Hi everyone!
This is a post about the new language curriculum. I regularly get teachers writing to me asking why I don’t write about the pay disparity issues, and the various problems in our educational system. I don’t write those type of posts because my blog started off as, and will always endeavour to simply be a place for sharing teaching ideas, not political ones. It just isn’t the right platform for that. So I hope that clears it up for those who send such angry messages! I am however, expressing my discontent for the first time ever! I embraced the new language curriculum, I did a summer course on it, I read it so many times to try get my head around it. I put a lot of time into it because I was worried about planning for it this September. Only to be told at the end of October at an in-service day that we actually don’t have to plan for it until September 2018!
We had our in service day for the NLC on the Friday we finished up. I am sure most of you know this by now but it appears we DON’T have to fully use and plan with the new language curriculum until September 2018! That is what we were told and many other teachers I spoke to who attended separate in-service days said the same. Remember your school may still want you to use the new language curriculum, but the official line we received was that we are to ‘engage’ with the curriculum but we don’t have to plan for it. I personally will keep using it just because of the amount of work I put into it and I feel I may as well seeing as we will be using it next year anyway.
I am however distinctly unimpressed with this whole debacle. I feel the NLC was rushed in. I got the impression from our in-service day last year, that the tutor didn’t fully understand what we were to do, yet we were told we had to start using it. We were directed to the planning templates which are now defunct. We were definitely told to start using the NLC in our plans for this September 2017. Every teacher teaching juniors to second class didn’t just pick it up the wrong way. I think there is a lot of back peddling going on because in its current form it is not ready to be rolled out. I don’t see a difference between ‘planning’ and ‘implementing’ but apparently there is!
I do think there needs to be a change in the teaching of oral language. I would like to see more time allocated to it. The NLC unfortunately only changes the planning side of things, not the teaching.
I also don’t see why it wasn’t rolled out to all classes at once. Next year we will have half the school planning for it, and half not? What happens when my 2nd class move to third? The progession steps won’t continue. It just doesn’t make sense.
Anyway, if like me and many others you have started planning with the NLC you may as well continue. If you haven’t then maybe check with your school to see how they plan on ‘engaging’ with it!
Enjoy the weekend!
Valerie