Frankenstein. The bane of my year twelve’s lives at the moment. They’ve been forced to study Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – forced by me. Mainly because it’s on the syllabus, and I’m very good at following orders, but also because it’s actually quite a good study in gothic literature and that is our theme du jour.

The lesson of the moment was actually going rather well, they were in groups, working on different elements of the gothic and putting together presentations (using a great resource I got from here). I was rather proud, the classroom was alive with the hum of happy students, enjoying the time to pretend to work and actually talk about Casey’s jailbait boyfriend, or whether they were going to vote for Stacey or Jo at the weekend.

Then, disaster; one of the ass(istant) heads walks in. “Random observation, keep going, ignore me.” The class fell silent. They kids began to whisper and sigh and glare at me. I tried some resounding humour and encouraging, motivational grunts, which didn’t work. Then the observatron stood up: “Dan, a word please. What’s the SEAL agenda for this lesson?” Eeerrrm, I struggle around like a flopping fish inside my empty brain trying to find a way to link social, emotional and behavioural issues with the key themes of the eighteenth century Gothic novel. I fail.

“The, err, responsibility of, err, people to, ummm, not create monsters in society?”

“Fine,” she says. Turns on her heel and leaves the classroom.  WTF? I don’t even know what ‘not creating monsters in society’ that means. Does she? Proof again that SEAL is a in actuality a fat sea mammal and NOT a legitimate way to teach the kids to behave better.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009 at 4:52 am and is filed under Behaviour, Lessons, Seal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.