This is a delightful idea from @bleidolf67 for day 16 of the @TeachThought 30-day blogging challenge:
'If you could have one superpower to use in the classroom, what would it be and how would it help?'
What teacher hasn't wished they could administer at the click of their fingers a harmless but too-painful-to-ignore jolt of electricity to any pupil careless enough to have let their attention wander during a lesson? I'm certainly not going to deny that the ability to do this from time to time - widely known amongst the pupil body of course - would be a real boon. I might even use it on the odd colleague from time to time...
But if I'm honest it might result in the 'wrong sort of attention' being paid. I have in my mind's eye a picture of terrified pupils straining to follow my every move, pinching themselves under the desks to fein attentiveness late on Friday afternoon.
So no, I think if I was offered a superpower I'd go for something a little more modest. I'd go for one that conferred on me the ability to fix any IT problem without deviating from the course of my lesson. Slow logins would be banished with a click of my heels; forgotten logins with a touch of my earlobe. Corrupted or 'lost' coursework (now, thanks to Google, mercifully rare) would be restored with a slight incline of my head, such that my lessons progressed uninterrupted in a kind of digital utopia. Bemused colleagues - particularly those given to trumpeting how things were better when we sent each other paper notes and wrote reports by hand - would leave my presence marvelling at the simplicity of it all, at how stuff just worked. No fuss, no delay, no downtime and certainly no blue screens of death...
If I could do that I think my life would be complete.