Today at dinner with some friends, we got to talking about the Filipino prisoners dancing videos, followed by rousing round of the the “would you rather go to prison or X” game. It was during this time that it dawned upon me:
perhaps the first day of teaching is akin the first day of being in prison.
If you’re soft, you’ll be eaten alive; if you’re hard, you’ll be respected. But what an awful analogy! Who wants to compare school to prison? [1] What we need is an analogy that somehow incorporates cloyingly cute and wonderful things, like puppies and sneezing pandas.
[1] I guess besides all teenagers, that is. (And Michel Foucault.)
Continuous Everywhere but Differentiable Nowhere 