Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Boxed In

I should have seen it coming. One of the first of the several ridiculous things I had to do in those long-ago, not-even-slightly-missed days of teacher training was a pointless exercise about devising some sort of lesson where you had to differentiate in the pre-ordained boxes given between Aims (whatever they are) and Objectives (whatever they may be.) I dutifully did what was necessary not terribly well in the certain knowledge that it was impossible to do the task well in the context of an English Language lesson, which was what I was forced to work on.

I have spent my career doing, as far as possible, what I want to do in the classroom and, generally, enjoying quite a fruitful time doing so. Unfortunately once outside the protected ground of the classroom I have spent inordinate amounts of time filling in boxes I do not wish to fill in.

At one time all this would have made me distinctly hot under the collar, prone to intoning Blake's I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man's under my breath. Now I just smile at it all. Which, I'm afraid, indicates the extent of my enslavement.

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