The (Passionately) Boring Teacher

My mum is a primary school teacher and, as a child, this made me incredibly lucky. I spent every holiday visiting museums, galleries and other important exhibits across Britain. I didn’t especially look forward to soggy sandwiches and passing round a single plastic cup of own brand cola while we all sat on a bench in our cagoules. Nonetheless, I have fond memories of these trips. As an adult, I’ve continued this tradition, dragging anyone who shows even the slightest interest to museums of any size and almost any topic on "Miss Sayers' Magical Mystery History Tour". As an adult, I also feel that I come away from museums with much more than I did as a child (though I, of course, still buy the obligatory pencil). After having a brief look at promotional material for many of these museums and historical sites, the purpose of them appears to be clear: children should go to museums to “put their detective skills to the test”, to “discover lost time periods” or to ...

I once attended a pupil panel which promised to explain the pupil perspective on good teaching. I was desperate to learn the secret ingredient which made pupils successful in my subject and choose it at GCSE. Five pupils sat at the front of the room for an hour, confidently and eloquently answering questions about different subjects. The three keywords of the session were “freedom”, “enjoyment” and “passion”, leaving me ultimately frustrated. Ben Newmark recently tweeted one of his older blogs about enjoyment and the elusive nature of “fun” ( http://bennewmark.edublogs.org/2016/11/28/are-we-having-fun/ ) and this nicely sums up my frustration: I have tried to attack ‘fun’ lessons from almost every angle I could think of: German murder mystery lessons to practice questions, Treaty of Versailles role plays to encourage empathy (shudder), ‘plan your own geography lesson’ lessons to try and encourage meta-cognition. There have been times when I have even resorted to posters and a DVD ...