Boring Teacher Rant.

[cedar_grove]

I've noticed something on my friends page lately, and that's the increasing number of people posting to writing journals and communities things that they have written during this or that class at school, college, university etc.

Now I'm all for people expressing their creativity and would never advocate ignoring the Muse when she hits, but I find this to be a worrying trend. What about the subject of the class? What about the work/discussion/explanation or gods forbid actual /teaching/ that is being missed while poems are written or stories penned?

What would happen, for instance if the /teacher/ suddenly decided, "To hell with teaching math, (or insert alternative subject here), it's boring anyway, I'll sit down and write the next chapter of my novel instead," and then did just that?

Spare a thought perhaps that your teacher has probably given up his or her free time in order to plan for the lesson you are summarily ignoring. Teachers work incredibly long hours for monetary compensation that is, more often than not, well below the average for professionally qualified individuals; receive little or no respect from peers, students, pupils, members of society and especially not from governments who blame them for the lack of achievement and the poor results of learners who are, apparently, sitting in their lessons writing poetry.

Comments

Fic in class? eek.

[calibrata.livejournal.com]

When I was in classes, I was forever "multitasking" -- this post's icon started as a margin doodle in a stat class -- but fic was about the one thing I wouldn't touch. Why? Because it uses the same part of my brain as processing a lecture. I knew this intuitively long before I learned about the separation of verbal from spatial working memory.

Poetry is neither here nor there because it can be so short (and so pesky) that it takes less effort to write than to ignore -- say, arrive a little early and write it down while the class is assembling and getting organized. I'm not sure exactly what you've seen though, so... ^_^