Ah. Got through it again, without too much call for the amphetamines and the whiskey. Easter means that it was teacher conference time, writes Kevin Myers.
Take your pick of all of the various teachers' unions conferences: they are the only occasions in Irish life when it is not merely usual to slow-handclap the guest-of-honour, but it is apparently mandatory.
It doesn't happen anywhere in our culture: but show teachers a minister for education, and unless he or she declares that Irish teachers are each and every one of them the Socrates of Europe, out come the hands, and out comes the clap. It's almost as if it's in their DNA, like hounds baying when they scent a fox. On comes an unapologetic minister, and teachers promptly obey the call of the genes, and begin the rhythm of witless disapproval.
But is it not the Irish norm to show respect for your guest? And are these teacher-union- bashes not the inverse of what they are meant to be? Take, for example, Marie Humphries at the TUI conference in Ennis complaining about the "questionable" jokes she had heard at the teachers' dinner the night before. They were of a kind, she opined, for which pupils in their schools might have been suspended from their classes.
Thank you for that, Marie. Your failure to differentiate between the rules governing what adults do and say over a few drinks at night, and those governing how children should behave in classrooms in the daytime, pretty much sums up the exotically unreal value- system which seems to be at work at teachers' conferences.
Which brings us to the bizarre ritual of publicly humiliating ministers for education. Why do teachers do this? Is it to make ministers love them? Because, do you know, I rather think it doesn't. A clue. What would happen if pupils slow-handclapped a teacher who said something unpopular in class? Or how would a head react if he or she was greeted with measured palm-smacking at assembly - in, of course, those relatively few schools which still bother to have assembly? Ministers seldom come to this corner for advice - alas! - but if they want any, here it is: give teachers' conferences the miss. Indeed, ma'am, for the sake of the sanity of your honest hard-working staff, I think your journalists should do likewise. For unless you bathe teachers in a warm bath of mucoid congratulation, they usually think they're the woe-is-me oppressed of the earth, and out comes the hand-clap, funeral-march time once again.
However, teachers' conferences occasionally do achieve something. A mathematics teacher at a conference in England - yes they have them too at this of year, and yes, they boo their ministers for education also: Lord above, what goes on in teachers' training colleges in these islands? - recently suggested that schools cease teaching mathematics to all but the enthusiastic and the committed, once, of course, fundamental numeracy has been achieved.
Abandoning mathematics? Sounds like lunacy, does it not? I certainly thought so. But then I asked myself: when did I last use a cosine? Better still, define a cosine: not a clue. But I'd spent scores of hours on these siny things. Yet does it make any difference to a single day in my life that I once knew that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the cube of the rectangle, divided by the isosceles, and multiplied by the number I first thought of? Who gives a trig. Though I was numerate by 11, every other mathematical concept I learnt in the eight hours of class and prep, six days a week for the next five years - upon which I laboured for well over a thousand hours - has vanished more completely from my brain than have the pterodactyls from our skies.
But maths sharpened my brain, goes the meaningless- exercise theory of education. Perhaps: but I had rather I had sharpened by brain on the horrors of German grammar or the abyss of Spanish sibilant- aspirates or the thickets of Russian - in which thousands perish every year - or, most of all, being able to read musical notation. These might stand by me now, even as the surviving fragments of French and Latin stand by me still.
Young people leave school today without understanding the most basic life-skills: mortgages, money- management, investments, the law, engineering, computers, sexuality, the biosphere, road-usage and even now, keyboard mastery. But they will possibly have spent hundreds of useless hours on Euclid and on algebraic abstracts, the outcome of which is that for a few months after they have left school, they can probably tell you the difference between a sine and a cosine: but will then soon gratefully forget, as I soon forgot.
Obviously, this isn't an argument against those who need mathematical skills from acquiring them. I - personally - prefer to fly in a plane designed by someone with mathematical skills rather than someone who's rather good with plasticine. But that's the way of the world. We don't expect plumbers to understand Chopin, nor do we ask of our sturdy labourers to understand gynaecology, though, of course, some might do their very best to, the noble creatures.
So in ten years' time, will our teachers still be gathering in their numerous conferences, while thousands of teenagers prepare to leave school, having wasted so much of their young lives learning meaningless mathematical abstracts? Oh very probably.
And will teachers at any of their conferences in the meantime have discussed this absurdity? Very probably not. But will they still be slow hand-clapping their democratically elected minister? Certainly.