In a school somewhere in the world, right now, there is a teenage boy drawing a penis on his desk or the wall of his classroom. Whether it’s a long one, short one, thick one, or thin one, this universal urge for teenage lads to decorate empty spaces with pictures of willies is only matched by the universal suffering of the caretakers who have to get rid of the drawings at the end of the day.

I can just imagine the scene in Cerne Secondary School a few hundred years ago:

“OK, everyone. The interactive whiteboard hasn’t arrived, yet. Actually, blackboards haven’t even been invented yet, so we’re going to carve today’s diagram into the side of that hill over there. Let’s work as a group on a big picture of a man then label all the body parts in French”.

Three weeks later:

“Well done, everyone. That looks great. Hang on a minute, who added the massive phallus?”.

Now, I’m not a maths teacher, but I’ve covered enough statistics classes for sick teachers to know that roughly 78.2 per cent of people are unable to tell the difference between real statistics and those made up on the spot.

Based on this expert knowledge, I can safely estimate that with ‘desk dongs’ being added to the world at a rate of one every minute and being cleaned up at a rate of one every three minutes (because of underfunding), were heading for a global glut of genital graffiti. So, what can we do about it?

I saw something on Angela Maiers’ blog the other day that might help. Idea Paint is a kind of paint that can turn anything into a whiteboard. I’m not going to suggest painting the whole class with it so the students can put wipe-off willies wherever they want, but having a large space where students could write on the walls (in boardmarker) could provide some scope for really interesting activities in class.

Letting students write on the walls, albeit under controlled circumstances might also reduce the ‘cool’ factor of graffiti. If it’s no longer an act of rebellion to write on the walls, maybe students wont feel the need to do it so much and can focus on really cool, ‘harmful’ activities, like learning languages.

Today’s image is by Induo.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 29th, 2010 at 8:52 am and is filed under Behaviour. 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.