Word Processing

---

What words should I teach? What words do students actually need to know? I don't know either, and intuition is always a lousy guide, but here's one approach to finding out.

The latest Oxford English Dictionary contains about 290,500 entries. The Concise OED has 65795, and I'm using these as my starting point.

I can discard 13,479 entries because they're phrases instead of individual words, plus I can lose 2,727 entries because they're hyphenated terms. That leaves 45,495.

But which ones are absolutely essential, which are kind-of useful, and which are in there to make it look 'comprehensive' or because the compilers just liked them?

I have the subtitles of 20,749 BBC programmes broadcast over the last two years - in effect, transcriptions. By ditching the shortest 749, then filtering out formatting data and punctuation, I've got a pretty large corpus of reasonably authentic utterances.

So, what words from the COED occur with what frequency in the BBC transcriptions? And what words don't occur at all?

Well, here a selection from the 14,633 individual words which occur exactly zero times in two years worth of BBC TV. I know what ten of them mean.

Word	Occurances
backgrounder	0
bouclé	0
chametz	0
contumacious	0
delist	0
dyspepsia	0
externalism	0
gambado	0
headquarter	0
inamorato	0
kaffeeklatsch	0
linstock	0
menhir	0
mutuel	0
orangeman	0
pemphigoid	0
portière	0
raja	0
sandinista	0
siksika	0
stumer	0
tetrastich	0
tynwald	0
usufruct	0
yaar	0

That means 29,140 words occur at least once. Here are 25 of the 19,381 which occur less than ten times. I know the meanings of 14 of them - what about you?

Word	Occurances
shirty	9
maraschino	8
cortisone	7
serried	7
ganglion	6
turbocharger	6
gilet	5
som	5
convulsion	4
nimbus	4
unlistenable	4
divestment	3
miscast	3
spousal	3
bioactive	2
epsilon	2
leafhopper	2
prelate	2
tambourin	2
angiography	1
chinkara	1
eclampsia	1
honeyguide	1
minuteman	1
piscina	1

9,339 occur a hundred times or more. The following happen more than ten but less than 1,000 times.

Word	Occurances
honourable	704
underwear	529
vain	416
troop	327
muffin	264
max	215
cam	177
blip	150
uncanny	129
gland	111
aerospace	96
detonate	83
mangle	72
yam	63
ringside	55
chamomile	47
embryonic	41
poncho	36
uneducated	32
bawl	27
gunfight	24
permissible	21
convection	18
lucre	16
morass	14

A more managable quantity of 520 occur 10,000 or more times. Here are some of those between 1000 and 10,000:

Word	Occurances
summer	8831
offer	7861
including	6985
hopefully	6285
fruit	5693
showing	5224
closed	4761
sight	4342
location	4031
countryside	3784
product	3474
lack	3211
arrive	3001
transport	2793
shower	2633
iron	2484
breathe	2297
panic	2162
twist	2031
cave	1921
purple	1824
innocent	1718
fraud	1641
virtually	1560
assume	1480

Here's a selection between 10,000 and 100,000. Do any surprise you as being more or less common than you thought?

Word	Occurances
get	273618
much	117311
home	63526
course	45194
lovely	34349
such	28509
front	24414
while	20752
easy	18113
hold	16047
dad	13846
hour	12535
cost	11389
beat	10660

A mere 76 occur 100,000 or more times:

Word	Occurances
the	3812984
to	2404952
a	2098428
of	1699308
and	1640805
it	1432806
in	1209482
that	1173021
for	730257
on	699870
have	633194
this	568081
be	564405
are	532264
with	490772
not	401645
at	396377
he	374352
do	368329
me	350617
all	346828
what	338545
there	337154
as	331112
but	321033
like	319404
just	309660
up	305068
can	297541
about	290147
out	285530
so	285324
going	283807
think	281064
from	275761
get	273618
will	269378
know	267222
here	252640
go	239097
an	220785
very	212718
them	212592
see	201120
time	196690
now	187122
if	187114
right	182193
by	182007
more	179865
really	176809
good	169427
people	168640
or	163126
back	160195
some	159211
she	157138
want	152556
no	148444
then	137351
into	134491
down	130689
how	130228
look	124413
come	124007
way	123631
make	122129
over	119391
well	117864
say	117728
much	117311
need	115195
bit	113799
off	107582
little	103122
take	101002

So, here's one difficulty in learning a language. Once you've got the major meanings of the top 100-200 words, you've got tens of thousands of others to learn, and the additional benefit of knowing each of them - their usefulness - is pretty damn small.

