SO teachers are bored are they? As revealed in the Telegraph last week, a survey carried out in East Lancashire schools and colleges found that ALL our secondary school teachers are bored out of their wits.

They find excessive amounts of paperwork and a strictly-regulated curriculum are squeezing the life out of their jobs.

And how do they cope? They doodle. They count window panes. They daydream. Some of them even - shock horror - need a drink after work, they are quite simply that bored.

So what's the big deal? All this survey shows is that teachers are just like the rest of us. Isn't this sort of thing what we all do?

Finally, some evidence that they live in the real world.

According to the report author, East Lancashire-born Dr Sandi Mann, we should be worried though.

She believes the repercussions of having bored teachers are serious - because boredom is contagious.

It will lead to a generation of children sickened by school and boring lessons, unable to learn.

Am I missing something? I left school some years ago but believe me, it wasn't some utopia of learning joy where the magic of maths sprang to life. I've always loved books but the teachers even managed to make furiously exciting classics of literature read like chemistry experiments.

As far as I can remember, it was all about remembering historical dates parrot fashion, or repeating your times tables.

Biology for me was a monotone voice droning on and on about amino acids. For an entire year. Yet I still don't know what they are.

I only spent 13 years at school and college but I reckon I crossed paths with one or two bored teachers in that time!

Don't get me wrong, I have sympathy with our teachers. I must admit, it looks like a brilliant job on the government adverts, but all that marking and paperwork must destroy the soul.

What does annoy me though is such a big deal is made of the fact that teachers - God forbid - suffer the same fate as the rest of us.

And I think it's more than a little demeaning of the teaching unions to say the job is rubbish because "it's just like working in a factory".

And it shows the professionals who prepare our little ones for life in the big wide world don't know what the rest of us do - that every job, not just teaching, is "just like working in a factory" these days. Especially working in a factory.

Every job has become standardised and bland, with far too much paperwork and regulation involved.

By way of example, here's a word to make you shudder - 'appraisals'.

My theory on this is that the rule makers realised their mistake when they destroyed manufacturing in the 1980s, so have tried to make us relive the old days by making our jobs mindless and our pay low, no matter what our trade is.

I tried to redress the boredom balance by wearing a gorilla outfit for work yesterday - but apparently "it's against company policy". How boring!