EADT 6
EADT 6
EADT 6
This won’t be the most popular piece I’ve written, especially with students, but I sometimes think we need to make our schools a little more boring.
Boredom these days has got a bad reputation: certainly in the classroom it’s seen as a mark of failure, a sign that we haven’t done enough to stimulate or motivate or entertain our students.
But I wonder whether, amid the frenzied cacophony of modern life, we all need to be prepared to experience more boredom, to savour it, and as teachers to teach young people how to deal with it.
I said this wouldn’t be popular, but let me explain. My memory of my own schooldays is that they were characterised by tedium. It’s how we expected school to be – a succession of 35-minute lessons in which a teacher talked at us or we copied stuff off the board. Then we shuffled off to the next one.
In fact, my childhood generally – in an age long before daytime television, let alone games consoles and the internet – was largely about finding creative ways to fend off boredom.
It was certainly like that in the summer holidays. Those five or six weeks stretched out before us and had to be filled with entertainment that we ourselves created – bike rides, den-making, practical jokes played on unsuspecting neighbours, dutiful excursions to elderly relatives, and occasional visits to sources of pre-packaged entertainment, such as the cinema.
Fending off boredom: that’s what we learnt to do.
I was thinking of this yesterday as the long summer holidays began. They are one of the greatest perks we have as teachers – a luxurious stretch of time to recharge ourselves, to read, to be with family. And if we manage them wisely we should allow ourselves to get bored, because that way we appreciate all the other stuff – the pace, the activity, the mental stimulation of our day jobs when they resume.
On the first day of my holiday I read something relevant to this by the inventor James Dyson. He said that we need to teach about failure. We overstate success, he said, and forget the importance of learning from failure. As he put it: “Failure, coupled with perseverance, can be the springboard to better things”.
So as I start planning my English lessons for September and beyond, I’m going to build in a little deliberate failure plus a careful sprinkling of pre-planned boredom.
At least, I’ll tell the Ofsted inspector it was deliberate and pre-planned.
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Last week a campaign group criticized schools for not teaching enough about infertility. In fact, most weeks someone – a business leader, politician or neighbourhood zealot – demands that something they hold dear should become the backbone of the school curriculum: more on money-management, more on good citizenship, more on the tax system, more on environmental awareness, more sex education, less sex education, no sex education – and so on.
The problem with all of this is that it overstates the importance of what we teach in schools when the real issue is how we teach. If it was up to me, I’d put together a national curriculum on two sides of A4 which lists all the stuff our culture considers important, and then I’d declare a ten-year moratorium on any further changes.
Some people would cry out that knowledge changes all the time, that the curriculum wouldn’t be up-to-date. But in reality Boyle’s Law is Boyle’s Law. In the hands of one teacher it will be a source of unfolding fascination and relevance to the world around us, whilst in the class next door it may prove deeply dull and irrelevant. It’s up to teachers to bring knowledge to life.
That’s why we need our politicians to stop endlessly tinkering with the curriculum and the examination system. If we want better teachers, we should focus on developing their skills and expertise, not distract them with another cycle of changes.
That way we can focus on helping teachers to teach better, for them to make the curriculum relevant, thought-provoking and memorable, instead of reducing learning to a sad series of modules and tests that our students are expected, like trained police dogs, to jump through.
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A joke from one of my Sixth Form students (which may show the sad state of adolescent humour): a man has been shot at with a starting-pistol. Police suspect it may be ‘race’ related.
EADT Education Supplement
25 July 2012
Wednesday, 25 July 2012