Gordon the Grouch

Are we really supposed to care that Gordon Brown is a bit of bad-tempered grouch? Within the limited remit of personality politics, the standard has become Tony Blair, a relatively personality-free smarm-machine, who avoids making gaffes by being over-produced and over-spun.

Yet these terms of reference seem to me to have sod all to do with what real people actually want from other human beings, let alone politicians. For me, his bland, PR-man image, was probably his least publicly attractive quality, not his best. The expectation that politicians have flawless personalities is something that probably exists only in the minds of Fleet Street hacks.

avoiding politics and religion

Teaching English is about other people's opinions. An average lesson probably goes something like this: you have an lesson objective, maybe a vocab area or a grammar point; you have a topic to teach it through, maybe with an article of a cd listening exercise; you do an intro activity, the exercise, do the teaching, practice the objective in a restricted way, then you have a discussion aimed at making them use the language. It's not always that formulaic, but that's about the general idea...

So, every single class, you want to have a topic interesting enough that students want to express an opinion about it. Except you're always trying to keep the topic within respectable bounds so none of the students get pissed off or things get too heated. It's a bit like a dinner conversation with people you don't know that well, you want things to be interesting but not too interesting.

One class I have in a sort-of Priest's college, where some of the teenagers are all signed up to learn how to be priests. The staff in general and the priests in particular are probably the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. Polite, friendly, laid-back, all you could want in a group of human beings.

Except I disagree with them about almost everything: politics, religion, society, whatever. You name it, they have a view about it that I'm against. And, obviously, is this group that loves to talk. Talk, talk, talk, talk.

None of the groups with sensible, commonly-held views about the world like talking, just this one.

"I like to read El País to see what lies they're telling about the church!" (What, you mean about them shielding pedophile priests for decades?)

"The government wants to knock The Valley of the Fallen to refight the Civil War!" (What, you mean they don't want to leave a giant monument to a murdering fascist dictator?)

Abortion and homosexuality have yet to come up.