Teacher: Maria, go to the map and find North America.

Maria: Here it is.

Teacher: Correct. Now class, who discovered America?

Class: Maria.

Teacher: Glenn, how do you spell crocodile?

Glenn: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L.

Teacher: No, that’s wrong.

Glenn: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.

Teacher: Millie, give me a sentence starting with “I.”

Millie: I is ...

Teacher: No, always say “I am.”

Millie: All right ... I am the ninth letter of the alphabet.

Teacher: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking when people are no longer interested?

Harold: A teacher.

Alarming sight

This is educational psychologists’ week. Actually, we made that up. But it is on this page. First, we learn of a sensitive fire alarm system at Heriot-Watt University, which was set off by the steam from a shower at the ed psychologists’ annual conference. This led to an evacuation into the chill early hours of the country’s finest shrinks in their night attire. The culprit turned out to be Sonia Sharp, head of children’s services in Sheffield. At the end of her keynote address, she was given a present by her fellow psychs - a leopard-print dressing gown and a shower cap.

Such a tonic

Secondly, our acclaimed ed psych, Tommy McKay, of West Dunbartonshire mass literacy fame, had a warning for an audience of Argyll education staff recently - not about setting off alarms, but about falling asleep in public. He did so recently on a flight from Heathrow, when he dreamed that a far distant voice atop a high crane asked him: “Would you like a drink, sir?”

How will she ever hear me, he mused. So, at the top of his voice, he filled his lungs and thundered: “A gin and tonic please.” Awakened by the loudness of his own voice, he came to and heard a rather shaken (but not stirred) stewardess ask gently: “Ice and lemon?”

Beyond the city limits

“Global” doesn’t have the same negative ring for Glasgow’s Central College as it does for the rest of us in these troubled times. It’s never far from the lips of go-getting new principal Paul Little.

A new FE campus in Glasgow, he said modestly, would “realise the once-in-a-lifetime prize of a world-class and global-sized college on a world-class site for a world-class city.” We wonder who he sees as its global, world-class leader?