Thousands of schoolchildren are planning to go on ‘strike’ on Friday to protest about government inaction on climate change. Called the ‘Youth Strike 4 Climate’, it has been inspired by a 16-year-old Swedish schoolgirl called Greta Thunberg who has spent every Friday since August protesting outside the Swedish parliament and has encouraged others to follow her lead. To date, there have been strikes in Australia, Belgium and the Netherlands, among other countries, with up to 70,000 children taking part each week.
From a school’s point of view, this kind of thing is a nightmare. Teachers are usually working to a detailed plan in which a syllabus is being taught in a particular sequence. If a student misses a day, they’re going to have difficulty understanding the next lessons in the classes they’ve missed because they’ll have skipped a step.
The teachers will either have to ‘catch up’ the students who were absent — at lunchtime or after school, which means extra work for them — or differentiate what they’re teaching in the next lesson, so some children are being taught the latest step and some the previous step.
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