Just For Fun!

Here are some illusions. For a closer look, simply click on the pictures.

             

Stoke Row School guide to educational difficulties or 'An Educational Alphabet'
(A non-exhaustive, tentative explanation of the problems encountered in schools on an everyday basis)

Anxiety
Often felt by supply teachers. In the case of regular Class Teachers, when the available supply of fingernails is exhausted, seek professional help. Headteachers? You asked for it.

Beauty
An attribute often applied to paintings, drawings, and pieces of creative work. This is often used in the loosest sense, but remains true universally.

Children
Individually wonderful, these vital school ingredients become increasingly unstable en masse. As a mob, they tend to be pitiless and voracious hunters. (Do not confuse with 'Imaginary Monsters' - these children are frighteningly real.)

Doors
Whatever can go wrong with a door, will go wrong eventually. This includes broken handles, frozen locks, crushed fingers, stubbed toes, whole classes locked out in the rain, etc.

Exploding Yogurts
A game played, usually involuntarily, by children with a packed lunch. Any number of players can join in. Play commences without throwing a six. The yogurt leaves the container at speed and deposits itself on yogurt owner or any player. There is no winner.

Finger Painting
The act of transferring matter from a digit to another surface. We encourage this with little ones. Unfortunately, this artistic creativity is not restricted to paint. Other available media include mud, snot, faeces, bacteria and scabies.

Gurning
The act of pulling ridiculous or amusing faces. This is a tactic often used by children, often unknowingly. It requires great professional aplomb to continue with the 'telling off' while actually wanting to burst out laughing. Similarly, children often exercise great tact when teachers do this, unwittingly. (Guilty as charged)

Horses
It is a well known fact that with a bit of imagination, a hand to slap your thigh to add the 'authentic' hoofbeat rhythm along with the sound of the exaggerated steps you take, anyone can become a horse. Most leave this phase behind by the time they become seven years old. There seem to be a lot of these imaginary equine presences in the playground. Champion the Wonderhorse still lives… These are not to be confused with 'Imaginary Monsters'. (qv)

Imaginary Monsters
Usually in the playground. Expect to be eaten alive by same. (Even vegetarian ones!)

Jumping
Wherever there is a change of level, expect a jump. Steps are not so much a device for access, as a challenge. Dust off the risk assessment sheets now. You'll need them eventually.

Kangaroos
The art of remaining in motion when in a stationary queue, using mainly vertical input.

Little Accidents
The random evacuation of bladder or bowel, it occurs mainly in younger children, though there is a recorded case of a Secondary School teacher, who, invigilating an exam alone, was not relieved. (Maybe that wasn't a good choice of word.)

Maths
This subject area often comes with a generational input. Many parents blanch at the thought of helping children with calculation, etc. This fear transfers itself to children and can become a barrier to success. The key? Get children to enthuse about the subject. Parents then often feign similar enthusiasm. Problem solved.

Nightmares
Ephemeral yet potent manifestations of anxiety. Some classes can, in real life, become substantial manifestations of same and therefore deserve the appellation also.

Obstruction
Can vary from the generic chairs in passageways to the more personal marble up the nose. A good spur to make an educational visit to your local A&E unit.

Projectile Vomiting
A game for all the class. Once one starts, they tend to all join in.

Quiet
You know that something's wrong - or just about to happen. Ominous!

Runny Noses
Prelude to that old favourite parlour game 'Hunt the Tissue'

Sticky Fingers
Especially after lunch. One child, liberally daubed in chocolate mousse, put his hand in my hand and said the immortal words: "I've pooed myself." Suddenly, I wasn't sure about the mousse bit.

Tyrannosaurus Rex
Continual attacks when in the playground. (See also 'Imaginary Monsters')

Upsets
Tummies, feelings, paint pots; each is equally fraught with potential for disaster.

Volume
Almost always set too high in the playground, this can become too low when being asked to own up to incidents of 'foul play'. Children also display similar behaviour.

Wet Playtimes
Every teacher's nightmare. How else can you get the children to shed all that pent-up energy? (See also 'Kangaroos')

Xylophone
(Also includes glockenspiels, cymbals, bells and recorders.) Any member of this genre of noise-making objects can be over-manipulated by children and form the prime cause of incipient nervous breakdown in adults.

Yawning
Tell-tale sign that the job interview or lesson isn't going well.

Zzzzz
Children falling asleep in lessons. Cause may be either the poor interest value of lesson content, or the fact that child has spent a long evening reaching level 332 in some computer game or other. (Check for callouses on joystick trigger finger!)