It made me laugh because I read it as something written by a sarcastic comedian, who was pre-empting the kind of thing that is written by the right wing press. I didn’t believe for one second that he actually thought teachers weren’t working hard. The joke fell on stoney ground. People sucked their teeth as they read it. It was too near the mark. It made me a little uncomfortable because I am one of the lucky/unlucky (depending on your point of view) teachers being paid to sit in my own garden. This is something I already feel irrationally guilty about. Not being in school feels wrong. It causes FOMO and makes it even harder to draw a line between work and life. However, it would be wrong of me not to acknowledge the benefits: great garden, nice tan, never having to put anyone on the red traffic light.
In our school, two thirds of the children are still learning from home, with our support. There are also less teachers at home supporting that learning. I’m not complaining. Even if I had to work more than normal I wouldn’t be complaining because my job is the best. We have approached the lockdown in a creative way. It’s a bit like Grayson Perry’s art club: we have a weekly topic and give lots of learning suggestions but are happy if children/parents go off on their own tangent. Any work is better than no work.
This week’s topic has been ‘Let me Entertain You,’ and I am spending my time watching videos of children being amazingly entertaining. There are dances, circus skills, weather reports, signing to songs (as well as singing them), presentations that could give Blue Peter presenters cause to fear for their jobs. My family hear me chuckling and occasionally I have to explain why, “Ooh, I hit my panda,” has become my new catchphrase. However, my favourite are the jokes.
There’s something I find enchanting about children telling jokes. The humour, for me, is stronger when they don’t quite understand it. I love a deadpan reading of, “What do you call a fish with no eyes a fssh,” that is followed by a look to camera full of confusion. A misreading of a difficult word in the punchline can prompt one of those laughs that make you think you’ve done an an workout.
My son was hilarious when he was about six with jokes. He liked reading jokes (they were short - reading wasn’t his thing - he preferred numbers - who would have guessed that he’d grow up to become obsessed with reading Chinese light novels that are anything but light - but I digress). He clearly didn’t understand that the joke was a play on words or made sense in anyway but he did get the rhythm of it.
At some point in his joke reading career he decided that he could write his own.
He would walk into a room and say something like, “Why did the Spaceman go in a rocket?”
It would always take a few seconds to catch on because his delivery was quite fast. He’d obviously just thought of it and had to try it out on someone as soon as possible.
Once you’d realised it was a joke you would say, in your best song-song voice, “I don’t know. Why did the Spaceman go in a rocket?”
He would reply, with perfect timing, “Because sky!”
There was a beat, where we would look at each other, confused before laughing loudly and genuinely.
This continued for several years.
“Why did the bird sing?”
“Because orange.”
“What did the whale say to the monkey?”
“Chips.”
“Knock, knock”
“Who’s there?”
“Fred”
“Fred who?”
“Fred Smith!”
“Doctor, doctor my finger is swollen. Well use your foot then.”
He was genuinely funny.
When he first started school his TA (who was my lovely and much missed friend) got a new puppy. My son was desperate for a dog of his own and so would ask her to tell him about her dog every day. One day she was in hysterics, telling me about a conversation they’d had.
“I brushed the puppy yesterday and he was so good. He sat so still and do you know what he got at the end of it?”
My son looked at her as if she was mad and said, “A tail.”
On the way home he said that he didn’t understand why she had laughed, it wasn’t as if he’d told one of his jokes.
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