Thanks freedigitalphotos.net

My assistant head says this ALL the time. And most of the time she’s overreacting. I know that things have changed from the days when kids ran around and bumped their heads and got up and carried on, but the world is changing and it’s more dangerous than it used to be. I don’t see anything wrong with looking after our children; and so generally I agree with the increasingly restrictive rules they place on us each day.

Until a couple of weeks ago. I was talking to my class of 20 children, when one of the parents whose child has been unwell came to speak to me, with said sickly child in tow. I invited them into the classroom, sat the sicky child down with a book, set the rest of the class about painting, and chatted briefly with the parent. Five minutes had gone by, when the bursar came charging in to tell me that I was ‘violating’ code of practice. I was now in the sole prescence of 21 children, which went against the strict 20:1 children:teacher ratio. It didn’t matter that her mother was there, or that the child was within reaching distance of two adults. No, no. Common sense was not to prevail here. This tiny, ill child was putting us all at risk.

“What shall  I do?” I asked the bursar.

“Well, she’ll have to go in the corrdior,” she replied. So the the tiny, ill child was sent to sit on her own, in the dark corridor on her own; (apparently that’s ok, it’s only when she’s being monitored along with 20 other children that she’s in danger, she’s much safer alone with no supervision), while I finished speaking to her mother.

This time, something has definitely gone mad. It was me.

While I was doing some background reading on Balls and Johnson, I was a little surprised (and disturbed) to find out that the ‘Balls Johnson’ dance is a kind of male genital gymnastics.

The thing I was most surprised about, though, was that the comments on all the blogs I’ve read about this debate seem to centre on who would win a fight between Ed and Boris rather than whether or not Latin is actually useful to learn at school.

The Guardian’s article, as well as the customary mention of Boris’ £250,000 salary for his column in the Telegraph, offered such gems as “Is he going to butt him in the Ed or the Balls?” from commenter ‘Spoonface’.

The fightin’ talk in the comments beneath the original article on the Telegraph’s website was a little more surreal with one commenter calling for “40 lashes with a wet noodle!”.

The best ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ article I’ve seen so far is over at adamsmith.org. It has a great picture of Ed Balls rocking out and looking a little like David Brent. It’s also well-balanced and contains a lot of common sense. The main reason I like it, though, is because mentions that Balls thinks Latin is ‘harmful’.

I can think of a lot of negative adjectives people use to describe Latin. ‘Boring’ or ‘irrelevant’ are the first two that spring to mind, but I don’t see how learning any language could be ‘harmful’.

Teenagers like ‘harmful’ things, though. ‘Harmful’ things are ‘cool’. Warnings on cigarette packs don’t put kids off smoking, they just make it more intriguing to them. Maybe language teachers could harness this reverse-psychology make language-learning ‘cool’. Are modern foreign languages as ‘harmful’ as Latin? I’m not sure, but if I can make them seem ‘harmful’ enough, maybe my students will concentrate as hard in class as they do on avoiding getting caught smoking.

Right, I’m off to stick “Warning! Language-learning is harmful and my cause cleverness” labels on all my textbooks.

Original photo by Jenny Rollo, edited by SimonSays.

And, anyway, aside from this – I have never, ever had a child attempt to make a desperate break for freedom – they’re too busy working their small socks off to make ridiculous government targets and pass another SAT.