Teacher Jokes Don't Need To Be Funny

Okay, now we've all been taken to school, let's break down what just happened.

This is the greatest spontaneous comeback I have ever seen.  As someone who stands in front of an audience every day, an audience which has not always been receptive to what I have to say, I am taking notes.  Here are my thoughts on this moment.

There was a strong chance that at the moments immediately after the heckle he would have needed to leave the stage.  He could have had a few minutes of "thanks for having me", maybe one last punchline, but to all intents and purposes he is done.  Because the heckle is brilliant, and the (clearly sober) heckler's timing is perfect, he can't appeal to the "shut the hell up people are having a good time here" argument, because maybe they'd have a better time with her, whoever she is.  They'd probably tell her to take the mic once he left.  

So he needs to think.  I can tell you the mistake you would probably make in this situation.  You would think, being him, that you need to think fast.  If you are thinking this you aren't a chess player.

The tempo of the gig is actually still his.  Until he speaks, he is the ranking officer in the legions of Funny.  Sure, he's hanging by a thread.  However, he will get one chance to save his skin.  Now watch his right hand.  Four times he flicks it out, each time a signal to the crowd like the hourglass on a screen.  Each flick is meaningful:  working.  He even extends the fingers as if writing, which is exactly what he is doing.  

What makes this moment beautiful is it is completely public creation.  He is literally writing a punchline in front of the audience, and what is more, he is so good he knows he has time not to use the first one he thinks of.  I would guess that each of those four wrist flicks is a discarded possible punchline being written and then trashed.  

Notice that when he has it, he completes the movement and touches his glasses.  Here the signal to the audience is "glasses - nerd", which given what little of the act seen at the beginning of the clip signals his persona is back in control.  And the audience is so smart it intuitively knows this and silences itself to give him his one chance.  

This tells you two important facts about audiences:  they respect power, and they are obedient.   And one more thing:  you don't need to spell it out for them.

If you are a teacher, remember this when a student calls out something which makes you look stupid:  You have time, and when you have something funnier/sharper/more just/more fitting (this all depends on the Values of the room), the class will not only realise, but they will be grateful to receive it because really, do you think they'd RATHER that lady finish the gig?  With her one lucky break?  Hell no.  That's relief you're hearing at the end in their delighted screams. Thus at the moment when you feel the whole room is against you, you are actually in the position of greatest power.  Break the silence too soon though, and they'll be sorry they ever believed in you.  

That's why teacher jokes aren't funny - they don't need to be.  If they are it's just a bonus - what they need to be is witty in the ancient sense of building on what has gone before and that means giving your response some thought.  You need to accept the premises of your opponent and render them absurd through mind judo, and that's going to take a moment.  Relax, you're going to be given that moment; audiences know what's good for them.

Or you could just send the kid out, and look like a sore loser.  It's your call.

2.

So that's timing.  There is one more important element of Teacher humour: Justice.

L-R:  Dr Whiteface and Feste

The other thing which humour does is recognise the absurdity of status and any attempts to impose order.  This is why its targets are so often aristocrats, and why the truly brilliant clown is not the Feste type (Harpo Marx, Coco the Clown) but Dr Whiteface (Groucho Marx, Oliver Hardy).  This is the guy with the plan who despairs of "these idiots I have to work with" but is in fact just as stupid as his contemporaries.  This is, crucially, who the students think we are.  When we fail, it confirms it.  When they fail, they feel like a Feste, slipping on water or being spoinked in the face with a ladder.

Conclusion:  The universe is random, unfair and unjust.

A staffroom, yesterday

Chaplin's genius is to represent the injustices, follies, heartbreak and failure of the world whilst remaining nevertheless pure.  He wears his failure as a badge, but also constantly struggles free of it.  The second category of Teacher joke (and I would put Socrates in the category of clown at times, too) displays the scars of confusion whilst also reassuring us that no matter how inept one is, dumb luck can also save you too.

It's a type of Justice, and there are times when you can use it.

After all, how else to explain an idiot like me ending up in front of a fine bunch of swells like you?

So You Wanna Take A Holiday?

So You Wanna Take a Holiday

 

First, horror beyond imagining:  remember to stare directly at it for as long as you can bear to and try not to look away.  I know that everything in your body will try and convince you to do something, anything else, but it is vital that you do not ignore it if you are to understand, viz. that it works on you BECAUSE you ignore it.

