DIVERSION (20 october 2006)
It must have been approximately twenty years ago that I was teaching a class of technical students when suddenly my instruction seemed to lose whatever attention it had received before.
I was just wondering what I was doing wrong when I perceived some motion at one of the classroom windows.
It turned out that a window cleaner was doing his job outside -- an activity which was obviously so interesting that it prevented twenty students from paying any attention to what I was trying to tell them about the ins and outs of the English language.
What I eventually did was just suspend the lesson until all the windows had been dealt with.
This incident came to my mind today when I was trying to read an interesting article in an online newspaper. The reading of the article was impeded by animated advertisements, which almost compulsively drew my attention.
Not that they were such useful ads to me: an announcement that one Chantal Janzen was going to reveal in the weekend edition of this newspaper who her real Tarzan was, and a filthy rich bank was eager to increase its capital by offering the poor reader a loan, no doubt at a hefty interest rate. So neither was really interesting, but still ...
I've often heard the necessity of newspapers defended with the argument that they have an important task in the information of their readers.
Now that the Dutch education system is more and more economized to pieces, it may be worth considering to rent classroom windows for the benefit of the advertisement industry. The performance shown above would no doubt have been appreciated by some of my students ...