How often do you need to describe something as 'spicy' (position 3,000, 975 occurances)? Or 'compulsory' (position 5,000, 370 occurances)? Or describe someone as a 'colonel' (position 7,000, 182 occurances)?

I may have had the occasional 'manky' cheese sandwich (position 10,000, 85 occurances) - but I'm not sure I've ever used the word in conversation.

The Arabic method of learning languages is "memorise the dictionary". It doesn't work, for obvious reasons. But it's...interesting that they've taken only the most difficult, least interesting and least rewarding part of the process, missing out all the easy, fun and useful parts.

The Arabs are almost British in their ability to miss the point.

---

Algebra of Need

---

This is a bit of a rant. Sorry.

There are three reasons to stay in a job, or a place, or an arrangement. One is for the money, or some other definite, measurable and significant benefit.

Two is because you enjoy it.

And three, the job itself isn't what you love or benefit from, but it comes bundled with something that does give you something good. You might not like the city, but you stay because your family are there. A personal reason.

Well, my personal reason to stay in this job, this city and this country...is incredibly busy and a two hour plane journey away. I am thoroughly bored with teaching - maybe after a good holiday I'll start to like it again, but right now I get no pleasure from stepping into the classroom.

And the money...is always promised, and in the future. The one big contract which will make us all rich is always on the horizon, and negotiations are in progress, but it never arrives.

So, of the three possible reasons to stay, I don't have one.

And I do have reasons to leave. I am sick of so many things about this country. I'm sick of the insane bureaucracy that means it takes a year to get a licence to set up a business, and six months to get a bank account, and three months to get a work permit - which ties you to one contract with one employer for twelve months.

The only way to get out of a contract is to commit a crime and get deported. And if it comes to that, the easiest crime to commit is to go on strike.

I'm sick of the infantile supersition that's tied up with self-mythologisation. The more intelligent Arabs I've met are puzzled that god's chosen people are not rulers of the world - and the stupider ones can't grasp that outsiders don't want to be god's chosen people.

In this last, they're a bit like the stupider Americans.

Why did god deliver his message in Arabic? Was it because he was talking to an arab? No, it's because arabic is god's language. And how do we know this? Obviously, it's because he delivered his message in arabic.

Oh, and because arabic allegedly (but not really) has sounds that no other language has. Because...something or other. And therefore...something. Somehow.

We know the Quran is the perfect, eternal word of the magic man in the sky because it's impossible for mere mortals to make a sentence which compares in beauty to any of its sentences. And we know this because the people who've appointed themselves to judge the beauty of competing sentences have already decided that no sentence can compare.

I'm sick of a government that's trying to reap the benefits of being open, while staying closed. They want to be innovative and cosmopolitan while staying a fossilised monoculture. The people are obsessed with images of drugs, alcohol, sexual freedom and even political dissent...and with condemning each other for having the same thoughts.

This is a culture that's trying to develop a work ethic while maintaining a racist elitism that justify's only foreigners doing work. And not just foreigners from poor countries.

I'm sick of an educational system that confuses rote recitation and mindless copying with learning. Tomorrow I'm invigilating an exam for elementary students who, after six years of study, can name every object in their house. They just can't construct a single complete sentence about them.

They've actually asked for more tests and exams, presumably on the grounds that the more tests you do, the more chance you'll get the answers right by the law of averages.

Oh, and strictly unofficially, no one gets graded below 50%, even if all they do is write their misspelled name at the top of the sheet. Because low grades are "discouraging" and high ones are "respectful".

So what's the plan?

Well, there is another potential big contract that will take four weeks for come into effect...or else collapse. In fact it's the biggest ever. So if after six weeks the money is rolling in, I can stay until the work permit expires in February.

If it isn't, I'm out. And with luck I'll even be home for christmas.

---

Edit: Actually, a slight miscalculation. The work permit doesn't expire in the second month of the Gregorian calendar, it expires in the second month of the Islamic calendar - which is used in one islamic country, and almost exclusively on official documents. Like, erm, work permits.