 

 



 

"By keeping parents in a state of chronic anxiety, psychiatry thus frustrates desires that advertising can then claim to satisfy"

-Lasch, the Culture of Narcissism

 

Imagine:  You've accidentally raised children with no inner resources.  You're 45 and relations with your spouse have cooled.  You have no idea what's gone wrong and you are in the process of despairing.  The lack of inner resources means that you are your child's only resource in the absence of screens.  Hence a problem:  you cannot change your aesthetic reality i.e. go on holiday without being treated like an IPhone by your offspring.  Do you want to know what it feels like to be clicked on?  You're about to find out.

 

In other words, you're straight out of a textbook.  The purpose of this advert is to conceal the fact that you are an expected and accounted for byproduct of modern life.  Instead, the entirely predictable development of your way of life and the attendant ennui is, in the course of this advert, presented to you as being a mistake, an accidental wrong turn which Capitalism can correct.  This is a false premise because it is Capitalism which ushered in the reign of this problem.  Why would it rob Peter to pay Paul when Peter and Paul are both at Cannes sipping Cristal?  You think that's Sea Air you're breathing?

 

The problem that this couple have is not a lack of time to "Relax".  They have more time on their hands than any previous generation.  The problem is a lack of inner resources, that is, a lack of those things which make time pass without stimulus.  When the quirky host child holds up a book and says "there's a chance you won't get past the first page", that is an instruction, not a warning.

 

"No time to chill out - what's that all about?"

 

Chilling out is a completely new concept for human beings.  In the past we spoke of reflection, contemplation, meditation, but these were seen as aspects of striving, of living.  This is a new era, where you are expected to empty your mind other than through the performance of repetitive tasks. 

 

It doesn't work. 

 

There are two reasons.  Firstly, instructing yourself not to think is impossible; it's a classic way of inducing the mystic state.  Truly kind masters ask us to perform impossible tasks precisely because they know how spectacularly we will fail, and that THAT is the lesson.  Cruel masters ask us to try and improve ourselves in ways which seem feasible ("finish a novel on holiday") but are more ruinous because, when you achieve it and aren't Enlightened the problem must be you "didn't do it right".  Hence every college student asks his instructor for Frameworks and a generation raised on porn defers to quantitative measures to decide if they enjoyed sex.  Hence lifecoaches.

 

When Jesus told us that anyone who thought adulterously was an adulterer, the point wasn't that you, subjectively, were cheating.  The point was that everyone, objectively, was a hypocrite.  But you only get to say that with any justice if you've honestly tried to stop being a monster.  Protip: you are a monster. 

 

This brings us back to the couple in the advert.  They're not monsters, they're not even adulterers.  That is because they are fictional beings.  Only a lunatic would call for their stoning ever.  "Who Stoned Roger Rabbit?" is self evidently absurd and yet, admit it, you were bearing their feelings in mind weren't you? 

 

However, the double bind is that millions stone themselves every day for their failure to not want to stone themselves.  They know they should aspire to rock hard abs and children who speak Mandarin but honestly, who can be bothered?

 

The answer is nobody.

 

The answer is, also, everybody.

 

That's the only Enlightenment that the 21st Century is offering, take it or leave it.

 



We're All Connected And It's Awful

We're All Connected and It's Awful

You're Telling Me

Darryl Revok

This was a test campaign used in 1947 to market a new product. The product was a drug, a tranquilizer called 'Ephemerol'. It was aimed at pregnant women. If it had worked it would have been marketed all over North America. But the campaign failed and the drug failed, because it had a side effect on the unborn children. An invisible side effect.

Cameron Vale

It created Scanners.

There is a scene in Scanners where Vale (the good scanner) falls in with a bunch of Hippy Scanners.  If you haven't seen the film, Vale is a hapless psychic who is recruited by No 6 from the Prisoner to stop the Bin laden psychic, Darryl Revok, who later lost an arm and cropped up in Starship Troopers telling Denise Richards to put em away, love, we've all seen them.  At this point he is making people die with his mind and warming up for a career in the Space Marines by taking over literally the entire planet, which given that it's a planet imagined by David Cronenberg he is pretty much welcome to, everyone being busy growing teeth out of their eyeballs or whatever.

Revok's name backwards is Kover.  Which means the same thing as Veil/Vale.  We'll return to that.

Brr

What happens is this: Vale forgets the sage advice of No. 6 and goes way off task; he ends up having a hippy love in with the wussy Scanners.  No. 6 said this would happen.  Don't get caught up in that Utopian Bullcrap, he said, just make Revok's head explode then go home.  At least I think that's what he said, I was flicking between this and something on Channel 4.

