school life
Working by the bell
Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 | education, reflection, school life | No Comments
After a long time without posting, I’m back. I apologise for the long break. I’ve just not had the inspiration to put my thoughts down - admittedly there have been few worthy thoughts lately.
But here’s a nice little parody on teacher life, which although it is hilariously exaggerated, rings some bells (sorry for the bad pun - you’ll see when you watch the video) with what I’ve seen of teacher life so far. Teachers seem to be ruled by the bell. They live by it’s merciless calling and have to drop whatever they are doing when it bids them to. In some schools bells even sound more like alarms than the good old school bell, and make you want to grab your nearest and dearest (computer) and run for your life.
Although the bell can sometimes be a welcome sound to us - both teachers and students - in many circumstances the teacher has to fight against it’s shrill power: raising his voice to be heard while struggling to get students to sit still for an extra minute, rushing through the assignment of homework, hastily thanking the students for their work in the lesson. Then the students are released and joyfully (or less so) skip towards next heavily regulated slice of time. The teacher also has to slip in to the next ‘box’ hastily erasing from his mind what just happened in the former lesson and prepare for what awaits in the next. Are teachers really a kind of computers that can perform equally well no matter how many times a day they have to ‘reboot’? I don’t think so. This instant save-and-load mode of school is not conductive to reflection in teachers OR students! So what do the good teachers do? They run faster. Not an enviable position to be in from where I sit!
And here’s the bit of entertainent that sparked this thought.