Another Constable

I despair when I think of where society is headed. I also sadly fear that it is too late to turn the tide. The excellent Frank Chalk tells similar tales of woe to us police bloggers, but he is a secondary school teacher. If you can’t get enough of his blog, read his book.

One of my very good friends is a secondary school teacher, and I am aghast at some of the stories he comes out with. One of the ones that sticks in my mind the most is when he was teaching about foodstuffs, and during a talk about milk, he mentioned cheese. “What’s cheese got to do with milk?” one of the 14 year olds asked. “Err, cheese is made out of milk” was the simple if somewhat baffled reply he made. Half the pupils thought he was pulling their legs.

Some did not know potatoes grew in the ground. Many had not seen real items of fruit or veg, and he had to explain what various bits of green stuff actually were, so used were they to processed foods. Jamie Oliver has a mammoth mission ahead.

More worrying though are the levels of “students” (it seems Frank got told off by his department head for calling the students “kids”) that cannot read or write. I remember being told at 7 years old that I had a reading age of 12. I thought it was a bad thing until people explained to me that it was really good. Unfortunately these days it seems, many 12 year old don’t even come close to having a reading age of 7.