Tedious Teaching and Other Bore-Outs





Boredom never had good press and is now getting sued as a mortal affliction

Many in India will be keenly watching what happens later this month to the case of the Indian-origin British lawyer who has sued his alma mater Oxford University for £1 million for “boring“ teaching that apparently resulted in his getting a second-class degree, leading to a second-class career.After all, pedagogy in India is not generally regarded as scintillating and attributing underperforming careers to tedious teaching would be temptingly plausible for India's aggrieved. Indeed, even the specifics of the lawyer's complaint are eerily familiar: that four of the seven teachers in the faculty were on leave during his crucial final year, leading to “deficient“ and “negligent“ teaching by the remaining staff. Now that a teacher has been fired from her job in Scotland for boring her students with insipid and repetitive lessons, the writing may be on the blackboard for ennui-evoking educators.However, the effect of “bore-out“ (a low-voltage burnout) on the workforce cannot be ignored either, considering a Frenchman has sued his former employer this year for turning him into a “professional zombie“ with mindless work, and a recent study of UK civil servants has ostensibly shown that people can indeed be “bored to death“. The latter could, of course, explain non-performance in many government departments here too.

Source: Economic Times, 6-12-2016