I am sitting in a class with four year 11 boys and we all know that we are wasting our time being here. I am confined to teach what the curriculum says I must teach, which at the moment is an incredibly outdated novel written in the 1980′s. This novel is so ingrained in the curriculum that I studied it when I was in high school.It is boring, old and completely irrelevant to their lives and interests.

These kids are confined to be here too. They would rather be smoking dope, riding their scooters or throwing rocks at trains. Getting them to read a novel is so far out of their realm of reality. Yet here they sit, in a darkened classroom attempting to read and to maintain their interest.

Why are we all confined by these invisible ties. Not just in the school room but in everyday life. There is this unseen force confining us into things we don’t want to do, often because we can’t see any point to them.

What do we want to be doing and how can we do it?

Is there a point to it all and we just can’t see it? Or are we right in our gut instincts and we are wasting our time and should be off doing what we love and enjoy?

Maybe our parents were right and we’re doing it simply because it is “good” for us?

On of Ben’s favorite things to do whenever we catch the train into the city is to look into the crowd or down the train carriage and try and spot someone who is smiling on their way to work. He very rarely finds someone. They are off to spend eight hours of their day in a place which makes them so miserable they can’t even fathom a smile. Why are we content to do this to ourselves? Surely we aren’t so tied to our sense f responsibility that we are prepared to spend our lives being miserable.

I can’t get out of teaching this book, but I can find an interesting way around it. I don’t want to spend the next six weeks boring my students. For the moment we are stuck in this panoptican, we will still work away busily until our jail term is up. In the meantime we can be miserable about the predicament we are in or we can take a deep breathe and smile on the train. Who knows what could happen? We could soon all be travelling to work in a carriage of smiling people, and wouldn’t that be a better way to start our day?

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