Today was not a Good day, for several reasons, but mainly because I had to discipline a teacher, and put them on a monitored teaching scheme to make sure their lessons were up to scratch. I hate doing this; sometimes I just want to go into the classroom, bore the kids with some dry Shakespeare history play and then go home.

But I am the head of English, and I do actually care that our teaching is Good. Yes that’s Good with a capital G. Ofsted Good, as it were. The ‘sted are due any minute now, and the school is going for Good status. I think we should get it, and actually seeing everyone in the school working towards Good status has (dare I say it) ‘raised standards’.

But for the English and Maths departments the pressure is oh so much higher; the big drive now is 5 A-Cs including English and Maths; because these are considered Good GCSEs, so we have to make sure ALL our pupils have the best teaching possible. And, there’s that word again. Good. It’s really quite an arbitrary way to measure something, if you think about it; I mean Kit Kats are Good, beating Arsenal is Good; a lie in is Good. But, can teaching standards and subjects merely be called ‘Good’? And how on earth can you really measure it? I know Ofsted have a criteria, but does it really mean something is actually Good, or is it just their way of judging everyone?

 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?

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…

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.

Frankenstein. The bane of my year twelve’s lives at the moment. They’ve been forced to study Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – forced by me. Mainly because it’s on the syllabus, and I’m very good at following orders, but also because it’s actually quite a good study in gothic literature and that is our theme du jour.

The lesson of the moment was actually going rather well, they were in groups, working on different elements of the gothic and putting together presentations (using a great resource I got from here). I was rather proud, the classroom was alive with the hum of happy students, enjoying the time to pretend to work and actually talk about Casey’s jailbait boyfriend, or whether they were going to vote for Stacey or Jo at the weekend.

Then, disaster; one of the ass(istant) heads walks in. “Random observation, keep going, ignore me.” The class fell silent. They kids began to whisper and sigh and glare at me. I tried some resounding humour and encouraging, motivational grunts, which didn’t work. Then the observatron stood up: “Dan, a word please. What’s the SEAL agenda for this lesson?” Eeerrrm, I struggle around like a flopping fish inside my empty brain trying to find a way to link social, emotional and behavioural issues with the key themes of the eighteenth century Gothic novel. I fail.

“The, err, responsibility of, err, people to, ummm, not create monsters in society?”

“Fine,” she says. Turns on her heel and leaves the classroom.  WTF? I don’t even know what ‘not creating monsters in society’ that means. Does she? Proof again that SEAL is a in actuality a fat sea mammal and NOT a legitimate way to teach the kids to behave better.

I do wonder sometimes if our overly litigious and health and safety mad society is leaking into my classroom ever further.

Today a classic example – Jenny drop her apple juice on the floor; not that I mind that much, full as it was off E-numbers and too much sugar. As my TA goes to clear it up, Jenny’s supposed best friend this week, Casey, says, clear as a bell: “Ummm, you should clear that up. If someone falls over on it and it’s not their fault they can get compostation.”

I believe she means compensation. And I also believe she has been watching too much mid-week, mid-day TV, the kind littered with those Accident and Injury adverts.

Telling this story later in the staffroom leads to this pearl of wisdom from the deputy head. “Obviously you need to select a health and safety monitor, one of the pupils, to keep an eye on the other pupils.” Ok then, one scrappy seven year old telling another scrappy seven year old what to do; I forsee trouble.

Great, great disaster of a lesson today. Took the children into the garden for a hands-on approach to understanding the natural world. Little Jamie found a half dead slug (mangled previously by a year three class I think) and threw it at little Lucy, who screamed, a lot. She in turn threw mud back, missing little Jamie – whose dodging tactics will make a great footballer of him yet - and getting not-so-little Dylan, whose mother terrifies me and who I will now have to explain about the whole sticky-mud-on-the shirt fiasco.

Next week they’ll be looking at pictures of leaves on black and white print outs. That’ll learn them. If I can ever get to the photocopier that is.

On the subject of sex education, this has me in a quandry. I can’t decide if i’m worried about it, happy about it or think it’s a terrible idea. Some of the five year olds I teach already use certain phrases that would make my grandmother blush, (and me at times), but I wonder if that’s exactly the point? I mean if they’re hearing bad language about sex at home, perhaps it is up to us to help them develop a more mature approach to sex. But then using the word ‘mature’ when you’re talking about a five year old is just ridiculous anyway.

There’s no harm in them learning about the parts of the body; but really, learning about sex age five – I cannot think of a good reason for this. The kinds of things they study in secondary – puberty, relationships, STIs - it’s simply not logical or necessary to teach a five year old that, or a seven year old even.

All of this just sounds like another way to put a plaster over the cracks in society – i.e. not dealing with the bigger issues of thousands of children growing up without the proper parenting and support, hence – among numerous other issues – there are far too many teenage pregnancies, and the solution is to hope  this won’t happen  if you teach them about sex early enough.

Was perusing the Guardian this morning, getting my daily dose of leftist sentiment, and saw a rather interesting article about how primary schools need to be teaching pupils to become more ‘media savvy’. I’m not even sure what that really means, because I’m pretty sure it’s a phrase the media themselves made up. But actually the concept behind it….not too insane for once.

A professor at Warwick University says that children should be learning media language and literacy, along with maths and English, to ensure they’re not too susceptible to advertising campaigns. Sounds good, infact, sounds like something we could all do with a refresher course on. Sign me up.