Expiration date: The 27th of Safar. Also known as the 30th of December. New Year's Eve.

So I've got ten weeks.

---

Need to Know

Sometimes you don't know whether something's worth doing 'til you've already done it.

In teaching (or learning) a language, it's always a puzzle which words you should tackle first, and which can wait for later. English has around 200 prepositions, of which half are so rare and specialised you can avoid them altogether unless you work in the relavent field. Here are the bottom ten prepositions in a frequency-ordered list I did:

astride
afore
apropos
neath
athwart
agin
modulo
anent
frae
aslant

I don't even know what 'agin' and 'frae' mean, and I'm pretty sure the only one I've used in the last decade is 'modulo'.

But simple frequency might not be always the best guide. So I thought, what about the number of senses? Excluding words with more 'structural' meanings, like conjunctions and pronouns, isn't it true that the most useful words are also those with the most uses?

Which would mean, if I can come up with an automatable procedure to transcribe a software dictionary, count the number of 'meanings' that each entry has, and order them by how many meanings each word has...I can get a guide to the most useful words for students to know.

So I did it. And then I did it again because the data was corrupted. And then I did it again because the processing wasn't quite right.

And now I have a list of 450 nouns, all with ten or more dictionary senses - though not generally ten noun senses, because they're also adjectives, verbs etc.

Column 1 is the word, 2 is the number of senses, then 3, 4 and 5 are whether the words has senses as noun, verb and adjective respectively.

