In the kingdom of the blind, the one eyed man is not king, he is stoned to death.
Efficiency
don’t work harder, work smarter
This is how the competitive commercial world works, in the global economy. I spent most of my life working in it.
Management do their planning at the start of the year. From this annual plan flow strategies and actions, medium and long term goals, which are then communicated to different areas/units/divisions and thence to teams and individuals. The communication may be simply an email, but often could be a meeting, a workshop, or other interactive activities.
Training, departmental meetings, staff meetings and so on are thereafter driven by this plan, these actions and goals.
We see an example of this in Derek Pringle’s Five Year Plan, and Elena’s Acuerdos.
1. We Calm down, stop reacting to events – which is stressful, often ineffective and above all not empowering.
Management, for their part, should be planning, empowering, facilitating. This is not the same as telling everyone what to do.
that style of management is largely extinct in the competitive world outside narcobusiness and the Catholic Church.
2. we work from 7.30 to 3.30 or 4.00 five days a week. Except in extraordinary cases, if the work can not be completed in this time, management should be looking to solve the problem. That is why they are paid more.
3. What are our goals and our plan.
4. our goals are to improve our teaching, this is a measurable goal, by student results.
How can we do this? By sharing best practice, seeing what works and what doesnt.
By respecting the different professional experiences and assets of the team and seeing this as a potential strength.
By raising our eyes and opening our ears
Because nothing will change unless we listen and look
What are the big issues we face as a school
Parent dissatisfaction
losing experienced teachers?
Not following/understanding Myp – as evidenced by PP grading
Kusi, aged forty, had cooked a handful of meals in her life. “I once had a dinner party for 8 people” she boasts. Only once.
Encera cooks every day for her husband and children. she has cooked thousands of meals.
Every day, Encera comes as an empleada to Kusi’s house and Kusi spends half an hour telling her what to buy in the market, and then how to cook it.
This is not about cooking a meal, it is about maintaining five hundred year old divisions of power, prestige and opportunity.
Society is commonly used to describe how a group of people, sometimes a country, work together with some shared values. The word does not apply in Lima, where people relate more as a guerra sucia, a dirty war. “The worst enemy of a Peruvian is another Peruvian”, is a common saying.
Social values still exist like archaeological remains outside Lima, where the Spanish and their cultural inheritors, the Lima-dwellers, were unable to entirely destroy them.
I visit a settlement on the edge of Lima, where houses built of thin board are scattered up the hillside. The community is building a road or trackway between their houses, on a Sunday morning. Thirty villagers are working, moving rocks to clear the route. Four or five people are putting the rocks like a jigsaw to create a solid foundation. It is called dry stone walling and it is a complex skill which I do not have.
The road passes close to a house. and they saw through the two ply to remove a small corner, bend the wall back and nail it into position. What will the householder say when they come back?” I ask. “She`s right here” they say, “she has agreed to let us do it.”
Back in Miraflores, I tell my 70 year old landlady, that I was helping build a road in the new towns, the asientos humanos, the settlements. She looks confused, or perhaps appalled, that I was working with my hands under instruction from shanty dwellers.
“You have to tell them what to do!” she exclaims.
She is one of the most honest, clear-thinking and morally valued people I know in Lima. And I hold her in great respect. So this response, based in ancient prejudices, surprised me.
In the supermarket in Miraflores a man is shopping with his empleada, his maid. She pushes the supermarket trolley. He tells her “A tin of tuna” and she takes a tin from the shelf and puts it in the trolley. And so they go.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective. They are maintaining five hundred year old power structures in Lima society.
At school, once a week, an alarm goes at eleven, and all the students and teachers leave their classrooms.
They gather in the grounds in circles and someone checks their names. Then five hundred students and teachers walk across the grass to another point, where a senior staff member makes a long and pointless speech, amplified into meaninglessness by a faulty sound system.
An hour later we receive an email declaring the exercise a success. We know that one teacher was not present and no-one checks the names of their class, but the email still announces 100% success. And so we go.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective. They are maintaining power structures in Lima society. Someone wears a coloured jacket, walks in a circle and makes a speech. And everybody follows. Order has been maintained. But it is not order, it is hierarchy. Nothing has been achieved, and nor will it be with such chicken headed leadership. Five hundred years of stupidity and the Peruvian headmistress of an expensive school has never read a book. except to copy and paste.
Every material I want to photocopy needs the approval of my head of Department. Every worksheet I prepare for students is read closely – “is this correct English?” – and amended. I print off another copy and bring it back for approval.
I teach seven different grades with different worksheets for each. Because of the time-consuming approval system I prepare very few materials for the students. One worksheet is used for four weeks. Or one printed powerpoint for the whole term. For the students, the course is tedious and repetitive. My time is spent amending, printing and getting signatures. But the hierarchy is maintained.
