I’ve been fortunate enough to have played a lot of sport since I was child, and now get great pleasure watching my own children’s obvious delight and excitement in physical competition. The sport I gained most from, and which for me puts all the others in the shade in terms of how one tests oneself, was cycle racing. There is none of the knee-jerking friction, joint-jolting energy waste of running, or the bruising exhaustion of a harsh contact sport like rugby. I was reminded of this only recently because after my accident in March, when I was convalescing, I exercised on a Cycleops indoor trainer for weeks. When the time came to get out on my new bike on the road again, (see photo for new bike and note…helmet!) what shocked and actually made me smile, was how you suddenly realize what you are doing is forcing yourself through a wall of air. Inside this doesn’t happen. But outside there is this weight of air pressure you are constantly battling through, which is why it is up to 30% more efficient to ride behind another rider….or car. In terms of testing your own physical ability, there is something extremely pure, about sitting on this incredibly efficient machine, with only a thin piece of rubber between you and the road’s surface, forcing yourself through the air at speed. When you train yourself to do it, and your body can do it well, it is amazingly exhilarating. Lance Armstrong had an expression for those moments, “Look, no chain!” he would yell at his team-mates.

So I was really interested in reading this article, by Bruno Macaes on drugs and sport in the New Atlantis Journal. In it he articulates the reasons why we feel drug use in sport is morally indefensible but goes further into the world of technology and biotechnology. In his piece he argues that,

Chemical or genetic enhancements are a way to influence human action from the outside. Precisely because they are the sort of power to which one will gladly submit, enhancement technologies should be regarded as an interference with our freedom, perhaps beneficial and attractive, but an external power nonetheless. They represent, ironically, the return of a repressed nature.

All of this has helped me clarify in my own mind, why I am so fundamentally uncomfortable with techno-zealots who encourage children to use technology for educational purposes, without ever hesitating to consider the possible consequences, or even having enough wit to realize there may be some. Time and time again, when you look through their rhetoric, the real reason why children and schools are encouraged to use technology is because it makes things easier for them. If using technology makes communicating or understanding easier for a child, I wonder have they really communicated or understood?

QCA are proposing to expand the number of GCSE’s children can take in English from 2 to 3, by adding a new exam, English in the Daily World. I found myself immediately asking the question, whose daily world? I have watched with increasing dismay over the past few years the rise of a really pernicious idea which I wrote about here some months ago, and which I suspect is at the heart of this new exam. It started a long time ago in English with teachers getting pupils to write newspaper articles based on Rome and Juliet or Macbeth, that sort of thing, and has ended up suggesting we shouldn’t really exam them at all, because after all, we’re all just digital immigrants and the natives are so far ahead of us. This agenda has always been to disarm difficulty through giving it some kind of spurious relevance, and is usually advocated by teachers who haven’t quite grown up yet. So I had a look at the QCA consultation papers and I will leave readers to decide if the following extracts from them suggest I’m right or not. I've italicised the bits that give it away.

The aim is to develop students’ understanding of language use in the real world through engaging with and evaluating material that is relevant to their own development as speakers, listeners, readers and writers.

reading and responding to a range of non-fiction texts that present information, events and ideas, including media, digital and multimodal forms; analysing and evaluating words, images and structures, exploring how they are adapted to create meaning and effect for specific purposes.

The assessment of non-fiction reading will have an emphasis on evaluating writers’ linguistic choices and the effects achieved in texts by different presentational devices. Subtleties of impact on the reader/viewer brought about by using digital or multimodal forms are a significant aspect of this component.

I feel sorry for the poor examiners of this new exam who will have to cope with evaluating material that is relevant to many of the candidates. Having sat on numerous trains being forced to listen to passengers on their mobiles, using the same stock phrases literally dozens of times in a single, short conversation (I actually counted once!) I have come to the conclusion that these phrases are all serving the same practical function. The speakers use them because they are operating so on the edge of inarticulacy, that they really do have to check with the other person that they are being understood. Try a little experiment for yourself the next time you find yourself having to listen. Listen carefully to the phrases they keep repeating, and you will see that they have exactly the same “are you understanding me?” function.