Word	Senses	Noun	Verb	Adj
blood	21	N	V
fair	20	N	V	A
tongue	20	N	V
bit	19	N
cold	19	N		A
green	19	N	V	A
heel	19	N	V
rise	19	N	V
snap	19	N	V	A
bang	18	N	V
bone	18	N	V
death	18	N
life	18	N
name	18	N	V	A
wear	18	N	V
wipe	18	N	V
card	17	N	V
care	17	N	V
course	17	N	V
cousin	17	N
job	17	N	V
over	17	N
peg	17	N	V
quarter	17	N	V
radical	17	N		A
shell	17	N	V
shift	17	N	V
slack	17	N	V	A
warm	17	N	V	A
wind	17	N	V
act	16	N	V
bed	16	N	V
blank	16	N	V	A
control	16	N	V
face	16	N	V
fill	16	N	V
horn	16	N	V
question	16	N	V
seed	16	N	V
view	16	N	V
arm	15	N
board	15	N	V
bottom	15	N	V	A
common	15	N		A
force	15	N	V
forward	15	N	V	A
grain	15	N	V
kiss	15	N	V
mount	15	N	V
rail	15	N	V
range	15	N	V
reverse	15	N	V	A
rule	15	N	V
shade	15	N	V
shape	15	N	V
sick	15	N	V	A
silver	15	N	V
stack	15	N	V
state	15	N	V
storm	15	N	V
think	15	N	V
waste	15	N	V	A
wheel	15	N	V
wrap	15	N	V
ball	14	N	V
belt	14	N	V
bend	14	N	V
blast	14	N	V
bomb	14	N	V
boot	14	N	V
bright	14	N		A
by	14	N
chip	14	N	V
corner	14	N	V
deal	14	N	V
edge	14	N	V
fat	14	N	V	A
flame	14	N	V
flesh	14	N	V
flight	14	N	V
God	14	N
issue	14	N	V
last	14	N		A
late	14	N		A
no	14	N
past	14	N		A
perfect	14	N	V	A
reach	14	N	V
repeat	14	N	V
reserve	14	N	V
ring	14	N	V
ship	14	N	V
smart	14	N	V	A
speed	14	N	V
steam	14	N	V
stiff	14	N	V	A
sweat	14	N	V
sweep	14	N	V
tap	14	N	V
trail	14	N	V
transfer	14	N	V
wall	14	N	V
beam	13	N	V
breath	13	N
brief	13	N	V	A
button	13	N	V
cloud	13	N	V
credit	13	N	V
doubt	13	N	V
fault	13	N	V
fish	13	N	V
grass	13	N	V
grip	13	N	V
handle	13	N	V
hole	13	N	V
kind	13	N
laugh	13	N	V
liberal	13	N		A
love	13	N	V
map	13	N	V
mess	13	N	V
nail	13	N	V
natural	13	N		A
note	13	N	V
nut	13	N	V
offer	13	N	V
pan	13	N	V
pay	13	N	V
pin	13	N	V
plug	13	N	V
position	13	N	V
record	13	N	V
register	13	N	V
report	13	N	V
resolve	13	N	V
rock	13	N
saddle	13	N	V
save	13	N	V
seal1	13	N	V
shadow	13	N	V
shoe	13	N	V
small	13	N		A
spare	13	N	V	A
spill1	13	N	V
stay	13	N	V
stem	13	N	V
subject	13	N	V	A
suit	13	N	V
trace1	13	N	V
trip	13	N	V
weight	13	N	V
whistle	13	N	V
wide	13	N		A
wire	13	N	V
wonder	13	N	V
world	13	N
balloon	12	N	V
brush	12	N	V
chance	12	N	V
clip	12	N	V
close	12	N	V
crown	12	N	V
deep	12	N		A
dust	12	N	V
earth	12	N	V
fear	12	N	V
fiddle	12	N	V
float	12	N	V
grant	12	N	V
guard	12	N	V
gun	12	N	V
gut	12	N	V
hair	12	N
hammer	12	N	V
hog	12	N	V
ice	12	N	V
inside	12	N		A
interest	12	N	V
length	12	N
liberty	12	N
lick	12	N	V
lip	12	N	V
load	12	N	V
low1	12	N		A
ordinary	12	N		A
paint	12	N	V
picture	12	N	V
plot	12	N	V
positive	12	N		A
puff	12	N	V
rally	12	N	V
rap	12	N	V
rib	12	N	V
road	12	N
rush	12	N	V
sack	12	N	V
say	12	N	V
section	12	N	V
serve	12	N	V
sock	12	N	V
spit	12	N	V
spout	12	N	V
spread	12	N	V
star	12	N	V
sting	12	N	V
stone	12	N	V
stump	12	N	V
style	12	N	V
sun	12	N	V
sweet	12	N		A
tooth	12	N
tread	12	N	V
tube	12	N	V
warrant	12	N	V
yellow	12	N	V	A
abstract	11	N	V	A
acid	11	N		A
associate	11	N	V	A
bank	11	N	V
bell	11	N	V
best	11	N	V	A
bind	11	N	V
bird	11	N
bond	11	N	V
clerk	11	N	V
clock	11	N	V
cock	11	N	V