Anyway, Vale finds himself sat in a circle of gooey love with some people wearing hemp whilst they all chant "We are one - We are one".

In other words, he goes on Twitter and stays there.

To Find Out What Happens Next, Click Here

Couldn't be bothered to watch?  I'll tell you what happens, they all die from Shotguns.  The ones who don't die are rendered catatonic or idiotic from the shock of being inside another's mind when they died.  Why? Because being connected into a beautiful overarching consciousness of fragile intersubjective Scanning super shamans is horrible, and Revok is the wrath of a disconcerted universe.

"Lose yourself to the group will" - you're damn right I'm frightened to do that.  Every time anyone tells you to open your mind it's probably just so they can put something in it.  What on earth is wrong with these people?  Why do they never listen to No. 6, he beat the Combine once, sort of.

We're all out here looking for kicks, but what happens whenever a decent fun starts?  I'll tell you, an elderly buffoon who barely survived the last Revok convinces you that this time it's different, that Voldemort doesn't have his old power or whatever, and that you need to hook into the overmind to commune with the infiniverse.

Enough!  Harry thinks Vodemort's Thoughts and he's going to lead him right to you and then it's shotgun time.  That's the coded message: that connection to other people will destroy you utterly.  In this sense it's missing something: connection to The Other is compulsory:  for the Other.  The choice already go made for it, by you, when you were asleep, or drunk, or high.  In other words, you got sarged so hard by your Unconscious that you barely know how to get back to complaining about stuff.

Do you start to see what the Vale Kovers?

That's right:  You ARE Revok/Voldemort, and everyone else is plotting your downfall.  The only comfort I can offer is that they are plotting their own as well.  The only thing left to do is unKoveR the conspiracy, you'd better hope your telepowers are good and limber.  Sincerely, I wish you luck, I'll be hunting for you as much as the next patsy.

What was the name of that drug again?  And what was it supposed to do?  Surprise: the only reason to tranquilise you is so that you stop trying to impose morality on something horrible, so that it can be the most horrible it can possibly be:  Listen to No. 6, he needs to debrief you:

be honest, you found him funny too

Ahhh, No. 6 was playing the long con (never mind that this is a different film, that's so far from the point right now).  Let your petty little ego be swallowed up, it will only hurt for a second.  Repeat after me: I am not a number oh wait I always was.

"Safety" in Numbers

Numbers are the most effective way of distancing ourselves from the universe, thanks Hegel.  We will do anything to avoid reality and the first priority is always going to be to shut down the senses.  The problem is that people know there's something missing and now you've got a workplace full of frightened neurotics who won't shut up about banal nonsense.  Congratulations, you killed their minds and turned them all into parrots who are really good at repeating the last soundbite they heard in a frantic bid to fill the silence that they intuitively know is the opposite of comfortable.

The cure definitely isn't to cut them off from their numbers.  They think they need those now and if you tell them they can't have them best case is catatonia worst case is you end up like the Tsars.  Plus, you don't even exist, this is a conversation I'm having with myself and the imaginary spokesperson for a conspiracy of secondary minds which really run the show.

British Foreign Secretary William Hague apparently works EIGHTEEN HOURS a day.  What does he do?  I'll bet my own face that what he doesn't do is fix international affairs.  The person I want to get at is his organ grinder, and unfortunately for everyone but most of all for Hague they share a body.  So there are two William Hagues, Earth 1 Hague and Earth 2 Hague or "Anti-Hague".  What are we doing about this?  Nothing, Earth 2 has been running the show ever since people first started feeling bad about stuff they couldn't change, i.e. when we started telling ourselves that slaves had it good.  Slaves have it appalling, and the clear priority for anyone who isn't retching their own lungs out in a sanatorium is to avoid that outcome.  

Hold on, did Number 6 just say that Christ was a psychiatrist?

What Number 6 wants is for you to give him your National Insurance number, it's the same old scam, but just like all cults this one has a new twist otherwise nobody would join.  The twist with this one is that you laugh at people who use the word "Individual" like it matters.  This is a great idea because I do that too, so now I feel like I have a pass.  This cult has co-opted irony and the best thing about it is it doesn't even exist, so the gap in the market is there for anyone who wants to go full L Ron on it.

