I work in Stoke on Trent in a VIth Form College, teaching 16-19 year olds.
The college has a very high intake of working class, and Asian students
(mainly Pakistani)for whom English is a second language. A large proportion
of our intake are first generation post sixteen.
There are some serious problems developing at the moment because of the
government's mindless target setting which means that growning numbers of
students who in the past would have done sandwich courses or some form of
vocationsl training are now doing A Levels and expecting to go on to do
degrees. This leads to some difficulty in teaching extremes of mixed
ability from those who are hardly fluent in reading and writing through to
those who are Oxbridge applicants and want to study linguistics and
literature at a high level.
However it is my experience that the vast majority of students are
interested in ideas and want to learn - if the material is put to them in a
way they find it possible to digest, and can see the relevance of. And even
those who are very weak will make tremendous efforts to progress.
They may not be interested in politics in the form that I was in the late
seventies and eighties, but they are interested......
Liz
> Where do you teach? How would you describe the demographics?
>
> Mark
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