Oh, the irony...

I read a great blog yesterday, by Katherine Preston. She'd written a bit about irony, and how it's not the dreadful thing that's painted in this article from the New York Times. I completely agree. You may have noticed that I would not get through the day without a heavy dose of irony. People who take themselves too seriously are not attractive, no matter what they look like. Everyone needs a sense of humour. Working with certain children, I would go mad if I couldn't turn being told to get f***ed  into a joke: "Ok, but do you mind if I finish the lesson first?" makes them look the idiots, not me. 

I did make an idiot of myself yesterday, through trying to do a good deed for Mr Chaos (last time I do that, matey....). Most of the staff stayed late after school to put up Christmas decorations in the corridor and classrooms. Mr Chaos had a set of lights for his classroom tree, and, because there were some bulbs missing, we weren't sure if they'd work. He plugged them in. "Are they working?" he asked. "Yes," I answered, then they went out. "Oh, no, they've stopped...they're back on...oh, hang on..." Ok, so no-one told me they were flashing lights, but now all of facebook knows. Cheers for that...

So now the school is all Christmassy. The post-box is ready outside our classroom for those hundreds of cards being sent in the next couple of weeks. It doesn't matter how many letters of instruction we send home, we'll still get lots of cards that just say "To Joshua," or "To Chloe," on the front, and we'll have to work out which of the several dozen people it's meant for. I will have many interesting variations of my name, no doubt, not helped by the fact that another teaching assistant has a very similar name. We've often taken home each other's cards and had to bring them back the next day, "This must be yours, it says 'Thanks for being lovely,' and I know I haven't been, not to this child..."