Education: How to make the classroom really dull

One secondary school class was asked to spend an entire Geography lesson drawing a snowman.

In a French class, pupils spent an hour and a half going over the present tense with the teacher writing examples on the board and the pupils copying them down.

In another French class pupils spent the whole lesson drawing a picture of a table and writing the word "table" underneath.

One class of 15-year-olds spent every maths lesson for two months sitting in silence working through sheets of questions which they already knew how to do .

In Religious Studies for 14-year-olds the teacher devoted every lesson for weeks to reading from Pippi Longstocking - a Swedish classic about a nine-year-old.