AN EXPERIMENT IN EDUCATION The best program on TV last night was the first episode in a new series called The Unteachables. It's a kind of reality show set on a farm. But this farm is not for animals, it’s for children. The farm has been converted into a school for one class of difficult students. And it is the job of one man to try and teach these students something in the two weeks they are there. The class is a group of sixteen boys and girls, aged thirteen and fourteen, who have all been expelled from schools at least once. Their previous teachers said that they were ‘unteachable’ and, judging by their behavior on the programme last night, it isn't hard to see why. The teacher who has to deal with this class is forty-year-old Philip Beadle. Before working in education, Mr Beadle played in a rock band, but he gave up music eight years ago to become a teacher. At his first school, he helped his students to get the best English marks the school had ever seen. As a result, he was made Schoolteacher of the Year. In the program last night, we saw the students have their first lesson with Mr. Beadle. He started by playing a game, where he and the students pointed at each other and said something bad about the other person. This might not sound very educational, but he had the attention of all the students the whole time. After that, Mr. Beadle took his class outside for an English lesson. At their previous schools, most of the students refused to read in front of their classmates, so Mr. Beadle took them to the field to read to some cows. Each student read an extract from a Shakespeare play to them, and the students seemed to enjoy it. In the next scene, Mr. Beadle took them to another field to teach them basic punctuation. He did this through another game that involved jumping around and shouting ‘question mark!’ and ‘semicolon!’ Everyone seemed to enjoy this strange way of learning and by the end of the show the students were starting to accept their new teacher. Some of them even said he was ‘all right’. I really enjoyed The Unteachable because you could see the teacher was having a positive effect on the students. If, like me, you are fascinated by this experiment in education, you’ll want to watch the next episode on Channel Four next Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. Personally, I can't wait! 1. What is Unteachable? 2. Who said that the class on the TV is hard to deal with? 3. Who/What did the students read Shakespeare’s play to? 4. How is Mr. Beadle’s teaching method? 5. How is the writer’s attitude towards the TV programme?