Attention Thieves


Why Modern Lessons Are Designed to Distract

Lessons are no longer about learning. They’re about ticking boxes. Students get dragged through pointless routines. Teachers are forced to follow a format that kills thought. Every lesson looks busy on the surface, but underneath, nothing’s happening.

This isn’t just bad practice—it’s a failure of fucking purpose. Schools have been redesigned to control attention, not to build understanding. As Psychology Today puts it, we’re in an attention economy now—and students are the ones being harvested. Learning isn’t the goal. Looking like learning is.

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Algorithms to Anarchy


What TikTok Is Doing to Education

We’ve normalised dysfunction. Cinemas are shutting down screenings because teenagers are acting out TikTok trends during Minecraft: The Movie. They’re not just loud — they’re organised. Filming each other, throwing things, chanting catchphrases for views. It’s not quirky, it’s not harmless, and it’s not going away. This is what happens when attention becomes currency, and social media is the mint. Schools are dealing with the fallout daily. Behaviour is deteriorating, empathy is collapsing, and nobody in power seems willing to admit what’s happening. Social media isn’t just a distraction. It’s behavioural sabotage at scale — and we’re being fucked over by it every single day.

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Lost Boys

The Education System Is Failing Our Young Men

We are watching a generation of boys disengage from school while society and leadership look the other way. From the first days of primary school to the final exam hall of sixth form, boys are underperforming, overlooked and often written off. The system isn’t broken – it’s rigged. It’s bullshit, and everyone knows it. Their decline is measurable, undeniable, and scandalously ignored. While politicians talk smack about ‘levelling up’, the data tells a different story: boys are slipping further behind and barely anyone seems to give a shit.

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Let People fucking Shine

Why the AI Doll trend bothers some people, the backlash against the trend, and what it reveals about insecure masculinity, performative creativity, and how our education system is still raising people to mock joy rather than understand it.

Like many, I have been interested in the recent trend where individuals use AI to generate stylised images of themselves inside action figure/toy-style packaging. These visuals often include accessories like a coffee cup, a book, or a pet—personal items symbolising aspects of identity or daily life. It’s playful, self-reflective, and widely accessible.

And of course, some people crawl out of the woodwork to shit on it. The backlash—particularly from “creative professionals” on LinkedIn—has been swift, smug, fucking tedious—the only irony being how unironically predictable it all is. The trend has been labelled unoriginal, cringe, shallow. One comment even said that choosing a cat and a coffee as your accessories reflects a “vacant life.” That kind of cold, arrogant dis doesn’t say anything profound about culture. However, it does say a hell of a lot about the person saying it.

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Selective Enforcement is Killing School Culture

When schools apply rules inconsistently, students stop believing in them—and social proof turns low-level defiance into the new normal

Every teacher sees it. That creeping tide of low-level defiance. Hood up. AirPods in. Pencil? Nah. Pencil Case – fuck no. Bag…as if. Homework? “Didn’t know we had any.” And what happens? Nothing. Or worse—’a smile and a shrug from some SLT douche’. You start wondering why you bother. But this isn’t about uniform policy or being a stickler for pens. It’s about something more corrosive: the slow collapse of expectations in our classrooms, aided and abetted by cowardice and convenience.

And don’t confuse this for some Daily Mail rant about trousers and haircuts. I don’t really support school uniforms as a concept (or business dress fyi). But rules are rules. If we set them, we should damn well mean them. If not, scrap them and be honest about it. Because what’s killing school culture isn’t kids being kids—it’s leadership bottling it every time a standard gets tested.

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The Grade Alchemist

Turning Water into Wine

At this time of year, teachers often find themselves in a modern-day parable akin to Jesus with his baguette and tin of Aldi sardines. Just as Jesus performed a miracle to feed the masses, teachers are expected to perform similarly, magically elevating students’ grades to meet the student’s target. Yet, behind this show of divine intervention lies the devil: the guilt-laden question that pursues teachers – “What can we do to get their grade up?” NEWSFLASH: if you have ever said this phrase, then 1. you are a fucking dick and 2. you are part of the fucking problem within education.

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Weaponised Ignorance

Blindness and/or Bullshit

Behind the curtain, school leadership apparently wields wizard-like power, but their decisions more often resemble a game of drunken pin the tail on the donkey—aiming for ass but hitting fuck knows what. From ignoring critical issues like misogyny, harassment and toxic behaviours to treating valuable expertise like unwanted leftovers, the fallout is ionising. Don your hazmat suit as we wade through the toxic swamp of leadership ignorance that’s contaminating schools.

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An excess of exit passes

Navigating the Passpocalypse

A seemingly benign practice has evolved into an issue that’s impacting education far more than perhaps we realise, and as a teacher, it is definitely grating on me. Here is a typical scenario: a student raises their hand, brandishing a brightly coloured, laminated pass like it’s a VIP ticket to meet Taylor Swift backstage, and proceeds to step out of class. Seems harmless, right? Wrong. It’s become a significant issue: the overabundance of time-out passes is threatening to derail learning and I can’t shake it off. But before I go absolutely postal, it’s crucial to acknowledge that I fully support the use of these passes for genuine reasons and to those kids, I’ve got your backs. However, I can’t help but feel that they’re sometimes distributed to students who may not need them as much as others.

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The Business Dress Myth

How ‘smart dress’ is a red herring

In the classroom, innovation and student engagement should be paramount, but there is an alternate focus for some SLT because, let’s face it, they have fuck all better to do: the enforcement of “business dress” for teachers. While proponents argue that such attire fosters seriousness, it’s time to address the elephant in the room—this is a school, not a fucking bank from the 1920s. The impracticality of suits and ties in an educational setting is glaring, and the repercussions are profound.

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Pen to Politeness

Basics in Decline

Step into a modern-day classroom and you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve wandered onto the set of a Kafkaesque sitcom: students, chauffeured to school like VIPs, lounging in their seats with an air of entitlement. But the laughter fades when you realise the punchline—their desks are barren, devoid of the most basic tools for learning. Pens? Pencils? F**k that! Welcome to the paradox of education in the 21st century, where chauffeur-driven arrivals collide with a distinct absence of independence and initiative. It’s a scene that’s both farcical and foreboding, underscoring a troubling trend in our schools.

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