Friday, April 29, 2005

Rambling: The Secret Lives of Teachers, pt II

Last time, we discussed the topic of teachers and free time. Now, I want to expand on that idea some more. (Danger: continued large amounts of tongue-in-cheek writing ahead.)
Teachers, as we saw last time, are really robots. This is why teachers have no free time. It is also why teachers don't care about having their names shortened. Mr. Quistinifarfablus was content to go by "Mr. Q" not because his full name was so hard to pronounce or spell, but because his real name was English Instructional Unit 42049. Any other name is merely an alias. Each robot's true name is based on the subject taught. So, an Science Teacher might be Science Instructional Unit 238 (SI U238) and a music teacher by be Musical Instructional Assistant 440 (MI A440). Thus, a teacher's true name, known only by the teachers themselves and used only among themselves when students are not present, serves as a unique identifier. Each robot then chooses its own "handle" or external name using a random word/suffix generation algorithm. This is why so many teachers have such odd names. You thought Mrs. Wimpee just married into an unfortunate name. Nothing of the sort -- it was the handle chosen by the name generation algorithm.
Now, someone will object to this idea of teachers being robots by saying, "I talked with my teacher at the mall" or "My teacher was my basketball coach, too." In each of those situations, the "person" the student interacted with was not his Instructional Unit (IU), but another robot built to look exactly like the teacher. This other unit, called a Fully Automated Unit eXternal (FAUX), activates when the IU shuts down. The FAUX serves to create the illusion that the teacher is a real person, not a machine. It is this robot that people see leaving school at the end of the day. Each FAUX follows more or less the same programmed routine, although there are some minor deviations, depending on whether the "teacher" is involved in any extra-curricular activities. Each unit leaves school, completes any one of several "normative appearances" (such as coaching sports or shopping), drives to a pre-determined residential dwelling, and then enters the dwelling to begin its secondary mission -- being a political analyst for a cable television news network.
Alas, this is all that I may reveal. Indeed, I must conclude this discussion before I reveal any more and draw the wrath of the National Union of Teachers Synthetic (NUTS). So, for now, please be nice to your teachers, lest your poor behavior cause their synaptic pathways to overload and melt down.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Can't breathe... *laughing* If you wrote a book, you'd be famous!!!!