And so it goes.
These activities are not aiming to be efficient or effective. They seek to maintain a 500 year old view of the world, imposed after a bloody invasion that killed 80% of the native people. This medieval hierarchy no longer exists in the land of the original invaders, in Spain. It exists now in some extreme muslim states, in spy networks and narcotrafficking gangs. The latter finance and are part of Peru’s leading political parties and Congress. Some of their children attend the school. Many of the students’ families are close friends of drug mafia leaders.
The hierarchy and secretiveness are also continued in the Catholic Church, where many of the school’s teachers received their education.
A senior teacher comes to my class, her arm around the shoulder of one of my 15 year old students, about to complete the course and leave school.
“I have known this boy a long time, he is a good friend of mine, and I want to be sure that he will get a passing grade to get into university.”
The student has done no work and undertaken no assessments for several months, because he had chosen not to complete the course. I told him to sit at the back and do something useful and quiet. Yet it appears that, for Peru`s National Education System, I have to give him a grade.
What makes it easier is that under the National Education System there are no standards or measurements as to the grade I give. Peru`s Olympics would have people going for a run around the park, starting and finishing when they wish, until someone stops the clock and writes down a nota, a mark, for each person. There are no national exams or attempts at standardisation.
In several government jobs, there are set standards according to education, but as there are no standards in the education system, this is a performance of clowns. Which nevertheless, is discussed solemnly in the newspapers as if it has meaning. In the school, it is never discussed. Nothing is discussed because the forums where some exchange of view might take place, are dominated by hierarchical instructions from those with the least understanding, experience.
I said to Carrie, “Well I don`t mind giving him any grade because it has no meaning.” And she said “No it is very important, he can not get into University unless he has an average of 12”
So the number I and other teachers create without standards has a value. But still it has no meaning, in that they are not measured against any scale. Where I can say my students are three metres tall, and another can say they are 20 cm tall, because there is no definition of what is a centimetre or a metre?
Why would a country have a system of education whose grades have no meaning? Do the people I work with have any idea of the absurdity of this?
I imagine they do, because they never talk about this. It is our shame, like the corruption, the incompetence, and the sheer stupidity that is evident every day on the streets of Lima. Instead of addressing it, we believe that if we pretend that it is not there, it will go away. The power of Faith, which many were taught in their Catholic schools. And yet after five hundred years, it has not gone away. A more scientific approach would suggest that doing something, anything, and as a first stage recognising the problem, would be a small step in the right direction. But five years in Lima, and no-one will talk about the absurdity of a national system which has no values and no measurement.
Because the purpose of the education system, like the justice system, is to perpetuate inequality. A state exam would lead to a meritocracy, which would allow poor people to prosper. An equitable justice system would lead to powerful people being punished for breaking the law. And so
One former president had several hundred people, prisoners, shot by the army. One almighty bloodbath assassination of 172 prisoners within a jail. A network of corrupt maginstrates, judges and fiscals has ensured that he has yet to be charged, thirty years after the event.
There is a confusion here. Order and hierarchy. You can have one without the other. But very few of these highly educated people at one of the best schools in the Capital have travellled outside the country. The “Peruvian Director” has spent her life as a primary school teacher, before doing an offshore degree in Spain – she completed the “masters” at a Spanish University without leaving Peru. This is the same Centre of Education used by politician Cesar Acuña, who claims never to have read a book but runs his own university, has several offshore degrees and stands for president.
The S0dalicio, an extremely conservative political grouping of unmarried men with tax free religious status that runs schools and universities throughout South America, whose founder used the organisation to recruit children into a child abuse ring for the senior members of the order, continued over the years as the abused children joined the gang and became members in their turn.
This is how the competitive commercial world works, in the global economy, for which we aim to train our students.
Management do their planning at the start of the year. From this annual plan flow strategies and actions, medium and long term goals, which are then communicated to different areas/units/divisions and thence to teams and individuals.
Training, departmental meetings, staff meetings and so on are thereafter driven by this plan, these actions and goals.
Here it is el mundo en reves, the world in reverse. Teachers are ask to complete their whole year planning at the end of December. On the same date, management have a meeting to plan for the year ahead.
In January, teachers undergo training, internal and external. Some may wish to adjust their plans for the year to incorporate new ideas. In late Frebruary or March, management may communicate some ideas for the coming year, often with micro-rules for the planning that was asked in December and which the more enthusiastic teachers may have amended in February, such as ” you can only teach one ATL skill”, In March or sometime later, a calendar for the year is given to teachers. In 2018,
This is how the competitive commercial world works, in the global economy. I spent most of my life working in it. As a highly paid consultant, writing publicity materials, for global blue chip companies. Olympus, Roche, Becton Dickinson. And in Peru, people correct my English.