performative teaching

Attention Thieves

Posted on 03-06-202521-05-2025by admin

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.

Engagement Leadership Support Toxicity Well-Being

Spoon-Fed Minds

Posted on 29-04-202513-05-2025by admin

How Education Is Undermining Critical Thinking

Education was supposed to sharpen minds, not blunt them. It seems schools are little more than factories, churning out obedient workers rather than independent thinkers. Instead of setting off fires of curiosity, we smother them with compliance and conformity. It’s not just a system that’s broken — it’s a system that’s actively hostile to real thought. We’ve traded thinking for ticking, and every day we perpetuate this bullshit, we’re complicit.

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Lost Boys

Posted on 22-04-202513-05-2025by admin

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.

Engagement Expectations Leadership Policies Well-Being Workload

The Cult of Control

Posted on 17-04-202513-05-2025by admin

How Micro Management and Control Culture Is Killing Teaching

Micromanagement in education isn’t about standards. It’s about control. Fear. Power…and by proxy, guilt. It turns passionate, thoughtful professionals into box-ticking robots. Creativity bleeds out. Joy disappears. The system doesn’t trust the people working in it, and that distrust spreads like a virus. Some of the best minds in the profession are walking away, i’ve seen it over and over—burnt out, broken, or just too tired to fight another bullshit policy. This isn’t quality assurance. It’s a slow death.

And we’ve normalised it. We’ve allowed it to take root in meetings, policies, CPD, and appraisals. We dress it up as rigour. As “high expectations.” But it’s really a stranglehold. A tightening grip around a profession that should be fuelled by intellect, empathy and creativity—not suspicion and compliance.

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Let People fucking Shine

Posted on 16-04-202513-05-2025by admin

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.

Artificial Intellignece Curricular Concerns Engagement Innovation Leadership Technology

Teaching in the Age of Conspiracy

Posted on 14-04-202513-05-2025by admin

The Kids Are Not Alright — And We’re Pretending Everything’s Fine

The education system is not equipped to handle algorithmic influence, emotional manipulation, or online radicalisation — and yet we have never needed change more urgently.

We are failing a generation — not by accident, but arguably by choice. While students are being silently shaped, misled and manipulated by an unregulated media machine, the education system is busy patting itself on the back for hitting targets that ultimately, mean fuck all. The world outside the school is a psychological warzone of misinformation, algorithmic bias, and dopamine-driven outrage — and we respond with curriculum grids, box-ticking and ‘thought showers’. We are not preparing kids for reality. We are, unfortunately, complicit in their intellectual disarmament.

Behaviour Engagement Leadership Support

Selective Enforcement is Killing School Culture

Posted on 10-04-202509-06-2025by admin

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.

Assessment Expectations Leadership Policies Time Management Toxicity Well-Being Workload

Why Teachers Are Making It Up

Posted on 03-04-202513-05-2025by admin

Taskmasking and the Collapse of Trust

We are not okay. But we’ve been trained to act like we are (Toxic Resilience). Teachers everywhere are cracking under the pressure, papering over the cracks with a new form of quiet self-harm: taskmasking. Take your impossible workload, cut it into 50 meaningless micro-tasks, tick them off like a good little worker—and no one above notices you’re drowning.

This isn’t resilience. This is bullshit.

Schools are collapsing under the weight of BS bureaucracy, and instead of support, we get scrutiny. Instead of time, we get tasks. No wonder people are quitting. But for those of us still here? We’re keeping the lie alive. We’re breaking ourselves to keep up appearances. And the system, the MATs, the CEOs, fucking love it.

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Consistency is the Last Refuge of the Unimaginative

Posted on 24-03-202513-05-2025by admin

We’re constantly being sold the narrative that innovation will save education. New tech. New metrics. New training. The Emporer’s new fucking clothes. But what no one wants to admit is that education doesn’t need innovation—it needs some fucking humanity. The real innovation is the teacher. The character. The heavy fucking metal presence in the room. And that’s the bit academy chains are working hardest to erase. It’s paint-by-numbers, muzak, beige BS—and it’s being peddled as progress.

In the push for uniformity, teachers are being stripped of their individuality. Personality has become a ‘problem’, not a strength. It’s happening quietly, strategically, and with full corporate backing. And it’s the students who suffer—stuck in lesson after lesson delivered by unimaginative robots following identical scripts produced by “the director” in some sort of Orwellian homage.

This is not a teaching model. It’s an act of cultural vandalism, sanitising schools of the very people who make them work.

Expectations Leadership Time Management Toxicity Well-Being Workload

The Culture is Breaking Teachers

Posted on 17-02-202513-05-2025by admin

I have explored this topic before, but every year I am reminded of the mess, and every year it makes me question whether I or indeed anyone else should consider this a viable career. The mental health strain is undeniable.

Education should be about young people. Yet, in many schools, the toxic culture takes root—one where certain members of leadership dedicate every waking moment to the institution, and they expect everyone else to do the same, as Aldous Huxley said: ‘Community, Identity, Stability’. These individuals often don’t have the same responsibilities as classroom teachers, but their overcommitment becomes the standard. If you’re not staying late, taking on extra duties, or responding to emails at all hours, you’re not “dedicated enough.” The result? Guilt. Exhaustion. Burnout. This is not commitment—it’s coercion.