The Dreams Of A Child.

Children are a decidedly odd bunch and their brains work in an unsual way. I suspected this for a long time having once been a child and having to work with the little clowns has confirmed my suspicions.

I arrived at school early after recently being told to arrive at school earlier. A simple instruction that I acted upon with great success and yet if proof were needed about the minds of children, I also told several of mine to not be late and they still arrived late. Idiots.

As I made myself a cup of tea, one of the younger students walked past with a cup. This in itself is not that unusual I admit, and if the story stopped there, you would probably feel it didn't warrant mentioning. Luckily for you the story doesn't stop there, because unlike children I'm not the sort to tell you pointless bits of information. Stupid children.

I looked at the cup to see what muck the boy was drinking and he was it appeared drinking some water with a small turtle in it. I turned back to put some milk in my tea; those kids always drinking weird stuff whether it's Aloe Vera juice, cold green tea or water with turtles....HANG ON.

I spun around. Nobody drinks water with a turtle in it. Not even here.

I had no idea who this particular student was so I addressed him as I do with all new children..."Oi you, come here".

He came here. Obviously a smart one.

Me: "Why do you have a turtle in your cup?"

Boy: "Is a turtle."

So much for him being a smart one.

Me: "Not 'is a turtle' you say 'it's a turtle'"

Boy: "Yes is a turtle"

For fucks sake, anyone would think I was speaking a foreign language.

Me: "I know, why do you have it in a cup and why is it here in school?"

Boy: "My pet. I bring him today."

Me: "I see. What is he called? What's his name?"

Boy: "Name is Obama."

Interesting; a communist, Muslim turtle from Kenya.

Me: "What do you feed him? What do you give Obama to eat?"

Boy: "Beef burger, teacher. Get him big."

Beef Burgers? You won't get him big, you will get him dead.

Who the hell in his family is going out and buying him beef burgers to feed to a tiny Turtle called Obama? What sort of person simply listens to the insane request of a little child and then thinks "Sure, let's run with that."? If he wants to feed his turtle burgers on the basis that it will make it big, who am I as a parent to say something crazy like "No, let's get him some turtle feed"?

I began to think what would have happened if my parents had agreed to my every whim as a child. The first thing is that I would be dead. As dead as Obama the turtle is going to be in about a weeks time.

The other thing that had me contemplating my wishes and desires as a child was a popular Facebook picture of John Lennon with a supposed quote from him about how when he was 5 years old his mother told him to aim to be happy and at school he was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and he said "happy". Then the teacher said that he didn't understand the question and he replied "You don't understand life".

It is quite the quip and being a boring pedant I very nearly commented on the numerous postings of this quote to point out that Lennon didn't live with his mother when he was five. Moreover there is no evidence that he ever said what was being quoted.

Thankfully for everyone concerned I managed to reign in my insufferable, know it all smugness and instead thought about what I had dreamt of as a five year old and it would not make for a very deep and meaningful Facebook status.

If like my little friend with Obama I had also been allowed to try and follow my dreams at the age of five, I would have led one of the most fascinating and yet surreal lives imaginable.

I only had three pressing dreams as a young boy of five or six. The first was to change my name by deed poll to "Robin" and move into a forest with a group of friends. Being five or six years old I presume the group would have been largely made up of "merry kids" as opposed to "merry men" and the goal was basically to live in trees and shoot people with arrows.

A fairly noble goal for any child, but my desire to be involved in medieval conflicts as a chid outlaw was always going to be difficult given the era of my birth and my parents reluctance to set me loose into the nearest woodland.

But no sooner had one dream been crushed, than another was born in earnest.

Because I also had a strong desire to be changed into a Japanese boy. Being the worldly, educated man I am today, I refuse to buy into offensive stereotypes or wild generalisations. However, at the age of five I was a free thinker without the constraints of a politically correct world gone mad. I was of the firm belief that all Japanese people had an innate ability in Kung Fu and other martial arts.

I wanted to be a ninja and years of dedicated training seemed a lot more tiresome than simply becoming Japanese. To think that any old person can get a sex change these days and yet science is still months, maybe even years from being able to offer children a race change. How difficult could it have been for someone to just make me Japanese for God's sake?

