Contest 104! (Blog 580)

This podcast starts off with the three teachers saying they’re standup comedians. When I was in school, it was the pupils who joked around whereas the teachers were serious, not the other way around. I joked around by climbing out of a (ground floor) window, I’ve never seen a teacher do that. The phrase ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ springs to mind. Well it usually would, I do trust THESE teachers and I’m not accusing them of climbing out of windows. But if ANOTHER teacher were to teach a class by telling jokes for an hour as the students were like ‘oh God here we go again, grow up…’ I would be concerned. Sometimes the old ways are the best. Remember when everyone knew 1+1=2? Now there’s a 300 page book proving that, no wonder the students of today struggle. Oh no, a teacher explains the children only want to work if they’re having fun? So everyone is silly in school, now? Here’s a conversation I have in mind: Teacher (from another school, not a teacher in this podcast): ‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ Student: ‘I don’t know, but let’s all play on the Playstation!’ Teacher: Will you listen??? I’m trying to tell a joke!!!’ I’ve heard of pupils getting detention for not listening to a teacher, but a detention for not laughing? That’s the reason I never got a job in the profession. What do the children learn?? How to be a standup comedian? Fine, have a few of them, but does the world need BILLIONS of them? Society needs doctors and not even the best joke can cure cancer. (Although that is the ultimate goal for me). Again, sometimes the old ways are best!

A teacher explains how he was told he had low vitamin D levels, and after taking supplements he started feeling ten years younger. When I started taking them maybe ten years ago, I noticed no difference, it should have made me feel like a 17 year old at the time. That would have been weird. I would have gone from a man (technically) to a child! (Definitely). Here’s an interesting experiment: Give vitamin D supplements to a 5 year old, and when he starts feeling 10 years younger, you can ask him what it was like before he was born! The same teacher later says that children have to be really quiet during their end of year tests and they are. The children have to be quiet? I mean… why not just point out the children have to be really quiet all the time? How weird and radical is teaching now? Everyone jokes around including the staff, the children need to be entertained constantly, and all you need to do to fix things is say ‘You have to be quiet…’ Wow, does that mean all you have to do to tackle knife crime is say ‘don’t do that?’ Maybe it’s never been said because it sounds so obvious, I think I’m onto something here! The thing with getting mugged, is most people don’t say ‘please stop’ they usually just scream, it’s too ambiguous.

The same teacher later goes ‘I love all their little personalities’ and another teacher goes ‘… yeah…’ He didn’t sound convinced, I’m just saying. I suggest just telling the disliked child to be quiet! Matt later says that he told the children he’d give them donuts if they behaved. Again, why not just tell them to be act nicely? Oh great, now children are going to hate me for taking their donuts away. Still though, food(!) for thought! I get it though, no one ever told me not to climb out of a window. Had a teacher explained that was a silly thing to do before hand, I may well have thought to myself ‘…oh yeah.’ No seriously, people with schizophrenia don’t think clearly. I’m not saying everyone Matt teaches has schizophrenia (the odds of 30 people in the class with that condition would apparently be at LEAST 1 in 10 with 60 zeros following), but maybe some do? A teacher later explains that many students need counsellors, but he didn’t say 70 million children (roughly the amount of school-age children in America) need therapy, which is something. That would be a hard problem to tackle, wouldn’t it? Unless if counselling is equally as straightforward as telling children to behave? As in ‘Stop being mental!’ This may sound naive, but why not get one guy saying the phrase just mentioned on a speaker? He wouldn’t even need to be qualified! A teacher explains that there isn’t enough money to tackle the problem. Well… sounds easy to me!

A teacher talks about the pandemic and says ‘when Covid hit’, but the subtitles said when ‘CO’ hit. Sounds like a mistake, but when the person said ‘covid’ again, the subtitles insisted on saying ‘CO’ a second time. Should I start calling Covid ‘CO’? That’s a genuine question. A teacher mentions ‘Edu-skate’ and the subtitles said ‘Educate’ which does make sense as I’d never heard of Edu-skate either but again, what do I call Covid? Co? Or maybe CO!!! I’d be like ‘Oh no, I have CO!!!!’ I’m mental because I like screaming letters AND I’m infected? Definitely a person to avoid… The teachers then talk about how ‘soccer’ (football!) is becoming more popular in America. I’m just saying football is an English game, so… pown. I guess I shouldn’t have yelled ‘football!’ as the exclamation mark made it look like the American word for the sport is silly, where in fact I heard ‘soccer’ was originally an English word. Or something like that, I wasn’t really listening. I should have done, though. A teacher later says ‘where there’s a will, there’s a way’. I need to find a way of beefing this paragraph up so it matches the prior ones, and the podcast is coming to an end! Interestingly, I’m beefing things up right now! He later says kids find a way of getting around parental locks on mobile phones. Bad news for parents, good news for this word count! Now check out the video below!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1COdKgrCqQ