25/02/24: student guide (3) going from room to room

One of the facts of secondary life, of course, is that students go from room to room for their lessons while teachers mostly stay where they are. For some subjects – food, technology, science, PE – this makes sense, but for others it doesn’t. Wall displays get changed about every 10 years so that wouldn’t be a reason. Maybe teachers are lazy? Think we need the exercise more than they do?

But going from room to room, teacher to teacher, offers great opportunities for students to show their inventiveness. No need to rush between lessons, after all, teachers wouldn’t want us to arrive as hot sweaty masses, would they? All of the setting up and clearing up issues described in part one of this guide can be engaged with all over again. You’ve wound your teacher up to nearly breaking point in one lesson? Fantastic! You can start all over again in the next!

It is, of course, important to remember that what is learnt, eg. in the French classroom, stays in the French classroom. Unfortunately, not all teachers understand this. So, you go from a French to a mathematics lesson, the teacher asks what you’ve just being doing, you say French, and the mathematics teacher tries to speak French to you. I mean, how ridiculous is that? Everybody knows you only speak French in French lessons. They don’t even speak French in France – at least, not the places you go to on day trips, they all speak English just as everybody else in the world does. Clearly, everything learnt in French is instantly forgotten the moment you go out of the door, to be remembered (well, probably not actually) in your next French lesson.

Teachers sometimes try to make links between their subjects and others, really don’t understand why because clearly every subject is completely separate. The graphs you draw in science, for example, are completely different to the graphs you draw in maths. Maths teachers may make you do calculations without a calculator but clearly calculators are absolutely essential for anything at all involving numbers when you’re doing eg. food or geography. Although this may present an opportunity to whine at your maths teacher that they’re inflicting pain and suffering quite unnecessarily, after all, the geography teacher doesn’t!

But, worst of all, teachers may try to persuade you that their subjects are useful in everyday life. What a load of nonsense! Whoever in their right mind does a calculation outside of school? Or worries about adjectival phrases (whatever that means)? Or composes poems whilst waiting for a bus? As for oxbow lakes….. or non-diegetic music? No need to worry about different strands in the Muslim faith if it isn’t in the syllabus for the RE GCSE!

What is learnt in any one classroom stays in that classroom, to be immediately forgotten on stepping out, possibly to come out of cold storage in the next lesson of that subject. Students of the world unite! There are some things too important to leave in the hands of teachers, who clearly were born middle aged, never went to school themselves, otherwise they would understand these realities of life.