Election 2024: Education — 'Forget phone pouches. Leaving Cert projects are a bigger problem'
Murphy At Skibbereen Less Says Lists On Disadvantaged Conor Andy Gibson Well Have Will His Taking English Up Projects, Munity Will Advantages And Be Teacher Son Set Picture: School Students Home
One of the first things English teacher Conor Murphy had to deal with in the classroom, now more than 25 years ago, was a girl answering her mobile phone down the back of the class.
“I had hair then and I have no hair now, and I’m still dealing with the same thing,” he laughed. “It wasn’t a really a big issue then and it’s really not a big issue now.”
For him, recent budget announcements about mobile phone pouches rang hollow, only standing to highlight how education policy always seems to come second to buzzwords.
A teacher at Skibbereen Community School, Mr Murphy is worried about changes to how our teaching and learning is examined, and the wider implications this may have on us all as a society.
Changes made in recent years to the Junior Cycle were not necessarily education-based, he believes.
“It made everything much more surface level,” he explained.
“In terms of English, we have to teach so much. It’s supposed to be kind-of pick and choose and you are supposed to have the freedom in the classroom to do whatever you want but in creating this kind of freedom, they’ve diluted education completely.”
“Now you have too much choice and, because there’s an exam at the end, you can’t actually pick and choose and dive into anything. Anything could come up, so its all surface level and that seems to be the way education is going.” His big fear now is the Leaving Cert redevelopment.
“It’s much more obvious in the Leaving Cert redevelopment, especially in my subject, English.”
Issues with redevelopment are not only confined to his subject, he believes.
From next September, science subjects are all expected to include an individual experiment to be carried out by students, worth 40% of their overall marks. “A lot of schools around the country simply do not have facilities to do that,” he said.
“You will have the well-off schools that can afford to do this, who will be able to roll this out perfectly, and their students will be able to do this well and do this properly whereas you will get disadvantaged schools that simply won’t be able to.”
The English assessment will also be worth 40% for creative writing assessment and is planned to be assessed in fifth year.
"That goes against the very core of why we educate in the first place.
"We’re educating students and people, and society to be able to think for themselves and to be able to articulate those thoughts.”
“There’s an equity problem there as well. I’m a very middle-class English teacher,” he said wryly.
“I have a room upstairs with over 2,000 books, it’s got a couch, a couple of chairs, it’s got a coffee table. My son will be doing this exam and when he’s doing his project, he’s going to come upstairs with me every few nights. We’re going to sit back, relax, cup of tea, few biscuits and go through this project. He has me to help him do that.
“Other parents who can afford to will pay somebody like me to do that for them. Other people will be able to use AI [artificial intelligence] to do that.
"If you are at home and you don’t even have a laptop, or if you are at home and you’ve no space to do anything, if you always have to help out at home doing odd jobs or you have to work part time to help your parents pay for stuff, you are at a disadvantage."
“That’s just my subject of English.
"That inequity covers right across all these projects. AI should have been the death of all of these projects because there’s no way of knowing or checking if something has been written with AI or not.
"People will say there is but there isn’t. Not 100%. If a student says to me ‘I only used AI for this’, and I’m looking at it and I know they might have used it for more, I can’t prove that. If I can't prove that, then I can’t do anything.”
You also have to also remember the CAO ‘points race’ is so massive now compared to years ago, he added.
“It’s all-encompassing, it just takes over all conversations and the pressure is the points, the points, the points.”
“If you are under pressure for the points and you know you have a 40% project you can do at home where other people are going to use AI, you are going to do the same.
"It’s wide open for cheating.
"It makes no sense to me, it makes no sense to any teachers I know. Just pause it, stop it right now, and re-evaluate. The repercussions if they get this wrong are huge.”