The whisper of the axe

[james_davis_nicoll]

[Inspired by someone on my flist exercising caution based on experience and thus not dying in a horrible car wreck]

The closest I've ever come to just being flat-out no take-backs killed involved the route I took home from grade one. We lived in the tutor's residences on Columbia Street. My school was five or six blocks away up Columbia [1] and there were train tracks about a third of the way from home to school. One day I was walking home, tripped just short of the tracks and as I stood back up, a train came through. I could have covered the distance between me and the tracks in the time it took me to get up.



1: Or much longer via a "short cut" I discovered, which looped all around UW campus and took me by the Tuck Shop in V1 (which was only useful if I'd remembered to hide my money: the teacher used to confiscate any loose change the kids had for some charity or other].

Comments

[kuangning]

Did your parents know about the teacher taking your money? Because giving voluntarily is a far cry from a flat out demand of "I'm going to take your loose change now."

[abidemi.livejournal.com]

Not that I don't care for James's health, but this was the part of the post that got most of my attention.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Obviously I am basing this on a small sample but it seems to me that the fraction of teachers who were, well, loons or otherwise total crap at their job was higher in the 1960s than the 1970s.

I remember Mr. Ferguson, my music teacher in high school, talking about his days as a supervisor out east back in the olden days when anyone could get a job teaching up to one grade below the highest one had graduated from. He said once walked in on a teacher writing something like this on the black board:

2/7 + 1/3 = 3/10

[kuangning]

... I do not even know what thought process makes that possible. 1/3 is, all by itself, just a little more than 3/10, so why would adding 2/7 to that ever add up to 3/10?

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's obvious: 2 + 1 = 3 and 7 + 3 = 10. The teacher also didn't have any kind of feel for what fractions represent.

If the kids were lucky, it was not the kind of teacher who sees a correction as an attack. I well remember the heated disagreement I had with my grade four teacher over whether millipedes literally have one thousand legs or not, which is what led to me dumping a bag of them on her desk so we could count legs together.

It's probably a good idea to precede dumping a bag of millipedes on someone's desk with a phrase like " I am about to dump a bag of millipedes on your desk."

[kuangning]

*laughs.* Yes, I would imagine so.

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

One grade five teacher insisted that the street I lived on was not Poplar but Popular. I don't recall any particular consequences of our disagreement other than annoyance, doubtless mutual. A couple of years later I had to haul in an encyclopedia to get my science teacher to grudgingly admit that he'd been wrong about the definition of some term - "blue baby" IIRC.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

No, it didn't occur to me that teachers weren't allowed to do that.

[kuangning]

I admit, I'm probably picking up on this more because I'm still fuming over a post someone made yesterday laughing about the the fact that a child had been locked in a room at school for two days with no supervision. He fell asleep on the floor the second day. The assistant principal walked by, did not see him, did not check on him, and he woke up on his own after the buses had all gone. To the teacher posting, this was apparently hilarious.

Me, I can only imagine him having a seizure or an allergic reaction in that room by himself with no-one to care. So I'm a bit rampage-y about teachers being mean to children because they know kids can't do anything about it. I really hope someone found out and that teacher got what was coming to him/her.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I don't think the teacher was being mean so much as guiding kids firmly in a direction they'd have chosen of their own free will if only they were not self-centered snot-nosed kids. Spending money on self = spoiled but giving money to charity = virtue.

[kuangning]

*grumbles.* Involuntary charity isn't. If I clean out my fiance's bank account and give it all to third-world children, I'm still a thief. The rules don't change just because the victims are too young to know they can complain/say no.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

It was the 1960s. The rules were different back then.

[kuangning]

This is true.

[fridgepunk.livejournal.com]

Or they were communists enforcing collectivism.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Ontario in the 1960s does not strike me as a likely place for a communist to get a job teaching.

I don't recall any from the 1970s although maybe that was just my schools being fairly conservative. I remember in the early 1970s when my father offered to have one of his Indian grads come in [1] to talk to the World Religions Class about what being Hindu is like, that was firmly rejected as going Too Far. Theory was fine but actual contact was out of the question.

That was in my brother's time. In mine, I think it would have been OK or at least the staff had been trained to curl up in a ball and cup their testicles during certain kinds of debates involving a Nicoll.


1: I will assume the grad in question actually wanted to come in to talk about what being a Hindu was like and also that Bill would have checked to make sure they were in fact a Hindu.

[kiya]

or at least the staff had been trained to curl up in a ball and cup their testicles during certain kinds of debates involving a Nicoll.

I am reminded, perhaps a wee bit tangentially, of something my father was asked by one of his TAs in college.

"Mr. Nicoll -- how can you be so convincing and so wrong?"

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am sure if I mentioned it to my father, he'd have had a chat with the teacher. He had a keen grasp of the difference between people who are Nicolls and people who are not Nicolls and there was a real limit to the crap people in the second category were allowed to pull on people in the first.

I remember in high school we had for some reason to bring in letters from our parents acknowledging this or that, which Bill felt was a waste of his time. He had everyone in the family write identical letters asking the principal if he could tell which one letter was the real one, because if they couldn't he was just going have us handle the letters from now on.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, and don't get me started on how people in positions of authority reacted to us calling our parents by their names(That was my older brother's fault. He asked Bill why it was necessary to call him "dad" or Lorna "mom" and since Bill couldn't think of a logical reason, none of us ever had to use anything but their names after that). We knew who they were to us and who cares if outsiders were confused?

[kuangning]

That's *awesome.* I wish my parents had been that logical; we, as children of traditional West Indian parents, got raised on the "because I said so" and "if you don't stop crying I'll give you something to cry for" model of child-rearing.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Bill also did that all the time. It depended on how much reaction time you gave him when confronting him with a new idea.