Nice words don’t work without real consequences.
Don’t belive the bullshit that every behavioural issue can be fixed with a restorative conversation. That if you sit the kid down, let them talk, and get everyone to “reflect,” things will magically improve. Spoiler alert: they don’t. Restorative practice has been diluted to the point of uselessness. It’s become a ritual of empty scripts, soft tones, and zero fucking impact. You cannot ‘chat’ your way out of a discipline crisis.
No, students don’t get a vote.
Somewhere along the line, we started treating classrooms like town fucking halls. Rules became suggestions. Sanctions became “conversations.” Teachers were told to listen more, say less, and act like facilitators rather than leaders. And now we see the rusults: Total fucking chaos. Kids don’t need a peer, they need a boundary. A classroom is not a democracy. It’s a learning environment, and the adult is in charge. So step the fuck up and act like a fucking adult!
By doing everything for students, we’re teaching them not to give a shit.
Schools talk a big game about aspiration. High flyers. Dream big. Growth mindset. But it’s all bullshit. What they actually train is apathy. Effort is optional. Failure is feared. Ambition is actively discouraged. Not overtly, but structurally. Slowly. Systematically. Kids don’t opt out because they’re lazy (well not always). They opt out because school teaches them that nothing’s worth opting in for.
Comfort, Compliance and the Cult of Fragility
School used to be where you learned to cope with difficulty. Now it’s where you learn to avoid it. We’ve built a system that rewards fragility, punishes independence, and medicalises effort. Resilience isn’t something we teach—it’s something we fucking sideline. And no one is talking about the long-term cost of raising a generation that can’t cope with being uncomfortable.
How reality TV made emotional detachment aspirational, taught teens that attention matters more than integrity, and sold us connection performed by people who avoid it.
We live in a time where the spectacle has replaced sincerity. Nowhere is this more obvious than Love Island. It’s not a show about love. It’s a fucking marketing machine presented as romance, where emotional betrayal is a plot device and self-worth is measured in abs and airtime. The real scandal isn’t who kissed who. It’s what the show teaches and what students are learning.
The Erosion of Classroom Civility
The classroom, once a space of basic cooperation—however reluctant—has become loaded with hostility, apathy, and arrogance. The respect has gone. Kids walk in late, with no pen, no folder, no clue what day it is, and expect to be entertained. If you challenge it, you get attitude: “Why are you shouting at me?” or “What’s your problem?” The concept of effort is alien. The idea of consequence? Hilarious. School is no longer a space for learning; it’s an inconvenience in their dopamine-chasing day
How Image Obsession is Warping Girls’ Self-Worth and School Culture
It’s a tough subject, but I’m going to say it: girls in schools are spending more time on their appearance than their education. Fake lashes, full makeup, skirts rolled , TikTok poses at break. It’s not “just a phase”—it’s a full shift in values. Where boys have turned to toxic male influencers as a model for behaviour, girls are copying shallow, appearance-focused ones. Looks now carry more weight than effort. Schools are avoiding the issue for fear of backlash. Meanwhile, girls are being shaped by an attention economy built on insecurity.
Summer—a time most teachers eagerly await: the mental break, , sleeping past 6.30am, the sunshine, beach trips, and endless social activities. But for me, summer is a fucking prison sentence. While others bask in the costa del fuck you, I’m trapped in a cycle of depression and anxiety. The longer days, the pressure to entertain my kids, and the financial burden of holiday expectations all weigh heavily on my mind. Instead of enjoying a break, I’m overwhelmed, unmotivated, and consumed by a feeling of being stuck, unable to escape the monotony, and not worthy of the good things and people in my life-I’m a fucking let down. The expectation that summer should be a time of joy only amplifies my malaise, leaving me feeling even more isolated and lost and damaging family connections amplified by the fact that my wife and kids, and seemingly everyone else in the world, lives for the summer!
Confronting Toxic Mindsets and the Dismissal Epidemic
It’s a dilemma that’s as insidious as it is ubiquitous, as destructive as it is dismissive. It’s a dilemma born from the lips of our own colleagues, echoing within each department and reverberating through the corridors of our schools with the unsettling frequency of the Silent Hill radio static. This dilemma, my friends, is the casual dismissal of complex issues through language rife with logical fallacies.
