I Wanna be a Twain Dwiver!

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"The others are in the toilet. They need to piss off."
- My students

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There is something deeply stupid about asking an eighteen year old to close their eyes and imagine their dream job.

Partly because any teenager not destined for intensive psychotherapy won't have made up their mind yet. And partly because engaging in a visualisation exercise to answer a simple factual question is perverse and counterproductive, a bit like getting drunk to think clearly.

But mainly because anyone whose ambition involves doing one thing for eight hours a day to make someone else richer...doesn't quite grasp what "ambition" is.

One girl wanted to be a genetic engineer - which gave the class the splendidly off the wall opportunity to talk about "Adenine, Guanine, Thymine and Cytosine in complementary base pairing of deoxyribose nucleic acid meiosis". Oh yes, their scientific english is great - they just have trouble buying a box of headache pills in the chemist.

When I was eighteen I failed my english exams because I'd spent the previous two months reading about molecular biology - on the grounds that it was far more interesting. There is possibly an irony in there somewhere.

Another girl wanted to be a teacher of english - presumably because no one wants to learn her native spanish.

One boy wanted to be a lap dancer, which I thought was sweet. Then changed his mind and decided he wanted to be a dandy, which I thought was exactly right.

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Today's Pavement Wit. For use in competitive singing to backing tapes.

Kara Oke? Kara not okay!

I'll get me coat.

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