134. Call me Turing

Now that I am retired, weekends don’t mean as much to me as they once did.  I don’t have good or bad weekends.  If I meet someone who asks, “Have a good weekend?” I have to pause, think what day it is and then work out how long ago the weekend was before giving an answer which is always, “Pretty good, thanks.”  I don’t have bad weekends - until last weekend.

Before I relate the horrors that made last Saturday so bad, it is important that you know a little about OFSTED school inspections.  When observing a lesson, an inspector has to be satisfied that the material is pitched at the right level.  Remember that.

At nine o’clock on Saturday morning, I opened this email from Dave Kerr.  Dave and I were at Durham University together and we’ve been friends for more than fifty years. 

Terry.

Perhaps you will be able to solve this for me.  It’s been given to my grandson as a homework task.

GRAMIL, GRAMIL, EDDCHA ALEHIG, CLITHO, PERMAN - who comes next?

I’ve no idea where to begin, or possibly, no inclination to do so.

Hope you are well,

Dave

I got a coffee and went to my thinking chair to do some serious thinking.

The letter ‘A’ appeared most often but just four times and there were only 17 different letters anyway.  So, it probably wasn’t a letter substitution puzzle.

Some features struck me:

1. “Who comes next?”  They were names and so I was searching for a name list. 

2. GRAMIL appeared twice at the start. 

3. EDDCHA CLITHO was not separated by a comma and so it was possibly someone’s first and last name, or two people who are always said together and would be familiar to children, like Ant and Dec.

4. Each group was six letters but it was very unlikely that five different names are all exactly six letters long.

It was a puzzle for young children and so Caroline suggested I tried to think like a 10-year-old.  She told me I was good at that. 

I sent the puzzle to my daughter, Lucy, who is the mother of William, my 8-year-old grandson.  Maybe he could do it.

Monarchs?  Perhaps it had been asked by a history teacher and they are a list of regnal names.  Maybe EDDCHA ALEHIG was “William and Mary”.  If they were preceded by two monarchs with the same name like ‘George’ or ‘Henry’, I would have cracked it.   I went to Google. They weren’t.

Nursery rhymes?  Maybe GRAMIL, GRAMIL was “Baa, baa” and EDDCHA ALEHIG is “black-sheep” but that meant that the unknown word in the sequence was “any”.  How would I code “any” into six letters and anyway, I was looking for a name.

If it were “twinkle, twinkle little-star”. The missing word is ‘wonder’ but it can’t be.  Come on Terry!  Think like a ten-year-old.

I put ‘GRAMIL’ into Google.  It is Spanish for “gauge” but none of the other words produced anything.

Then, I thought I had it:  PUGH, PUGH, BARNEY McGREW, CUTHBERT, DIBBLE ….  GRUB.  It had to be the roll call of the firemen in Trumpton.

It must be, but how do I put GRUB into a six-letter code format?  Now that I was sure I had the answer, I spent most of the afternoon trying to work that out. 

Caroline tried to throw a spanner in the works.  “How would a ten-year-old kid in 2017 know about Trumpton, a programme that was shown 50 years ago?”

I rang William to test that by asking him to complete the sequence. 

“Grub,” he said without hesitation.

“How do you know that?” I asked, astonished.

“You gave me the Trumpton DVD for my birthday.”

“Yes, of course we did.  I remember now,” I lied.

Lucy took the phone.  “Could ‘GRA’ be Graham?” she asked me.  

“I doubt it,” I said, realising that she was probably on to something.

When I was at school, one of the teachers always called me “Terton” which was the first three letters of my first name and the last three letters of my surname.

Could it be ‘Graham Emil’ or ‘Graham Tamil' perhaps?  Unlikely.

But if ‘MIL’ were the first three letters of the surname, there were many possibilities: Milner, Miller, Milburn, Miles etc.

How about the others?  ALE could be the start of ‘Alec’, ‘Alexander’, 'Aled' or ‘Alexis’.  Then, at last it became clear - ALEHIG was Alex Higgins, the snooker player.  CLIFTHO was Cliff Thorburn another snooker player and I soon had them all - except for GRAMIL.

