This article from the TES, which I finally got round to reading in yesterdays staff meeting, is quite interesting – though as usual it does annoy me when the papers ‘report’ on something revolutionary with bold type and a big headline, which is merely a repetition of complaints heard in staffrooms up and down the country for years.

Frank Furedi, who often lectures on education, says our fear of kids being bored is leading to over-innovation – i.e everytime results aren’t what the government hoped for some overpaid bright spark says that pupils aren’t motivated anymore and we must therefore have ‘more innovative and dynamic lessons to really get them engaged’. We must develop several new IT programmes to help with this innovation, draw up a list of targets to aim for and put together some sort of quango to ‘drive this agenda’.

Problem is, this is now happening almost daily. My pupils are so overstimulated they now start shaking if there’s more than a ten second silence; which means my Monday morning solution of ‘quiet reading on your own while I try to deal with this epic hangover’ is tragically a thing of the past. Leaving me attempting to motivate and inspire a group of hormonal, over-hyped teenagers while juggling a sore head and alarmingly blurry vision. Perhaps we’re all just too over stimulated now?

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 2:50 am and is filed under Government, Initiatives, Lessons. 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.