My parents, Mr "not today" and Mrs "you can't do that" made absolutely no effort to make that dream become a reality either. Which brings me to my final yearning as a boy; a boy utterly devoid of a burger eating turtle or any sharp retorts for school teachers based on fictious life lessons. In other words, a boy in need of some excitement.

My final dream came about under unlikely circumstances. I was watching an extremely old episode of a black and white Flash Gordon serial film. I was born a long time after black and white left our screens and have no idea why a film serial from the late 1930's was ever shown on British television. But it was, and it changed my life. I had to do some google research just now to find out exactly which film it was and it was Flash Gordon's Trip to Mars.

In this episode there features an enemy called "The Clay People". They are people - and this may come as a surprise - made from clay. Only watching this atrocious pap on Youtube just now, they would surely have been better named "The Pyjama People".

How any five year old, especially one as sharp and discerning as myself, ever watched a group of dreadful actors running around in loose pyjamas with some mud on their faces and thought they were convincing aliens is quite beyond me. What is even more beyond me is why that same five year old decided that his goal in life was now to become a clay boy.

I wanted to become able to blend into rocky, clay walls and to live underground in a series of damp, dimly lit caves waiting to ambush unsuspecting explorers. I already knew my stupid parents would object and probably offer precious little support in this endeavour so I experimented alone. I tried sticking pebbles to my skin. I thought about making a suit with slate and mud stuck to it.

Sadly my attempts were as ineffective as my ghost catching machine made from a shoe box with a portable vacuum cleaner inside it was.

So I never got to live the dream life of being made from clay and rock. A dream that became so strong a desire that I all but forgot about any need to be Japanese or practice my archery skills for the inevitable stand off with whoever was the standing Sheriff of Nottingham at that time.

A quick Wikipedia search reveals the sheriff at that time was Thomas Ball Edward Hilton. The name of a money grabbing, oppressor of the people if ever I heard one. No doubt he slept easier at night once word had got to him that I was focusing on the bigger picture, and looking to become a clay based alien life form.

So while I look back at all the things I have failed to accomplish, I now get to see other young children telling me about their ridiculous dreams. It is almost like Karma. I'm being punished for my idiocy by smiling and nodding at the idiocy of the younger generations.

Speaking of the nonsense that is Karma, I was on a subway the other day when a man in an electronic wheelchair got on. Now calm down before you think I am about to say something vile. I know the wheelchair community and I had a recent run in, but that is all behind us now. What happened was that as he reversed I looked up and emblazoned across the back of his chair in yellow font was the word "KARMA".

It has to be the most inapproproate and ironic placement of a single word that I've ever seen.

Now either that man has a very self deprecating sense of humour or somewhere there is a wheelchair production company being run by a five year old whose parents indulge his or her every wish.

Grammar And A Magical Mouse.

Prepare to be disappointed. I am well aware that the title of this post is exciting, intriguing and full of promise. That was my plan though, draw you in and by the time you realise you've been duped it will be too late and you'll have already read half of my ramblings and decide to reluctantly finish. HA!

That's not to say that I will not be discussing grammar, of course I will. I always discuss grammar, at breakfast, in the pub and right here. Who doesn't love grammar? To be honest it is the magical mouse that I feel is a bit of con, somewhat of a deception even. There is no magical mouse you see, there never was really, he was just a normal mouse who died in the name of magic.

Oh I've definitely got you now...read on...

This tale came courtesy of a small boy called Alex. He is very young and very small, and in fairness to him those two things often go hand in hand. He is in a class with much older and taller students due to him being quite advanced for his age; the only thing is that his English is advanced but the rest of his personality is exactly as you would expect for a small boy of precious few years.

This leads to some bemused looks from the class when this highly confident kid launches into one of his excitable stories or begins to leap around the room as the teenage girls check their hair in their portable mirrors.

We were talking about animals. Again. If you have read my blog in the past you will know that animals and pets feature in class quite often and here I was getting tiny bits of information from my teenage students about what made a good pet. I thought I could wow them with my tale of how one student last year had a pet snail, yeah that would have these moody 14 year olds laughing; a snail as a pet...whatever next teacher?

Hailey just nods and says sagely "It's good idea".

