Say What?

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Things teachers say in the staffroom:

"[Our Director of Studies] is, like, a total dick."

"Communism is okay if it works. Fascism is okay if it works."

"[Name of student] must be gay. He's just so camp it's unbelievable."

"Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that you're gay or anything."

"They only way to deal with Arabs is to treat them like dogs, quite honestly."

"I don't think you should talk about another person like that behind their back."

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I used to work with someone who had Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

He scrubbed his hands clean twenty or thirty times a shift - though they were already clean - using the strongest soaps and antibacterials he could find. Each washing lasted ten minutes, and he managed to fit his work life around these semi-periodic washings.

And he lied about it. Everyone knew, no one judged, but he always lied, and it was always the same lie - that his car had sprung an oil leak.

No one tried to talk with him about it, and no one complained. I think the workforce (of thirty or so) had come to a silent consensus:

(1) He's a nice guy and we don't want to upset him.
(2) It's a problem, but not a major one.
(3) It's a problem, but it's his problem not ours.
(4) Trying to help would be interference, and that would be wrong.
(5) Trying to help wouldn't work, so there's no point in trying.

Fair enough. A defensible position, and probably a correct one, given that we were colleagues, not friends. But I wonder what would have happened if (1) hadn't been in place.

I think if he hadn't been a nice guy, all that enlightened pragmatism, all that tolerant humanism, would have instantly gone out of the window. His "quirk" would have gone from being an "eccentricity" to being "severe mental illness which means he can't do his job properly and we can't work with him".

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Things students say in the classroom:

"In England it's very easy to get drugs. Marijuana, heroin, cocaine..."

"I don't get drunk on beer. Only after a million pints."

"People are drunk over the whole world, but in England drunk people are everywhere."

"You can die from one dose of cocaine."

"Me? No teacher! I never try drugs, but I know people who do."

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One of my friends is an alcoholic. He's starting to see it himself but can't stop.

He doesn't get violent, or moody, or sexual. He just drinks every night until he's (literally) sick, then goes home to sleep it off, and goes to a job in the morning that pays just enough to let him do it again.

What am I supposed to do? In the past I tried to reason and encourage people out of addiction before - before I realised what everyone else knew, that it doesn't work like that.

So what, exactly, am I supposed to do?

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Right now, I reinstall an operating system and a load of programs onto a crashed laptop. I've got a catalogued set of 146 "essential" programs, and 103 plugins - plus hundreds of others on dozens of discs. Everything from wireless network driver, MPEG4 codec and MIDI driver to file compressors, flash player and a fiendishly complicated program to work out musical scales.

Oh yes, still working on the music - but in a faintly perverse way working on the video to a song I haven't recorded yet.

It's nearly 5am and I've got to get some sleep so I can stand in front of a class and be intelligent for students who're too tired to notice. It's their final week and the finer points of relative clause structure isn't at the top of their agenda.

Or indeed mine, but unlike them I've got to pretend to care.

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