The Little Computer That Could [/Douglas Adams] ►

◄ That is why I'm gonna keep running... -Oasis

Well, that was officially the worst lecture I've ever been to. Period. Founded upon highly questionable statistics, on a highly political subject. Blegh. Seven shades of 'worst'. :shock:

PSHE, for those lucky few of you who can afford to remain blissfully ignorant of such things, is 'Personal, Social and Health Education'... or, as we used to call it at secondary school, 'time to do homework'.

During the lecture, I made the following notes:

1. We are not social workers.
2. Statistics which rely on questionnaires are inevitably bollocks—if we lie when filling them out, why are teenagers (who are under staggeringly more peer pressure) going to be any more reliable?
3. At least they can't fake pregnancy statistics to make it look as if they're doing something / finding a problem to solve (delete as applicable)...
4. Newspapers are political vehicles.
5. We're supposed to push healthy food to kids, when teachers are more reliant upon convenience food than most sections of society.

This never happened in any of my previous education—the lecturer's voice becoming a multi-syllabic drone... 'Co-ordinators are unfamiiar with the term Health Promoting School'—gee, I wonder why? Because it's bullshit jargon? Then there's the discussion of why teachers are resistant to attempts to even further increase their workload and responsibilities—apparently it's weighed as 'time-allowance' vs 'incentive allowance' (money to the rest of us)... when several paragraphs readily reduce to a sentence, you think unkind thoughts about lecturers trying to impress, either as an intellectual posing exercise, or upon the powers-that-be that a required number of hours are being filled... I do have an nasty mind, don't I? ;)

Lest you think 'tis only myself moaning, the consensus of everyone I've spoken to is that the EPS lectures could be replaced by skimming textbooks, obviating the need for 9am time-tabling. What really, really annoys a lot of us, though, is that PSHE would be virtually redundant if so many parents weren't shit. Whilst I can see the point of sex education (and oppose the 'right' of parents to keep teenagers ignorant), I don't think it ought be our duty to fill in for parents who are totally absent from their kids' lives.

Completely unrelated to the above is the fact that I'm currently finishing this off whilst recumbent in bed... I promise I'll stop gushing about the Psion eventually. Maybe. :D

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