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.”

Well I’m not. I’ve thought for too long now that the exams are more a test of memory, than of an understanding of analysing and writing about a text.

My pupils spend a whole year going through the text, often developing good arguments and reaching an impressive level of understanding and analysis in class, only to revise by reciting quotes and hoping for a question on the sysmbolism of Piggy’s glasses or whether Hamlet is a flawed hero. When they get these they merely list the quotes they’ve remembered and rewrite an answer they’ve already practised.

It’s getting harder to justify how English will help them in future life when it is becoming a competition in who has the best ability to remember things; rather than something that encourages them to interrogate something they’ve read, question it, form and argument and use evidence from the text to back up their argument.

But hey, i’m only an English teacher so what do I know?

So, Micheal Gove has been talking about the need for weighted subjects, to stop schools entering students in supposedly easy subjects to improve their overall scores.  If this is indeed the case – as Matthew Taylor belives it is - then we do have something to worry about in education. Because purposefully getting children to underachieve is a frightening concept.

And yet, this idea of introducing weighting isn’t the solution. Firstly, we already have it – with maths, science and english (too right) being given special precedence – but then so is IT. And even the rest of the subjects we teach are privvy to a more subtle rating that centres around prejudice and misconception - (is media studies really a ‘monkey subject’? Some of my brightest students are taking it. And the art class puts in more after hours time than anyone else in the school.) The problem with this is that it forces perhaps the more creative and bright students to struggle through a geography A-Level they don’t want to do, because Drama and Art aren’t considered the right ‘level’ of qualification.

It’s all just more election crap – and if the Conservative solution to an apparent endemic of apathy in our schools is as unimaginative  and ineffectual as rating subjects then we really are in trouble.

Having sorted through the mountain of heavy catalogues and shiny, shiny promotional material that was dumped on given to me at BETT i’ve now been able to process the wonders I discovered there.

1) Schoolchildren pay absolutely no heed to running past you and knocking you over wherever they are; it’s not just in your school, and it’s not just you. They do it to everyone.

2) Bring your own lunch. £6.99 for a 6 inch pizza beggars belief. And empties your wallet rather too quickly.

3) Nodding and smiling is an excellent substitute for being interested, but beware, if you nod at the wrong time you’ll find yourself sitting on an hard orange bench, forced to watch a ‘fun afternoon demonstration’ for an hour with a group of equally bored confused teachers.

4) Virtual learning environments are the future; and there’s no point trying to convince yourself it’s any other way. Books will become ‘digital data’; the library will be turned into a ‘learning pod’.; and resistance is futile.

5) While it is in London, Olympia still remains one of the most obscurely difficult places to get to, with tubes only running every other Friday in a month with a full moon it’s a veritable miracle if you make it there before the end of next year’s BETT. Thank god for the Teachable bus to Hammersmith.

Have decided to drag myself to BETT – apparently it promises much goodness in the way of ‘innovative technology’ and apparently I need to be more innovative (I really hate that word).

English isn’t really a subject that lends itself well to technology of any kind – being about, you know, old books and stuff – it’s more about the turning of the page and the craft of the ancient text. But I do keep seeming to be at the wrong end of the deputy head’s wrath when our ‘IT Agenda’ is discussed, and am hoping that BETT can give me enough ideas to get her off my back for a few months.

But seriously – an IT ‘agenda’? FFS – can’t we just use computers and whiteboards and blackberries and be done with it? Why do we have to have a specifc laid out plan, with milestones, targets and endless, endless - so endless - reports on our success? I spend more bloody time writing reports on how IT is becoming part of my teaching, than actually teaching.

Last term I wasted at least 35 lesson hours, on a malfunctioning whiteboard (it just kept flashing one powerpoint slide at me in this desperately sad way); several millions of my own personal hours on trying to plan lessons while my computer kept turning itself off for no explicable reason; and have recieved no less than 47 homework excuses that were blamed on technology.  “Sir, my laptop ate my homework etc.”

Not that I don’t believe them, my computer constantly hides work from me that I’m sure I spent ages doing. Bastard.

Have been pondering the merits of BETT this year. I’ve been the last two years running and I always make the same mistake of thinking it’s going to be a  rather handy day away from school, doing something different, reflecting on my ‘craft’, drinking in the atmosphere, and that I will return inspired and ready for battle with new endeavours to motivate the preying hoards.

And then I still seem to spend the entire day on my feet, dodging other teachers, talking endlessly about my subject, and being run over by packs of schoolkids. Which means I end up concluding I should have stayed in school in the first place, where it was warm (ish) and I had my own ‘I know best’ mug to drink strong, delicious tea out of, rather than several cardboard cups filled with brown scalding water.

So you see; I am still pondering the merits of BETT. If someone has some wise words, do send them my way.

Arrived into work this morning, again - fighting through a depressing lack of snow – to be handed a document during the staff meeting entitled: “A Mission Statement for Success.” Yawn.

And oh yes it was as bad as I expected. Our new ‘tag line’ is “Inspired Learners, Inspiring Teachers” – and of course that’s ILIT for short. We must work the ILIT concept into everything we do, a meeting at the end of January will ask for evidence and ideas on how we’ve brought ILIT into our teaching on a lesson-by-lesson basis. And that’s it. Class dismissed, with  no more guidance than a reassuring: “I know you’ll all come up with some inspired ideas,” from the head. Give me strength.

Still, I’ve been working hard on the project already, and so far have focused all my efforts on trying to find a way I can make the mission statement a bit longer, so it becomes ILLITERATE for short. How about:

“Inspired Lazy Learners, Inspiring Teachers, Endlessly Reaching Abominable Target Expectations” ?

Opinions on a postcard…

…about the start of term are:

1) How cold my classroom is for about three days until it is eventually warmed solely by the breath of my students. Not, the radiator, obviously.

2) How, without fail, despite numerous traps, another mouse has eaten through the whiteboard cable.

3) The overlong and tedious ‘catch up’ meetings we have with the SLT. What is there to catch up? I ate turkey, drank too much, and New Year was disappointing – nothing changes.

4)  The fact that mocks are in about three days.

5) My end-of-holiday headache that takes exactly nine and half days to shift; without fail.

It’s Sunday night, and I am fighting the misery. School starts tomorrow, I have done none of the marking I should have done; I have a raft of reports I was supposed to read for the head, which I haven’t; and I have about 100 children who are supposed to be taking exams in a week, who will all arrive back at school in one of three states:

a) unprepared, terrified and overtired

b) unprepared and unconcerned

c) pregnant

According to this story, I don’t need to do my job anymore. My pupils are now learning to write by blogging and social networking. Awesome.

And of course, they really are learning to write well and pass their exams. This will surely be a good example of how much they’ve learnt: “Liz Bennett, imho, is not a heroine cuz she is 2 proud and judgemental, lol.”

God help us.