colour	11	N	V
crush	11	N	V
cry	11	N	V
dance	11	N	V
dig	11	N	V
dish	11	N	V
drink	11	N	V
drum	11	N	V
ear	11	N
flow	11	N	V
flutter	11	N	V
fold	11	N	V
gas	11	N	V
grade	11	N	V
grind	11	N	V
hack	11	N	V
hop	11	N	V
index	11	N	V
joint	11	N	V	A
leaf	11	N	V
loose	11	N	V	A
major	11	N	V	A
mantle	11	N	V
market	11	N	V
meet	11	N	V
model	11	N	V
mother	11	N	V
motion	11	N	V
needle	11	N	V
neutral	11	N		A
nod	11	N	V
offset	11	N	V
pad	11	N	V
period	11	N		A
profile	11	N	V
programme	11	N	V
quick	11	N		A
rate1	11	N	V
rattle	11	N	V
ray	11	N	V
reason	11	N	V
recall	11	N	V
relative	11	N		A
release	11	N	V
ring	11	N	V
riot	11	N	V
rod	11	N
savage	11	N	V	A
secular	11	N		A
service	11	N	V
sleep	11	N	V
slick	11	N	V	A
soak	11	N	V
solid	11	N		A
sort	11	N	V
sound	11	N	V
sponge	11	N	V
spur	11	N	V
stamp	11	N	V
standing	11	N		A
store	11	N	V
surprise	11	N	V
terminal	11	N		A
tool	11	N	V
tramp	11	N	V
traverse	11	N	V
treat	11	N	V
tumble	11	N	V
tune	11	N	V
upset	11	N	V	A
value	11	N	V
voice	11	N	V
wolf	11	N	V
woman	11	N
worm	11	N	V
worse	11	N		A
wrong	11	N	V	A
ace	10	N	V	A
address	10	N	V
advance	10	N	V	A
answer	10	N	V
appeal	10	N	V
band	10	N	V
bead	10	N	V
bill1	10	N	V
body	10	N	V
bridge	10	N	V
broad	10	N		A
brown	10	N	V	A
bulk	10	N	V
bundle	10	N	V
business	10	N
cat	10	N	V
charm	10	N	V
chill	10	N	V	A
climb	10	N	V
conjugate	10	N	V	A
cool	10	N	V	A
crib	10	N	V
crisp	10	N	V	A
crop	10	N	V
cup	10	N	V
dash	10	N	V
dip	10	N	V
distress	10	N	V
doctor	10	N	V
dope	10	N	V	A
dream	10	N	V
dress	10	N	V
drift	10	N	V
due	10	N		A
early	10	N		A
escape	10	N	V
evolution	10	N
fancy	10	N	V	A
father	10	N	V
favour	10	N	V
feather	10	N	V
feel	10	N	V
fence	10	N	V
fetch	10	N	V
flag1	10	N	V
flare	10	N	V
fur	10	N	V
glass	10	N	V
Gothic	10	N		A
great	10	N		A
gripe	10	N	V
groove	10	N	V
gross	10	N	V	A
hat	10	N
heaven	10	N
horse	10	N	V
hump	10	N	V
if	10	N
indent	10	N	V
iron	10	N	V
jam	10	N	V
juice	10	N	V
king	10	N	V
label	10	N	V
lash	10	N	V
left	10	N		A
lustre1	10	N
marshal	10	N	V
mask	10	N	V
mask	10	N	V
match	10	N	V
medium	10	N		A
mill	10	N	V
minor	10	N	V	A
monkey	10	N	V
mould	10	N	V
murder	10	N	V
mute	10	N	V	A
native	10	N		A
nature	10	N
net	10	N	V
objective	10	N		A
oblique	10	N		A
occult	10	N	V	A
pace	10	N	V
package	10	N	V
palm	10	N	V
phase	10	N	V
physical	10	N		A
powder	10	N	V
prime	10	N		A
project	10	N	V
race	10	N	V
rake	10	N	V
ram	10	N	V
ramp	10	N	V
regard	10	N	V
rope	10	N	V
safe	10	N		A
sail	10	N	V
scrape	10	N	V
sense	10	N	V
shaft	10	N	V
shock	10	N	V
shoulder	10	N	V
shout	10	N	V
sin	10	N	V
sing	10	N	V
size1	10	N	V
skew	10	N	V	A
skid	10	N	V
sling	10	N	V
snow	10	N	V
sour	10	N	V	A
space	10	N	V
spike	10	N	V
spirit	10	N	V
stagger	10	N	V
stall	10	N	V
steady	10	N	V	A
steal	10	N	V
stitch	10	N	V
straw	10	N
streak	10	N	V
stream	10	N	V
street	10	N
surface	10	N	V	A
swell	10	N	V	A
tear	10	N	V
thing	10	N
thread	10	N	V
tick	10	N	V
ticket	10	N	V
toe	10	N	V
ton	10	N
tough	10	N		A
town	10	N
type	10	N	V
vein	10	N
void	10	N	V	A
ward	10	N	V
warp	10	N	V
weather	10	N	V
welcome	10	N	V	A
will	10	N	V
window	10	N