Is it I asked. Why is a snail a good pet? What could possibly be a good idea about having a snail as a pet? To which she provided an answer so obvious I felt myself blush at my own stupidity.

Hailey: "The snail is not barking like a dog teacher. He always has the good behaviour."

Silly me. Of course! Snails don't bark, that's why they are great. But there are a lot of things snails don't do, in fact if we are going to praise snails for the things they don't do, then we could end up holding them in very high regard indeed.

I was and still am reluctant to give snails too much credit for their "good behaviour" as I don't feel it is down to discipline or resisting the temptation to run amock, smashing up local beauty spots. Call me cynical, but I think they are partly a bit lazy and partly a bit hampered by their lack of limbs.

To be honest if I ever found a snail that did bark then I think it would be a great pet. Arguably a barking snail would be one of the most brilliant things I can imagine.

So here you are, still none the wiser about the mouse, but with - and I think we can both agree on this - an unexpected bonus of a snail story.

Anyway, this talk of animals was too much for little Alex. He leapt from his chair and began to sort of jig in a circle, waving his hands about as he told us his story. Sometimes I will tell him to sit down, but this seemed like a time to let him jig, so jig he did.

Alex: "I had the mouse. For the pet teacher, the mouse. But he go away in the magic show. My brother do the magic show and mouse is gone ha ha ha."

Obviously he didn't actually say "ha ha ha" but he did laugh. He was breaking out into laughter constantly and kept repeating a sort of wooshing noise inbetween saying "magic show" and "mouse is gone".

I asked him to elaborate on how his magician of a brother made his pet mouse vanish and it wasn't the sort of magic I've grown accustomed to.

Alex gestured to the floor and outlined the mouse and then said "Mouse is here, and then the magic show..." and he leapt into the air and stamped down hard on the imaginary mouse made an explosion sound and then said "Woosh, mouse is gone, magic show".

I laughed. It's not even funny and it is certainly not magic. It is animal cruelty and if anything it was a murder show as opposed to a magic show, but everyone was laughing. Snail loving Hailey, the surly girls at the back who just comb their hair incessantly and me. United in mirth at a disgusting act of unprovoked cruelty and all because of how Alex told the tale. It was his mouse, and even he found it funny so cut me some slack.

I did however point out to the class that killing animals was wrong and that I expected Alex's brother to end up in jail when he was an adult, as these sorts of people usually do. Alex nodded and said "woosh".

For the rest of the lesson I could hear him sporadically mumbling "magic show" to himself and wooshing away with a deranged smile.

Perhaps he will end up in jail too, but how the time would fly if you were his cell mate. For tonights entertainment please welcome to the centre of the cell the famous magician Alex taught by his older brother who is on the secure wing for lifers. With Alex tonight we have his assistant for the evening a local cockroach who is in here for bad behaviour having ignored the standards set to him by Daegu's snail community.

All good animal based lessons must come to an end, that's just the way the world works, and I had to move on to serious subject matter.

The following lessons involved preparing students for their level up tests and a new section we are supposed to review with them on grammar. There is a problem here in that none of the English teachers really know anything about grammar. We never learn the rules in school and just pick it up, or don't pick it up and never have to worry about what infinitives are. I bet you think because I used infinitive as an example that I know what one is. Nope.

So I had to run them through some example questions which involved filling in a blank in a sentence with a word or a phrase from a choice of four options. Thankfully identifying which option was correct was very easy for me, what with being a native English speaker and all, but explaining why this was the case in terms of grammar rules was a little tricky. Luckily we had printed out explanations to give them

Here was one question. Fill in the blank with the correct term:

If you have ever stood next to a rushing river you___________ the water hammering away.

The correct choice was of course B) may have seen.

There were three incorrect options and an explanation for why they were wrong. One wrong answer was "saw" and another was "are seeing" and here is the explanation I was supposed to give for why these two were wrong...

"Since the present perfect tense in the dependent clause is used to express the subject's experience from the past to the present, the main verb in the main clause cannot be in the past tense or present progressive tense."

In the present perfect progressive tense of this independent clause; I haven't got a fucking clue what that means. Or is that present perfect with a gerund? What's a gerund again? I'm going to take this grammar sheet and woosh, magic show!