Except there isn't a gap, the market IS this cult.  We are all of us living under two sets of masters, the real ones and the symbolic ones.  The real masters can sack us or blacklist us, nobody is afraid of them, they're good peoples and you'd go to their barbeques.  The ultimate badasses don't even exist, they wear the invisible mask of logic and you're so scared of them you won't even give them names.  If I tell you there are Sixteen of them and their secret faces look like insects I do it because I want to help but I think I might be making it worse.

10 Reasons that Ofsted is Bad for your Child

This is from Caroline, a colleague of mine:  After her experience educating parents about what OFSTED really are, she has put together a list of ten things she would like to tell every parent.  Please circulate it amongst your friends who have children, so that they can begin to know the truth.

10 reasons why OFSTED is bad for your child

1. OFSTED causes stress and unnecessary workload for your child's teachers which could cause them to leave the profession.

2. Your School is so worried about OFSTED inspections that they are forced to give your child  a narrow and unfulfilling educational experience.

3. Your child's Teacher lives in constant fear and wastes a lot of their time planning for the dreaded inspection.

4. Your school will be judged based on data that is inaccurate and deeply flawed.

5. Your child may not be able to go on a  school trip this year or do an exciting new project  as your school will spend 1000s of pounds on consultants and  mocksteds in the hope of passing inspections.

6. All the important things that your teacher will do with your child will go completely unnoticed by OFSTED.

7. OFSTED does not help raise standards of your child's school the people who really care and have a deep understanding about your child's learning are their teachers.

8.OFSTED constantly change the goal posts so by last years OFSTED criteria  your child's teacher may have been outstanding this year however its just a good who knows what will happen next?

9. OFSTED will make a judgement of your school even before they step through  the school gates.

10. Your child's school may be judged by people who may be unqualified teachers, haven't taught for years or even failing ex head teachers .

All credit to Caroline for bravely telling the truth.   I will forward any comments to her.

What's School?

What's School?

      Spoiler:  You aren't the pipe.

Once a student (Year 10, reasonable when he chooses to be) asked me:

"Isn't university hard?"

Yes, I answered it can be quite hard.  What in specific terms do you think might be hard about it?
          

"Isn't it hard having lectures, because someone just talks at you?"

Yes, I said, that is quite tricky but you don't really do the learning there.  The learning, I said, is done over coffee with friends, or it is done in a library, or in your bedroom with a book and a cup of tea.  The lectures just sort of point you at some starting points.

"You mean they don't teach you!?" he replied, clearly stunned.

No, I said, that is the teaching, the part where they point you at the repositories of knowledge and say, "Engage with that, see you in a week."  That, I said, is what teaching is.

And at this point he really hit me for six.

"You mean they don't go round and help you!?"

At that I didn't have anything to say.  Nothing at all really.  I realised that I had honestly had the assumption in my head that my students knew what the point of academic learning was.  They don't know what we are doing all this for, The Kids.  Because to him learning is sitting still and waiting for somebody to come and help you and then as others have observed presumably to say "I don't get it".

Patrick doesn't get it either.

Like an idiot I had thought they meant "I do not understand the work".

But no, they had meant "What on earth is going on?"  They had meant "What's school?"

This was my hypothesis anyway, and I tucked it in my belt and carried on with my job.  Then, a week or so later, another student was in detention and I was trying to make him see that running away when I asked him to stop and speak to me might aggravate me and in the long run him as well.  At this point he asked,

"And why am I even here?"

I asked him if he meant in the cosmic sense, which was not a joke that he was in the mood to get.

"Because," he went on, with slim regard for my attempts at humour", "my mum only went to school for four years and she's fine.  So what am I doing here?"

And if I was a better teacher then I would have found a way to say this to him:

Aha!  Another piece of the puzzle.  Another student asking "What's School?"  Or rather, what's secondary school?

Now, secondary school in its present incarnation is very much a preparation for public life, including as a basic assumption the ability to be pointed at a responsibility and going away and owning it so hard that everyone weeps with gratitude.  Tertiary education prepares you for that by stripping away a lot of the more visible frameworks and leaving you in the hands of those who have Mastered their knowledge.

What I mean is, nobody is going to come around and help you, and the longer we keep doing that for students, the ruder the awakening on the other end of the long tunnel.

One of these things is getting more common around the world quicker than the other.  Guess which.

Students who avow that they want to go to university (because it will make them rich) don't know what university is.

I believe that this is a problem.  I believe, also, that it is not just a problem for academics, or even educators. I believe that we are all for it if people lose the ability to find things out which they want or need to know (usually the same thing, where knowledge is concerned).