I don't know whether I can do anything with this, and similar tables, after two weeks work. But if you're not prepared to invent something useless, you can't be an inventor.

The American Way (Part 2)

One definition of stupidity is trying the same tactic in the same situation, over and over again, in the hope that this time the result will be different.

Examples include:

• Students trying to flatter their teacher into giving them a discount on their fee, especially when it's not the teacher who decides the fee
  
• Teachers using the same crappy textbook that uses obscure technical terminology to explain simple ideas
  
• Schools employing Urdu-speakers with basic English to teach Arabic-speakers with even less
  

Another definition is trying to quantify the unquantifiable.

Examples:

• Teachers measuring student english level as a percentage of an imaginary "total fluency"
  
• Doing it with an exam, yielding the very precise and totally meaningless estimate that Student X has 68.3% of perfection.
  
• Doing the same for teachers with 'assessments'. Apparently teachers can assess students, students can assess teachers, and managers can assess teachers, but the only people wise enough to assess managers are other managers.

A third is: Thinking you can make reality your personal bitch the same way you try with people. Using bullshit, bribes and promises.

And when that doesn't work, shouting, bullying, threatening, intimidation...and writing memos.

And when that doesn't work, insisting that you've won already, hoping the universe will be tired enough to not contradict you. Animism and anthropomorphism are probably the oldest superstitions on the planet, and the hardest to kill.

So, I have now had four days of working for this insane company, which is odd, as there's only been work for two of them.

Interlink has grudgingly accepted that students don't come into lessons on non-American national holidays. But it has yet to grasp that they don't come in on days leading up to, or following from, national holidays.

Hence orders from head office that I and my colleagues sit in our classrooms for six hours a day, even when there are exactly zero students.

We can't mark them as 'Absent', because if we did, we'd have to expel them for multiple absenses because the Big Book Of Stupidly Inflexible Rules says we have to. So we mark them as 'Late'. Specifically, that they will be two weeks late, when (if) they return after the holidays.

So why can't we just lie and mark them as 'Present'? That is, after all, the tradition in this country. Yes, it really is. Officially, a class cannot be empty, so if it is empty, it's officially full. Why can't we adopt the local custom and do this?

The answer is that in book-keeping, spoken lies don't count, but written ones do. Lying on a school register is Document Fraud(^TM), which is Very Bad(^TM). Plus, if anyone is registered as 'Present', there must also be a record of What They Were Taught. And of Whether They Learned It. And if they didn't, Why Not? Non-existence is not considered a valid excuse.

In bureaucracy, as in sitcoms, lies lead to more lies.

So, I have been sitting in my classroom, catching up on podcasts, reading and working out abstruse bits of grammar. My colleagues have been doing all the pointless paperwork for the job, which the job didn't give them time for before. And our manager has been very busy, co-ordinating the inactivity by skype with other managers.

And his manager gets to spend extra hours in bed, so we don't have to deal with his confident self-belief.

So lets hear it for stupidity. If you're a bit clever and a bit lucky, you can get things done while the idiots are trying to define how to get things done.

The American Way

Ambrose Bierce defined a career as the first day of a new job.

If so, I hated everything about my career today.

Bad managers like to make rules, because they think managing means changing things, and they think the more managing you do, the more effective you are as a manager.

A good manager realises that if you have to change things all the time, it's probably because your last set of changes buggered everything up. And if you don't have to make changes, you don't.

An actually effective manager has nothing to do - except block the imbicilities of the bad managers - and does exactly that, letting the people who do the actual work, do the actual work.

Guess which kind runs the Interlink corporation? And yes, it is an American company.

Here's an example of how it works:

Problem: Students don't come to lectures.

Solution: Initiate a complicated registering system whereby a student who arrives less than ten minutes late is marked 'Present', while one who is between ten and thirty minutes late is marked 'Late', and one over thirty minutes late - or actually absent - is marked 'Absent'. Any student who is 'Late' more than three times gets an additional 'Absent' mark, and anyone with thirty 'Absent' marks is expelled.

This is supposed, somehow, to encourage lazy students to attend. Not so they can learn, but so they can continue to pay for the tuition they're not using.

Exactly how threating to stop charging should keep customers paying, I'm not sure.

Solution to the Solution: Students come to lectures on time, then after the register is called, develop an urgent and possibly plausible reason to be somewhere else.

Solution to the Solution of the Solution: Teachers call the register at the end of the session.

Problem: Management decree that all registers must be completed and submitted in thirty minutes after the lesson starts, neatly making the whole process even more pointless than it was.

Also, my work clothes are deemed not formal enough. This from the school which expels students if they wear jeans or don't wear a white shirt. It does this officially but not really, because if it did it would expel half the students, and lose the income from their fees.

And every student must add no less than three pages of written work to both of their colour-coded folders every week. And I have to explain grammatical concepts without using grammatical terms. And I have to teach only speaking and listening in the first lesson, and only reading and writing in the second. Even though my students are still shaky on the alphabet after six years of study

How much idiocy would you tolerate for a good wage? I have yet to decide.

Feast of Fools

"Things just seem to keep cropping up don't they."

There's a national fortnight's holiday coming up - the charmingly named "Feast of the Sacrifice" - and I was due to spend it with B. But he's developed family committments.

