Kiss of death for learning
I THINK the internet must have crashed this morning, because the kids were talking to me.
“Dad,” enquired the eldest, “can you help me with this?” He passed me his school exercise book, which, to be honest, didn’t look like any book that I remembered from secondary school.
For a start, there was something disturbing, offputting and almost alien about the cover – then it came to in a flash, not a flippin’ scrap of wallpaper anywhere! Yes kids, back in the day, that’s what our teachers asked us to do at the start of each new term.
As a result, it was an unwritten rule that the most creative and interesting parts of any school exercise book were to found on the outside. The Habitat dazzle-pattern flock that was left over from your dad’s attempt to create a hallway that was fit for for Michael Caine or Mick Jagger to strut down, provided a perfect backdrop for your imagination’s most fertile outpourings.
No matter how much of a lesson you spent on the periodic table, French irregular verbs or simultaneous equations, you would always devote more time to the ‘important stuff.’
So, like a monk on 12th-century Lindisfarne, long hours would be lovingly spent faithfully and elaborately scribing The Jam, Led Zeppelin or Black Sabbath’s logo on to the back page of of your physics book. As you hunched in deep concentration, each letter was slavishly and accurately recreated from the album cover that you’d lovingly memorised and knew better than the back of your own hand.
Kids obsessed on the size and shape of each letter, the double ‘s’ on ‘Kiss’ , for example ,had to be the angular jutting lightning bolts and ‘Thin Lizzy’ had to have the ‘L’ running along the bottom of the whole second word. If the teacher was the moustachioed rugby-playing psycho in the black leather jacket, a fine crafted band logo would be shared secretly but admiringly with your mates at the back. This was easier if it was first lesson on a Monday and the aforementioned Ollie Reed clone was nursing the satanic effects of a weekend on tour in Cockermouth. If you had the newly qualified hippy art teacher who always looked on the verge of tears – then happy days – you could openly and safely compare designs without giving a **** what they thought – indeed they’d probably join in, as back then, lesson plans were as implausibly far in the future as smart phones and zero hours contracts. The only real threat to your backcover creations came from your fellow pupils – friends and meat heeds alike! Without warning, a lavishly created band-logo masterpiece which took a week of maths lessons to produce, could be destroyed in seconds. The main culprit would be the enemy of creativity – the speedily scrawled male reproductive organ. This outlandishly exaggerated and cartoonish depiction of a bloke’s bits ’n’ bobs would be deftly scrawled over the top of your work of art. Your tormentor’s delight would be doubled if a teacher suddenly witnessed the naughty new addition to your existing book back-cover art and proceeded to blast you for both exercises in timewasting. You would then have to bide your time to wreak revenge of a similar sort to the kid who’d just “gotten ya”.
A real expert would manage to change the offending graffiti into a cactus being watered or a Norman Knight atarms before the teacher ever saw it. Strangely, I never witnessed any of the girls indulging in such behaviour. Indeed, the worst girlie thing I ever witnessed was Smutty Sandra using a Texas Instruments calculator to use an eightdigit number to create the word ‘boobless’ when viewed upside down. Not quite at the sordid heights of ‘Grand Theft Auto’ ...
Mike is performing his own brand new one-hour show at the Stand Comedy Club in Newcastle on Monday, June 25. Tickets are available now.