Speaker 3
It isn't English language, it's a subject, it isn't. There is no... When I talk to my cousin, she's a physics teacher in the same school as me, and she'll talk about the spec and the things that they teach in physics. She's like, what's on yours? And I'm like, there isn't anything on the English language one.
Speaker 2
What is on the English language? Is it a writing test? Is it a grammar test?
Speaker 3
Yes, a creative writing test. So half of it is a piece of forced creative writing in 45 minutes because that's all the best. Nothing
Speaker 2
could be more joyful.
Speaker 3
Yeah, that's how all the best writers work. And the other part of it is writing non -fiction.
Speaker 2
I mean, to be honest, as a writer,
Speaker 1
a bit of a deadline does help. But you don't get away with just staring at a blank screen in an exam and saying, well, this counts as writing, right? Which is what normal writing is like. And even in even in science, which is, you know, more knowledge heavy, there's still stuff in there. What the first thing is, there's too much knowledge. It's a stupid courses, you know, it contains way, way, way too much content. And, you know, granted, there are debates about what should go in and what shouldn't go in. There's a load of stuff in there that just should not be in the curriculum. There's no point in it being there. It's not interesting. It's not exciting. It's not meaningful. It's not relevant. And the point is there are things that you can choose that are like that. So why not choose those? So we have an overstuffed curriculum that's full of things that students that aren't relevant or important. And then there's also stuff that's weird in the exam. Like for example, we talk about command words, which are where there's a hoop you've got to jump through in assessment to get a mark. Like for example, it might say evaluate the use of aluminium or copper as for wires. Now, if you don't, if you say aluminium has x properties and y properties and z properties, whereas copper has, you know, a, b and c properties, you're limited in terms of your marks, because the word evaluate means include a judgment. So you have to say, overall, I think blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, which is just, it's just nonsense. And it's, it's, it's like completely crazy. And there's loads of stuff like this where what ends up happening, and I've been ranting about this quite a bit recently, what ends up happening is that the curriculum, you have what's called a specification, which is what Amy mentioned before, the spec, which is what you're supposed to teach the students. If you really want to know what you're supposed to teach the students, you have to go to the old exam papers and look in the mark schemes. And what that means is that the curriculum doesn't really in here, in those curriculum documents, in here's in the old exam papers, which is just dumb. a promulgated curriculum and an assessed curriculum and you have to know the difference between the two.