If you date an arab guy, just remember his mother always comes first. So it's not very different from dating any other guy.

I had three new students, all at different levels ranging from "doesn't know the alphabet" to "good conversational fluency"...and they wanted to study together because they're friends. And they want a special class just for them, so I can teach the absolute basics to the one third who didn't master them years ago.

Not that it matters, because they didn't turn up. Actually, almost all those who want special classes never turn up.

A teenager I taught nine months ago burst into the middle of a lesson, demanding to be seen immediately. Loudly, and repeatedly. His complaint? That on his six month old certificate of course completion, we'd transliterated his name with two Rs instead of one. He's very angry about it.

Oh and apparently my teacher's qualification must be a forgery because...something something something.

Another trio of students walked in as I was packing up, wanting to "practice conversation". They asked me to tell them about England. And then they started telling me I'd be happy if I adoped Islam. Five minutes later they decided they had an appointment elsewhere, and left looking disappointed.

There's a bank branch manager with an enormous book of management theory bullshit...which he wants me to translate into simple english, and teach him. I asked him about delegation - if the ATMs are broken, which department does he call? Answer: Marketing.

But it's not all bad. Ahmed is an english teacher from Jordan, complete with picture-postcard family and deeply humanist teaching philosophy. He's been dropping in for the last few weeks, asking about grammar and talking about how teaching children in a fun, life-affirming way makes the world a sunnier place.

My largely-absent boss has been telling me for months about how he's hired a new manager to market the school to businesses...and how he'll introduce me just as soon as there's a spare moment. Today I met the new man, and it's...Ahmed the Jordanian English teacher.

There's a big new technical college opening in town, with an english language department. The department head is James, a man so British I feel Japanese by comparison. Apart from his fluency in Spanish, German and Arabic, of course - not that I'm envious, oh no.

James needs more teachers. My contract has expired. The college runs in the morning and my school opens in the afternoon. Sounds good doesn't it?

Sexual History

How far back does your sexuality go?

At age 13 I remember finding the pictures in Playboy uninteresting - in fact some of them seemed a bit gross. It was puzzling why the other boys at school loved them so much - even the one with the pack of gay porn playing cards. I desperately wanted to get a closer look at those cards, which were being handed around as a joke.

In May 1981 I was 9, with a small collection of superhero comicbooks. One featured Captain Britain, which I thought was a dreadfully hokey name, to go with an equally hokey backstory and dialogue with enough cheese to feed Denmark for a year. The bad guy was more intriguing - an evil genius with terrible dress sense, name of 'Arcade' and creator of 'Murderworld'. That's right, I could have been a ComicCon geek.

But there were a few frames that showed off the hero's muscular frame in skintight spandex, which...provoked stong feelings in me - feelings I couldn't have described but which were unmistakable. If the artist wasn't a raving queen, it was someone who'd had a lot of practice drawing broad shouders and pert buttocks, all set off by inconsistent but convenient lighting.

Yes, the creators of comicbooks know perfectly well what hormones surge in children before puberty - and it just can't be an accident how much and how well they exploit it.

Before that...I think I was seven. The family were clustered around the TV on a winter night, watching some harmless, totally innocent teatime entertainment. A magic fantasy story of some kind. Told entirely 'through the medium of dance'. On ice.

The principle dancer. I just couldn't stop staring. At everything about his body, all the lines and curves, showed off by that sparkly blue costume. I actually had to leave the room, because I was sure my eyes were on stalks and my face must be flaming red and surely no one could miss the rocklike erection I was trying not to touch.

I didn't know what sex was, but I knew it was something I was supposed to be ashamed of.

There was a house we lived in till I was four. I remember the bedroom and the bed...and discovering that I could rub my...well, I didn't have a word for it...against the sheets, and it gave a kind of rushing tingling sensation.

The biological plumbing for getting an erection is in place by birth, and so are the nerves for all the sensations, including orgasm, even though sperm isn't manufactured for maybe a decade. A girl has the same nerve endings as a woman, long before she ovulates.

The intensity and emotional hair-trigger of adolescents is, I rather think, a continuation of the emotional sensitivity and sensuality of the child - with extra hormones added to the mix. But these extras are concerned with making reproduction possible, not with the pleasures of one's own body, nor with those of others.

