It can be risky for headteachers to continue teaching pupils occasional lessons, after having long ceased to deliver examination curricula. You can quickly become rusty, out of touch with new classroom techniques and thematically repetitive, giving voice to themes previously aired in assemblies or speech days. So it is with some trepidation that I approach weekly classes, embracing Benedictine humility, as appropriate in my context, and expecting an element of critical debate.
At present every member of the sixth form at Downside has to suffer through some classes with the headmaster within the General Religious Studies programme. So there is a class on “Dante in 30 minutes” (where we treat The Divine Comedy as a computer game while reading extracts). There are two classes on faith and modern poetry (one on Siegfried Sassoon and another focusing on contemporary poetry) and then there is a class on “celebrity worship syndrome”.