Do I have a solution?  No that is not my job.  But it does strike me that we might be doing the wrong thing putting children through Key Stage Three when their parents left school after four years.  It does occur to me that this big push might be a push in the wrong place, and entirely too hard.  Won't somebody think of the Adults?

Now, New Labour made Education (of the young, obv) their big push.  They made it their big push three times.  They made it their big push three times.  They made it their big push three times.  Read my lips.  That works quite well, doesn't it, because who can look at a snarling feral hoodie or an angelic but impoverished urchin and not resolve that something very definitely must be done?  That is, provided they don't have to pay for it.

If the parents aren't able to explain the long term objectives of a course of learning to a child, then it might conceivably be the case that that child will have expectations of their future and their present so wide of the mark that only disillusionment can result.

All of this is parenthetical however.  My purpose here is to address the 'question' (they think it is),

"I don't get it" 

(emphasis theirs) translated by me as,

"What's school"

And I think that we should start answering that question.

School is the pipe and you are the water.  Whatever age you are, you arrive at school and, insofar as it is a school at all, elements within it do not change.  Those are called The Facts.  If you dispute The Facts then you are not a member of The School.  That may well be a good thing, from your point of view, and the best of luck with that.  Certainly The Facts have changed before.  As Keynes is supposed to have said,

"When the facts change, I change my opinion; what do you do, sir?"

But The Facts give solidity to the idea of school.

When water meets a pipe, the pipe does not change shape to fit the water.  The water changes shape to fit the pipe.  And that is school.  It really really is.  On the other end of the pipe, the water can evaporate, or make a puddle, or wash up, or it might even want to stop being a metaphor for somebody's weak version of power and become a real human being.

But water in a pipe is pipe shaped.

And students in a school are school shaped.

And a student who is trying to fit the wrong pipe, or who doesn't believe the pipe exists, needs to have it explained to them before anything else happens.

Why the Reclassification of Free School Meals Matters

Why the reclassification of Free School Meals matters

In an apparently casual manner the Department for Education has reclassified the way in which we measure students as part of the key Free School Meals (FSM) measure.  Before , it was simply a matter of whether a child was in receipt of them.  Now a new measure is being introduced by the DfE, at the same time as they implement two other policies:  the massive expansion of the academies programme and the "Pupil Premium" which awards money to schools based on the number of students there classified as FSM.  I hope to show what the consequences of these apparently unrelated policies will be in a year or two's time.

What does reclassification mean?

As shown here and elsewhere (Row 124 of the KS2 data), "the key DfE measure of free school meals changed this year, from the % of students currently eligible for FSM to the % of students whose families had been eligible in last six years."

On the surface this would seem to simply increase the money awardable via the Pupil Premium.  However, there are other forces at work here.  Let's imagine a scenario shall we?  Say a family which had undergone some hardship in the last few years (not many haven't) but are now back on the road out of poverty, or are even relatively prosperous.  

The government's own data shows that in 2011, at the average "good" school, 51.2% of pupils got five or more A* to C grades, the commonly used benchmark for success of a school.  This compares to 27.8% of FSM students attaining at the same level at a similarly average "good" school.  This offers us concrete evidence, using the Government and the mainstream media's favoured method for calculating success, that impoverished students perform almost half as well in final exams. (Whether you accept that this kind of quantitative data is of any use or interest is of course up to you, the point is that many voters do.)

What the reclassification means is that students who have been impoverished at any point in the last six years will now count towards these statistics, even if they are not now.  There is, therefore, only one way in which the statistics can go in light of this reclassification: up.  Students who have been historically poor will stay poor and achieve as they would have anyway, whereas students whose home lives are improving will stay on the books as convenient success stories.

A couple of predictions

I would predict that either this year or the year after the DfE will release figures showing that the Pupil Premium has been devastatingly successful in raising attainment of its target groups.  I would also predict that no mention of the changes to how FSM pupils are classified will be mentioned.  Finally, I would also predict that the Academies programme will be cited as a further success given their 'rigour', 'tenacity', 'dedication' and other inkhorn adjectives with regard to the implementation of the Pupil Premium.

So, for a tiny extra spend, the DfE has guaranteed a jump in its figures whilst cutting liberally elsewhere, a fact which I have not seen reported widely, and so put down here that I might bring it to the attention of others.  It only took the alteration of one formula on a Whitehall spreadsheet.