be a teacher, and have friends who are teachers (I live with two). As a consequence the conversation regularly turns to teaching and the multitude of topics that accompany it.
Recently I filled out an online survery to try and find out what sort of career I should be doing. The results were somewhat poor due to the fact that I hadn't paid them any money. However, I received an email from this website which talked about you and your career and your aspirations and all that sort of thing. It made a very interesting point: many work related reviews spend time talking about your weak points, and how you can make them better. The conclusion was basically that this was a waste of time, and you should carry on being weak at the weak stuff, and concentrate on the strong stuff. I haven't stopped thinking about this since I read it.
There is a boy in my friend's year 11 tutor group. He is usually stoned, doesn't attend school 100% of the time, doesn't want to be in most of his lessons, and other things too. My friend is going to spend from now until April/May time dedicating hours of his week to ensuring that things are happening with this child. Is this a complete waste of time? His tutor group has about 26 students in, some of whom are in the category where they are achieving a mixture of As and Bs, but could achieve straight As. Who do we concentrate on?
The infamous A* to C percentage is killing schools. Maybe we should forget who is achieving that and concentrate on the high fliers. Pull as many As from the students as possible by concentrating on the top students. Who succeeds in the work place - the people who are mediocre? No! Is it time that we moved our focus and helped the people who can be helped?
Forget the weaknesses - I say it's time for the survival of the fittest.

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