Arakin 4 kurs new 001 176. indd

6. Read an e-mail of a teacher
Should central government be telling schools how to deal with 
naughty children?
The government’s “discipline” tsar has just issued a checklist of 
“tough measures” to help schools deal with misbehavior. Teachers are 
being told to make punishments clear, to patrol playgrounds, to know 
the names of every pupil, to keep calm while dealing with difficult 
children, to impose a good system of rewards and so on.
Excuse me, but isn’t it hugely patronizing for central government 
to be telling teacher these things? Shouldn’t teachers be trusted to 
deal with misbehavior as and when it occurs? The thing I’ve noticed 
during my twenty years in the classroom is that human behavior is 
very complex; there is no magic formula. A whole host of things need 
to be got right before children behave properly. Improving the “con-
text” of learning is just as important as having a set of rules on the 
wall; the curriculum needs to be appropriate and challenging, assess-
ment regimes need to be fair, teacher and pupil morale needs to be 
high and so on.
The problem is that the government is utterly muddled in its 
thinking about education. On the one hand, it prides itself in “setting 
schools free”, and yet, on the other it’s about to impose an entirely 
new and centralized National Curriculum and exam system upon us, 
and tell us how to manage behavior in our schools. It’s completely 
topsy-turvy. The latest set of guidelines beg all sorts of questions: just 
how “voluntary” are they? Will they form part of Ofsted’s checklist? 
Will free schools be obliged to follow these guidelines? (http://tales-
behindtheclassroomdoor.com/2011)
a) Translate the following expressions into Russian:
To deal with misbehavior, to patrol playgrounds, to impose a sys-
tem of rewards, a host of things, to be highly patronizing, to be 
muddled in smth., to be topsy-turvy, a set of guidelines, to follow the 
guidelines.