I put ‘Graham Miller’ into Google.  Please let him be a snooker player.  He wasn’t but Graham Miles was.  Cracked it!

So, the sequence was: Graham Miles, Graham Miles, Eddie Charlton, Alex Higgins, Cliff Thorburn, Perrie Mans.  But who comes next? 

The fact that Graham Miles appeared twice at the start should have helped but didn’t.  The only thing I could find that Graham Miles had done twice, was to win the television programme “Pot Black” two years running in 1974 and ’75.  In 1976 it was won by John Spencer and so it was not a sequence of those winners.

Eventually, thanks again to Google, I found the answer to the sequence: these snooker players were the runners-up (not even the winners) in the Snooker World Championship from 1974 until 1978.  The runner-up in 1979 was Denis Taylor and so the next name in the list in DENTAY.

Dave’s grandson and his classmates will have had the same chance of getting the answer to that question as I and other colleagues had of working out the answer in a game of Botticelli some forty years ago.

In Botticelli, one person thinks of a famous character (real or fictional) and then answers up to 20 yes/no questions to allow the other players to guess the identity.

There were about twenty of us - ten teachers and partners.  It was the turn of Boring Carol’s boyfriend to think of a character (She was known as Boring Carol to distinguish her from another Carol on the staff who was certainly not boring.)

After five questions, we had established that the character was a footballer.  After 10 questions, we knew he played for a club outside and south of London.

After 20 questions, BC’s boyfriend had won a point for his team and he had to tell us the answer:  Jim Someone Or Other, Exeter City’s reserve goalkeeper!  I haven’t played Botticelli since.

The more I think about Dave’s question, the angrier I become with the absolute twat who gave it to a group of primary school children.

To solve it, certain steps had to be taken:

1. To understand the format of the code - first three letters of the first name followed by the first three letters of the last name.

2. To identify at least two of the names correctly.

3. To appreciate the link between those names.

3. To identify the other names.

4. To isolate a unique connection between those names in the order they appear.

5. To discover the next name in the sequence.

6. To transform that name into the code.

How ridiculous was it to give this puzzle to schoolchildren today?  Those snooker players were all in their prime more than forty years ago and three of the five in the list are dead.  The teacher is a twat.

Unless I am very wrong (which I never am), the question was mistakenly composed and set out: 

1. Why GRAMIL, GRAMIL at the start when Graham Miles only lost in the final once.

2. Why no comma after EDDCHA?  For about four hours I was looking for a two-word name, hence, "PUGH, PUGH, BARNEY MCGREW ….

I suspect that this question originated in a pub quiz in about 1980 as a specialist round on “Snooker” and then some idiot has given it to a group of kids in 2017.

In the opinion of One Who Knows, that teacher is an ABSOLUTE TWAT.

101. Jerk Chicken Day

With all this talk nowadays of the Ofsted investigation into Birmingham schools and the ongoing effort by the Secretary of State for Education to remove poorly performing teachers from the profession, I am reminded of the only time I was observed by an Ofsted inspector. 

There was only one Ofsted inspection of Fortismere School while I was teaching there and that was in October 2001, four years before I retired.  I taught a lesson observed by an inspector whose observation of my performance lasted just under twenty minutes.  

I have calculated that I spent approximately two and a half million minutes standing in front of a class teaching, but that was the only time I was watched.  In 37 years I was never observed by a Head of Department, or by any member of senior management. 

We knew that Ofsted was coming in October 2001.  In those days schools were given two months notice which seems ridiculous now as schools were given the time to portray an unrealistic impression of themselves.  In fact, they would have been daft not to.

Monday and Tuesday passed with no visit to any of my classes and so I knew that there was a likelihood that I would be seen during period 4 on Wednesday as that was the only lesson I taught that day. 

