Monday, 8 February 2010

Come on then...

As you can see from this BBC article, we are in desperate need of more violence in schools, preferably carried out by ourselves.

The Association of Teachers and Lecturers, one of the 5764 teaching unions, has sensibly called for teachers to be trained in what they can and cannot do to restrain violent pupils. Unfortunately, I've been on one of these courses and it was an utter joke. We were even told not to resist when practising on each other because of the possible risk of injury.

Anyone who has studied judo for more than 5 minutes would realise two things:

Firstly, none of the locks we were shown would have worked with anyone who was not totally compliant. For some reason, violent people usually aren't.

Secondly, it takes an awful lot of practice to get them right without looking a complete idiot or hurting someone. A half day's course consisting mainly of blather about 'diffusing situations' does not turn you into a combination of Bruce Lee and Bill Clinton.

Not to worry though; the National Association of Head Teachers would prefer us to get a good kicking and the Department for Children, Schools and Families say that behaviour is much better now, so there's nothing to worry about.

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