Six years ago when Teach First started, I was involved in their recruitment process for their first ever cohort, and then as a tutor. Although I thought it was a terrific idea, it wasn’t until I saw my own tutees teaching so effectively in schools, I knew it was. Even then I would never have predicted their meteoric rise in the graduate recruitment market to the point where they are now 14th in the Times top 100 recruiters. Their annual awards were held this week and as I was one of the judges, I was really pleased to see such a huge crowd of supporters, including my own company, and to see how fast they are expanding, not just across the UK, but internationally. In fact their international expansion is now being run by one of my ex tutees.

As always, they do a very polished job of presentations and one of their videos showed a number of teachers nominated for awards, actually at work. What struck me, and you can see it even on screen, was they all displayed exactly the same high level of intense engagement with their audience. Teaching has always been a complex skill, but I think we have only just begun to scratch the surface of what that skill actually consists of. And certainly from my experience, that intense, even demanding demeanour, is far more effective with children than the guide-on-the-side lameness so often trumpeted as a skill.

The government’s boys into books scheme got a boost this week, albeit overshadowed by straw-clutching headlines about closing failing schools, and it raised a bit of a smile at the thought that a librarian had been asked to compile a list of books boys between the ages of 11 and 14 would like. In almost a decade teaching at the City of London Boys school, I put quite a lot of thought, time and effort into trying to find books that the younger boys I was teaching in the school would like because in essence, that was my job. I never measured myself by the GCSE or A level grades accumulated every year, but simply by the fact that it was my job to make sure the boys I taught left school with at the very least a respect for books, and at best a passion, that would last them a lifetime.

One of the problems is that the kind of novels marketed by publishers to schools for that age range are incredibly girly, and I very quickly learned to ignore them. I would number Philip Pullman among them. I found a few books that the majority of boys would enjoy, and interestingly Bill Bryson was one of the authors, and he does appear in the Boys into Books list, but in nine years I only found one book I could guarantee any boy aged about 11-13 would love. It was The Maneaters of Kumoan, by Jim Corbett. Corbett was an English diplomat who lived in India for much of his life in the thirties and there is a national park there named after him. In his spare time he killed man eating tigers and the occasional leopard. He was not a writer but his unassuming accounts of the expeditions and hunts he undertook to track down the maneaters, some after having terrorised whole regions and eaten over 200 people, are just breathtakingly exciting. I found even boys brought up in single parent, Islingtonian households, under the strictest no toy guns, veggie regimes, adored his book. If I tell you that his main assistant on these hunts was a springer spaniel called Robin, you will maybe get just a hint of why they liked it.

A couple of years ago, after having heard one platform speaker after another extolling the educational virtues of computer gaming, I read some of the books which seemed to be fuelling the fashion. I did some more detailed research into the games themselves, which worried me even more, having previously not really seen any of the violent or horrific ones. I then met one of the leading neuroscientists looking at computers and teen minds, and ended up delivering a paper on why educators ought to be challenging these claims head on, at a conference in Rhodes. So the recent piece in the Independent by Howard Jacobson on the social impact of media entertainment, immediately got my attention. It is one of the most intelligent, lucid and well informed essays on the subject I have come across. These two paragraphs below strike me as simply irrefutable.

No test will ever establish a direct link between an image seen, an emotion provoked, and an action performed. So, no, you can't with certainty attribute contemporary knife-wielding among the underaged to the violence they've seen on films, television, or whatever virtual-reality murder toys they play with. But you can't with certainty deny the association either.

What astonishes me is that anybody would want to. Since we know that what we watch and read is capable of moving us to tears of compassion, and not necessarily passive, soon-to-be-forgotten compassion, as witness the charitable giving television is able to inspire, it stands to reason that it can variously move us to rage, to pain, to jealousy, to lust, and not necessarily soon-to-be-forgotten sadism, too.

I am just as astonished as Jacobson. Many years ago I came out of a screening of the Silence of the Lambs to hear a little clutch of teenage boys, all undoubtedly under 18, chattering in a way which can only be described as a kind of frenzied titillation. It chilled me then, and still does to think that was the effect the film had on them.