Category: General

Speaking of Nerds…

Further to FEEG’s post, there is a company here called Dial-a-Nerd that provides computer hardware and software support. In their latest newsletter, they sent this poser.

In this series of numbers, what is the next number in the sequence?
1
11
21
1211
111221
312211
13112221

You can probably find the answer if you google it, but it is so much more fun if you work it out for yourself.

Just to get the ball rolling in the November Pome Comp

Dear Guido Fawkes, please do us a favour
Give us all something that we can savour.
Come back from the dead if you possibly can.
You failed last time, what now better than
You go to the Crooked House of the Dumb
And blow them all to Kingdom Come!

This is most heartfelt! 🙂

Chronicles of a Westcentric

My wife, with a group of friends, has just returned from a five day shopping/sightseeing trip to New York. She got the boys some cracking designer garb. I’m not into the branded stuff much myself. Me, I’m easy to clothe. Call me eccentric I don’t care, as long as there is no green on the garment I’ll wear anything. “Is there anything you want?” she asked me before she crossed the ocean to the Land of the Superpower. I noted the missing word darling from the end of her question but let it pass.

I said “Get us a couple of papers”. (This sentence might be construed as abrupt to non-Westcentrics but it is not in any way rude. It is common vernacular in the West). My little darling didn’t disappoint. Continue reading “Chronicles of a Westcentric”

If the Italians can do it, so can we……

News has just come out that Silvio Berlusconi has just been sentenced to 4 years in jail. If only we could do the same thing to one or two former UK Prime Ministers, maybe with the period multiplied by a factor of ten! (And a few of their co-conspirators too!).

Berlusconi was only found guilty of tax fraud. It should really be possible to jail they there politicians for ANY kind of fraud. Only trouble is, the House of Commons would be pretty empty!

Apologetic pupils

I expect some cherished colleagues have seen this piece in DT, following on Michael Gove’s apology to his former French teacher.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/9628673/Dear-sir-weve-all-got-a-lot-to-be-sorry-about.html

It got me wondering whether I owed any apologies to any of my old teachers.  There was Mrs M, the maths teacher, who never managed to convince me there was any point in learning geometry theorems by heart.  I was glad that someone had discovered that the sum of the angles of any triangle make two right angles and I hoped they’d had good weather for it, but what had it to do with me? Faced with a circle and a triangle and some odd lines, I never could work out what theorem to apply.  I know my ability to score 100% in algebra and arithmetic drove the lady wild, since those were the days when 100% in algebra and 10% in geometry did not lead to Higher (this being Scotland) maths.  “No problem”  I said.  “I won’t sit Higher.”  No, I don’t feel like apologising, Mrs M, since you couldn’t enthuse me.

Then there was Miss M, the RE teacher who only saw us once a week and didn’t bother to learn the names of all the girls in the class.  Instead she simply picked those whose names she did know – me, because she knew my parents – to answer all questions. Came the day when she bounced into the classroom waving a hot-off-the-press copy of the New English Bible and invited us all to choose a passage we would like to hear from the new version. “Right, lady, you asked for this!”  So I chose one of the passages that reads “Tom begat Dick, and Dick begat Harry, and Harry begat …  Miss M looked at me coldly, said that it was much the same, and thereafter stopped asking me.  No apology there either – a teacher must learn the names of her pupils.

Perhaps some cherished colleagues do feel there are some teachers they “done wrong”.  Perhaps my lack of penitence comes from over 20 years of teaching myself.