I’ve banged on about my hatred for all things technical before. I spend more man hours calling technicians, re-planning lessons, moving classrooms and trying to fix problems when the whiteboard has a nervous breakdown and blinks angrily at me, than actually teaching.

This article in the Evening Standard today by Richard Godwin totally and brilliantly echoes my thoughts. He notes that Blair was all about investing in schools, but he invested lots of money and time and pointless white papers in computers and ICT Initiatives. And where is the investment in teaching, or pay, or comfy chairs, or the coffee in the staffroom? You know, stuff that really matters.

And now, the headteacher of the Brunel Academy in Bristol – the government’s flagship wireless school (whoopee) has said that technology is defunct. And pointless. And they’ve given up and are using pens and paper again. He actually called technology a ‘white elephant.’ That guy is switched on.

I wish I worked there. I hate my whiteboard. And my laptop. I hate the crappy wireless connection in my classroom that only works if I have exactly 12 pupils in there, all crowded round me by the back window, and I’m on one leg holding the laptop up to the light, akin to the Statue of Liberty – but, much less liberated.

I want to break up with technology. I am in a destructive relationship with it; one with occasionally violent episodes that usually ends in me cutting my finger on the broken pieces of another laptop i’ve accidentally thrown on the floor in a furious rage. “So, sorry technology, this is just working anymore. We’re just in different places, you know, I need to be able to write the homework up for my kids without having to call Tony the tecchie guy, and you’re more concerned with crashing, just after I’ve finished writing 25 reports. And not saved them.

We want different things. I want you to work. You don’t want to work. It’s over.”

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 11th, 2010 at 4:31 am and is filed under IT. 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.