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Nov 11th 2007
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7th May 2006
PUNISHING unruly pupils used to be simple – give them six of the best, force them to write a hundred lines or make them stand in a corner. But faced with worsening behaviour, outlawed corporal punishment and the threat that by imposing discipline they will be sued for abusing pupils' human rights, teachers are devising ever more inventive ways to keep control. Now a website has been set up to collate ingenious ways of tackling miscreants. The site – evildetentions.co.uk – lists an array of punishments, including scraping a specified weight of chewing gum from under desks and writing a love poem to Prince Charles ( regardless of a pupil's gender).
The punishments, ranked from 'short and sweet justice' to 'Dr Evil' for the most troublesome pupils, were devised by an anonymous teacher who claims to have become frustrated by the ineffectiveness of traditional detention after school. 'When I tried them out the kids said they were "evil", the current slang phrase to describe a particularly intense, thoughtful or well-matched detention,' the teacher explains. Pupils could be asked to rip up a large piece of paper into tiny fragments, then use sticky tape to put it back together, or type out a sentence of apology and convert it into every possible permutation of type size and font on their computer. Another suggestion is to give a pupil an old typewriter to hammer out the numbers one to 100 in word form.
The creator of the site is asking other teachers to add to the ideas. He warns that they must not be 'illegal, unprofessional or depraved'. Worsening behaviour is a big problem for teachers, with growing incidents of physical and verbal abuse. Half of all newly qualified teachers leave the profession within five years, with pupils' bad behaviour the most common reason for their departure. FIVE OF THE BEST GUM CHUM: Using rubber gloves, remove a specifiedweightofchewinggumfromunder the desks. POINTLESS PURSUIT: Roll a marble around a desk with your nose a set number of times, restarting if you fail to turn a corner or let it drop on the floor. 3LOVE LETTER: Write a love poem to Prince Charles.It must have at least ten lines, each with more than five words. WICKED WIRE: List 50 uses for a coat hanger.Draw each idea and number them. SILLY SCRIPT: Using a pencil and lavatory paper, write a list of 50 things that break easily.Be careful – the paper has been dampened with a spray, so it tears easily and you'll have to start again.
15th August 2006
15 August 2006 - Today’s website of the day is evildetentions.co.uk a website that is so inspired in its wickedness it should be up for some sort of despotic award.
The site is provided as a light-hearted resource for teachers and educators who perhaps need a little inspiration when it comes to handing out suitable punishments.
We’re not going to start banging on about “kids today” or “bringing back the birch – it never did us any harm” or any other nonsense like that, but this site has some wonderful ideas for disciplining unruly pupils.
It warns people with a sense of humour failure to click away, but as we know that won’t apply to any of our readers, there’s plenty of gentle amusement to be had.
The detention ideas range from “Mildly Evil” to “Dr Evil” and they are genuinely creative; in some cases bordering on the twisted. They are also available to buy in handy pocketsize packs of cards. Every teacher in the land should have one, in our opinion.
