h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

My wife is currently getting her grade in teaching for primary school. Due to corona, she has been home schooling a small group of 5 year old boys, while I work mostly from home as well.

I must say: Your list is very recognisable.

(It already should have been, since my parents and parents-in-law are all teachers (now retired)).

Best wishes to her. Five-year-olds are a demanding crowd.

And they teach you things. In Greece, there was a five-year-old boy. I asked him, 'What is your name?'

Silence.

I tried it in Greek. Still silence. Then, 'I'm thinking, I'm thinking!'

This puzzled me until I found out that kids couldn't be called by their names until they'd been baptised - it was bad luck. Due to family squabbles over which grandparent to name them after, baptism could be delayed for an unconscionably long time...hence the fact that 'what is your name?' was not a simple question...

So you had to revert to παιδί instead?

Interesting to know about the naming. This is probably becoming more of a problem with smaller families (less kids to spread around grandparent's names).

For me it is three out of four. Luckily, my brother covered the last base.

You've got it! Greece is one of those countries where they used to have larger families. Now the norm is two per family. We had boys who had exactly the same first and last name as their first cousins.

In the US, I had kindergarten ESL classes with five-year-olds from Laos and Vietnam. Different logic problems.

One day, one of the Laotian kids in my class set off the fire alarm. She had just learned to read. It said, 'Pull Down', so she did. I caught heck for not watching the kids enough. There were six of them, felt like an army. I was glad to go back to campus and deal with the college students. Kindergarten teachers should get combat pay.

Not the sprinklers I hope?

Nope. But the whole school had to evacuate like a fire drill, and the assistant principal was a humourless Scots-Irishman.

Nothing wrong with a good fire drill.
Last year I had a lot of meetings in different buildings, leading to being fire drilled on three consecutive days.

Trouble is, when something really happens, people still think it's a drill. At one time we were informed afterwards that there was a hydrogen leak. That is something you don't see until it says boom.

Glad nothing went boom.

I know: I used to work as a translator in an office building where they had a fire drill once a month. It got to be pretty routine, and a welcome break to go outside for a few minutes.