It is simply empirically false to insist that a person is incapable of being sexually attracted before they're capable of reproduction. Which suggests the patterns of attraction - and fantasy - are laid down during childhood, though tastes can become modified in later life.

The conventional thinking about sexplay, that it's not the real thing, is based on confusing sexuality with reproductivity. It's like confusing the pleasure of eating with the process of digestion.

This obviously doesn't excuse the sexual abuse of children by adults - or as it usually is, by other children and adolescents. That's an issue of power, of taking from someone who can't resist. It's wrong to lock a child in a cellar and rape them for exactly the same reason it's wrong to lock a child in a cellar and beat them.

Yet we have this bizarre notion that sexual abuse is qualitively worse than other forms of abuse because it's sexual. We've got into the habit of thinking it's somehow an order of magnitude worse to stick a penis in a child's mouth than to stick a knife in.

How many ways are there to abuse a child - emotionally and physically? Probably hundreds. We're obsessed with protecting children from abuse, but by 'abuse' we somehow never seem to mean emotional abuse, or bullying, or sadism - we almost always seem to mean 'rape' or 'sexual harassment'. When an adult kills a child, the media always look for clues that he had his pants down while he was doing it. If he didn't, it's just not newsworthy.

A small but definite minority of children do enjoy being stimulated (not hurt) by adults - anyone with experience of churches or boarding schools could tell you that, though we're not supposed to admit that we know it.

Anyone who's worked in a field where pedophillia is an issue, knows that slow chatroom 'grooming' is almost a complete myth - the abuser raises what they want early in conversations with many children, and discards the majority who tell him where to go, show disinterest or don't understand.

Which means of course that some do understand and are interested. Something else we're supposed to pretend we don't know, on the grounds that acknowledging sexuality somehow exonerates sexual abusers.

It could be objected that the child who enjoys the headmaster rubbing their crotch in detention is actually enjoying the attention, or that they enjoy touching in general and they'd be equally happy with their feet being rubbed, because the crotch hasn't been made sensitive or 'special' yet by puberty.

But this is to view sexual pleasure as something other than bodily pleasure, as though it were a fundamentally different kind of feeling, felt with a ghostly second skin that has it's own unique sensations and only appears when androgens or estrogen begin to flow.

The spiritualisation of sexuality goes hand in hand with its mystification. Perhaps the real aim is mysification and the spiritualisation is only a convenient ruse.

The famously creepy NAMBLA (North America Man-Boy Love Association) likes to make the point that 'inter-generational love' doesn't necessarily have to be exploitative. Which manages to be true in strictest terms, while evading the point.

Plus it blurs the crucial distinctions inherent between '20 year-old with a 15 year-old', '...with a 10 year-old' and '...with a 5 year old".

It's interesting that NAMBA's chosen line relies on the trope that a mutually loving, presumably monogamous, presumably long term relationship legitimises the sexual act. Because that's really just a coded way of saying sex for it's own sake is bad.

Gay rights campaigners talk all the time about how gay people are just as capable of monogamy and love as everyone else, as though (a) that didn't meant they were just as incapable as everyone else, (b) only those judged morally upstanding deserve rights, and (c) figures of authority can and should make that evaluation.

If these lines were just bullshit propaganda to attract more conservative types to the cause, it would be a justifiable campaigning tactic. But it seems most people who want to radically change values in society...only want to change specific values in isolation. And it never works that way.

We live in a culture that's obsessed with youth and beauty - the younger and more beautiful the better. It's no coincidence that 'barely legal' is a selling point in porn - the obvious corollary being that younger than legal would be a bigger selling point. Just another thing we're not supposed to admit we understand.

Marketing lipstick and miniskirts to girls of seven has the same basis and the same reflex denial. Ditto the existence of pop magazines printing pictures of shirtless boybands. The entire point of boybands is to be sexy, so the question is, sexy to who? To the target audience of course - half of who are below the legal age of consent.

So, kids love to look and touch, and they also have nerve endings in their genitals. The distinction between the presexual and the sexual phases of life is so blurred that no line can be drawn. Humans don't acquire bodies and emotions at puberty.

We won't be able to cope with the consequences of this reality until we can admit the reality. Which is difficult, as right now we barely understand it.