I was not happy about that.  On the first two days of the week, I had taught really successful, well-planned lessons (in my head – not on paper) to my Year 8, 9, 10 groups and even my bottom set, Year 11 class of fifteen and sixteen-year-olds.  I say “even my Year 11 class” because they were often a problem.  When they were all present, there were only 14 of them but to say that they were “challenging” is putting it mildly. 

I knew that on Wednesday, my Year 11 class would all be there because Wednesday was “Jerk Chicken Day” in the school canteen and period 4 was the last lesson before lunch.  So usually, but not always, they behaved relatively well so that I would let them leave as soon as the buzzer sounded at the end of the lesson.  That meant that they could be at the head of the queue and get the chicken before it ran out.

At 12 noon, the buzzer sounded for the end of period 3.  I went into Room 306S and drew an ‘angle chasing’ exercise on the board so that the early arrivals could get on with something and not sit around doing nothing while they waited for the stragglers to arrive.

At 12.05 after a 5-minute changeover period to allow the students to walk the 400 metres between wings if they had to, the buzzer sounded for the start of period 4 but I was on my own.  No one had come.

At 12.15 I was still sitting on my own in an empty room and I checked the school bulletin to see if the Year 11s were on a trip.  They weren’t.  At least, the Ofsted inspector wasn’t coming because he would certainly have been on time and as the next lesson I had with this class was on Friday, when their inspection reports were being written and no observations were made, any observation of my teaching would be with a more amenable class.

Then I heard a commotion on the stairs.  There was shouting and laughing and the noise of running feet.  The commotion became louder as it got nearer and then the door burst open and all of my Year 11 maths class came charging into the room shouting, laughing and screaming.  They ran to the corner at the back of the room and gathered in a huddle, completely ignoring me.  After a minute or so, I almost had them all sitting in their places.

Then, before I could find out what was going on, the door opened again and in came a somewhat disheveled, middle-aged man, red in face, smouldering with rage and shaking with anger.

“Who’s that boy?” demanded the Ofsted inspector.  “He just knocked me over on the stairs.”

He was pointing at a large Afro-Caribbean boy wearing a pork pie hat.

“I have absolutely no idea,” I said.

“What!” said the inspector in a tone of some exasperation and disbelief.

“What are you doing here?” I asked the boy.

“He’s my cousin,” shouted Nelson.  “He’s visiting.”

A deputy head teacher arrived having been somehow summoned by the inspector.  After a minute or two she eventually managed to persuade Nelson’s “cousin” to leave the room with her and I started the lesson.   The atmosphere was a little tense.

The 14 students sat in the back two rows of the room as they always did, while the inspector sat at the end of the front row near to the door.  Perhaps he had planned his escape route in case things got tough.  I thought things were starting to go quite well, especially after I muttered, “Jerk Day” under my breath a couple of times.  The inspector looked puzzled each time.

“I’ll tell you later,” I told him.

Ayo, one of the six girls in the class, was obviously wondering about how things were going.

“Are you enjoying this, Mister Offset?” she called out but Mister Offset ignored her.

“How’s Mister Wilton doing?” she asked a moment later.  “Do you think he’s any good?  Can he teach us?” but again she got no response.

Fifteen minutes into the lesson, just as I got to the good bit where I helped the class prove that the internal angles of a rectangle must always add up to 360 because all rectangles are made up of two triangles, the inspector stood up and walked towards the door.

“Are you going to the canteen?” shouted Nelson.  “They won’t serve you yet.  You might as well stay here.”  

Ignoring Nelson, the inspector reached the door and went into the corridor outside.  Then he turned around to face me and raised two thumbs.  With that, he disappeared down the stairs.  There was no written assessment and I never saw him again.

So, all the recognition I have for 37 years of dedication is two thumbs up and yes, I was wearing my glasses, Caroline.  They were thumbs and not middle fingers.

 

*******

 

I have checked the 2001 Fortismere Ofsted report.

Apparently,

“Two thumbs up” is OUTSTANDING.

“One thumbs up” is GOOD.

“One middle finger” is REQUIRES IMPROVEMENT and

“Two middle fingers” is INADEQUATE.