#oneaday, Day 94: Year 7, Years Later

Times change, especially when it comes to kids. As new parents inevitably say at some point or another, “they grow up so fast”. One minute they’re a mewling, puking, shitting machine that whinges and moans about everything. Then they move out of their teenage years and leave home.

I jest. Actually, no I don’t, really.

I spent today doing supply teaching work for a local school. A local secondary school, to be as specific as I’m going to get in this post. As far as days at school go, I’ve had worse. Largely because I knew I was leaving at 3pm and that I was only there for a day, which meant that even if it was a nightmarish experience, I was going to escape pretty quickly anyway. This meant I could take a fairly relaxed attitude to the whole day and not get wound up by children who obviously do their very best to drive their teachers nuts at every opportunity. Water off a duck’s back. It was a new feeling. I liked it.

What I didn’t like so much was the discovery that Year 7 are into hardcore pornography, and aren’t shy talking about it in rather loud voices in the middle of a music lesson.

Now, I may have led a somewhat sheltered existence being a rural, country village boy, but I don’t think I even knew what “hardcore pornography” meant when I was in year 7. As I recall, most of my conversations in Year 7 revolved around whether the Sega Mega Drive or the Super NES was the best, and whether it was pronounced “Rye-oo” or “Ree-oo”. Much like today, in fact. The most anything even vaguely sex-related came into conversation was if someone fancied someone else – and even then, it was never talked about in terms of sex, just in terms of an Alan Partridge-esque “ooh, I’d like to… kiss her”. Oh, and there was the one time someone put a condom over a shower head in the boys’ PE changing rooms and turned the water on. We were all delighted to discover that said prophylactic would reach all the way down to the floor if you kept filling it with water.

But no porn. At least, no-one talked about it, anyway.

Part of the reason for this shift in the, ahh, “interests” of 11-year olds is clearly due to the Internet. Most of the discussion that these kids were having (and ignoring requests to please shut up about it, I might add) revolved around the sites that they liked to visit. There was no shame in this discussion, no taking the piss out of each other that “urrgh, you’re doing that so you can have a wank!” – just pure, unadulterated filth. From 11-year olds.

Now, all right, the area that the school in is, shall we say, not the best. But I was still pretty surprised and shocked to hear these sorts of things come out of the mouths of 11-year olds.

The regular teachers at this school seemingly weren’t, however. “Miss says this class is sex-mad, sir. Sex-mad! Sex sex sex,” one helpful young man informed me. I wasn’t arguing.

The moral of this story, dear readers, is clear, then. If you’re a parent, then for God’s sake take an interest in what your kids are doing on the Internet. Talk to them about what is and isn’t appropriate for them. By all means talk to them about offensive content and what they should do if they come across it (get your mind out of the gutter) but don’t just leave them to their own devices. From that springs porn-addicted, shit-talking, ill-informed arseholes who will inevitably grow up to become /b/. And do you really want to create an entire generation of /b/?

A Jedi in New York: Day 2

A short post tonight as it’s pretty late and we’re both exhausted! It’s been an interesting and fun day today, though, as we had another long walk and took in a Broadway show – specifically, Avenue Q, which proved to be both hilarious and touching.

Acquiring tickets for Avenue Q was less easy. Our New York Passes supposedly got us money off Broadway tickets if purchased through a ticket seller called Applause. We could have phoned them up to order, we later realised, but after waking up later than we’d intended and wolfing down some breakfast at, again, the Ritz (omelette today… tasty but not quite so enormous as the pancakes portion) we decided to pay Applause a visit and pick up some tickets.

Why Avenue Q? Two reasons. Firstly, we’d played a song from it in the last local pantomime that I’d taken part in. The song was “Purpose” and I found it pretty catchy, but knew nothing about the show it was from. Secondly, I remembered that Rampant Bicycle had mentioned the show a while back, along with a number of entertaining-sounding songs such as “The Internet is for Porn” – and also something about puppets. Puppets? I was intrigued.

But I digress. The offices for Applause were actually in an anonymous-looking office building of the type that bigger companies rent out tiny rooms in when they need a tiny bit more space. The depressing loss adjustment company I temped with for a short while (which, incidentally, made me come perilously close to hurling myself off a tall building from sheer boredom… despite tall buildings not being easy to come by in Eastleigh) hired out a tiny office to put their typing slaves (including myself) in. They rather naïvely supplied everyone with wireless Internet access, however, so I spent the majority of my time when I should have been listening to boring, slobbery old men dictating their boring, slobbery old reports about small hairline cracks extending from skirting boards to the ceiling surfing the Internet.

The point of that? Wandering down the corridor to the Applause office put me depressingly in mind of that horrible place. Fortunately, once we were inside we were greeted by a typical-looking ticket window, which is kind of the last thing you expect to see behind a door in a place like that. We were greeted by a friendly woman who sold us some tickets and gave us our discount, promising that we’d be able to pick up the tickets at the theatre half an hour before the performance that evening.

There’s no amusingly tragic end to this story, if you’re waiting for one. We picked up our tickets, we saw the show which was, as previously stated, great fun.

Also today we had planned on visiting Central Park Zoo (another attraction we could get into with our Passes) but the walk to Applause had been a long one so we decided to simply stroll around the park and enjoy the scenery. There are plenty more photos to come from there.

Tomorrow we are going to head for the Zoo and possibly one (or more) of the museums on our list.