Hope Springs Eternal. Or, y'know, not...

Note: It occurs to me that religious folk should leave this page at once if heretical thought offends you.


"Hope springs eternal". People always say that. And besides from the fact that, contextually, this is completely untrue(for more details check suicide rates)the context this phrase is used in is the opposite of it's original intent. The words come form Alexander Pope's essay on man, epistle one. The section reads:


'Hope springs eternal in the human breast:
Man never Is, but always To be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come.'


As anyone who has watched Veronica Mars can tell you these lines are saying: "life's a bitch, until you die'. Or, people don't throw the towel in at every minor inconvenience because they believe in an afterlife with frolicking bunnies and kitties and ponies.


Or something like that, anyway. Although this is also clearly untrue since many people don't believe in a heavenly reward and still manage to survive day to day life. However, my point is that people use the phrase to say people will always have faith in life when Pope meant that people will always have faith in death. And although I disagree with both perspectives, I object to the mutilation of Pope's thoughts.


I also give him the credit of realising that life really sucks, even if he was optimistic enough to believe in paradise.

Last Day

Everyone jigs on the last day of term. Well, not EVERYONE. But almost. And it is really the most pointless day to skip.

I mean, most days there are classes with learning and teaching and homework. Everyone is there and most of them are annoying. But on the last day you watch movies or talk and as long as some of your friends attend, the percentage of people to avoid is much smaller.

The computers don't care when you skip school as long as you attend 85% of the time or something. So skip a day that might actually suck instead of wasting it on the last day.

Controlling Teenagers

I have come to the conclusion that it is useless to try and control teenagers. Every attempt is doomed from the start. A key problem here, I believe, is that the natural tendency towards the contrary, found in all people, is magnified in teens. The other problem is that adults seem to forget this, along with every other aspect of the teenage mind.


A typical example of this occurred at my school a month or so ago. Some higher up, for reasons unknown, decided that police should talk to the year 7-9s about cyber-safety. The first on a list of bad decisions. It does no good telling teenagers about bullying. Anyone who remembers teenage-hood knows this. Beyond that a 30-something-year-old cannot tell a room of 15-year-olds about advances in online technology without looking silly. My dental hygienist, for example, thinks he's being 'cool' when he talks about 'going online and looking at the facebook'. Walking in to the library my only hopes were that the presentation wouldn't be interactive so I could lapse into a state of semi-conciousness.


Unfortunately the presenter wasn't just completely useless at discouraging online bullying, she actually created new problems. She asked whether our school had a 'goss' page on facebook. We didn't. Yet.


Yeah, that's right. By talking about how bad these goss pages where she inspired some kids to make one. A goss page is, apparently, a pace where kids from a school write nasty things about each other for the whole world to see. The internet bathroom wall.


But that wasn't the end of it. Not at all. One week later years 8 and 9 were called in for a meeting. They told us all about the goss page. About how horrible and illegal and irresponsible it was. How the police were now involved and questioning students (interestingly, they didn't mention how the police had started the chain of events off). They told us that even looking at the page was encouraging it. I think the word 'ignore' appeared about 80 times in the speech.


Can you guess what happened next?