Chapter Four (continued)
The Strange New Tutor Who Can't Control the Class, and Doesn't Even Seem to Want To Most of the Time At First

(To recap: At the end of the previous page, the students talk about how anger isn't always bad but can sometimes give people the energy and motivation to do good things, and also about how the amount of anger people feel can depend on the way they think about events rather than the events that made them angry themselves, before one makes a joke.)

A Student Talks About Bad and Better Ways of Handling Insults

Then one got serious and said, "You know, it's not just anger where people can feel very different things depending on how they think of things. I read a message on an Internet forum by a woman with a little boy, about three years old, who said something like, 'My heart broke in two today! I'm devastated, because my son was upset on the train today by two teenage boys who teased him about his red hair. One said he ought to be taken away from me by social services because if I was producing boys with hair that colour I must be a bad mother, and the other one said that if he had a child with hair that colour he'd kill it. People have teased my boy about his hair colour before, and now he's asking me why his hair has to be red and if he can get it changed. I think it's really upsetting, because I got teased for my hair colour when I was younger and I know what it's like.'

"The thing is, I can understand her being a bit upset about it, but to use language that makes it sound as if it was a catastrophe, like heartbroken and devastated, makes it sound as if it was a disaster, and I thought her attitude might hurt the boy far more than the bullies did, because if he learns to think of it as something catastrophically upsetting, he's going to be far more upset about insults like that as he goes through life than he will be if he learns to just laugh them off. Just because She was upset about being teased about her hair colour when she was growing up, it didn't mean her son would be bound to be affected in the same way, especially if she taught him not to take it seriously.

"I mean, when the boys said those stupid things, the mum could have laughed, even if she didn't really feel like it, and said to her little boy, 'Gosh, did you hear that funny thing? There's a boy there who believes there's nothing wrong with killing a baby, but he thinks that having a hair colour he doesn't happen to like is a terrible, terrible thing! Isn't it a strange old world! I wonder if you could be with him for a week, hearing lots of bad things on the news, and he wouldn't think any of them were bad, but if someone walked by with a hair colour he didn't like, he'd think it was a terrible, terrible thing!'

"She could make exaggerated horrified faces and speak in an exaggeratedly horrified voice and pretend to shake violently when she said the word terrible, and her son would probably giggle his little head off.

"I mean, maybe it would be better to wait till the boys were out of earshot before she said that just in case they got nasty, but I don't know."

"If he giggled his head off, he wouldn't have to worry about his hair colour any more, would he," joked one student, laughing.

The students giggled. The one who'd been talking grinned, but said, "Come on, You don't have to take that comment so literally! I'm trying to be serious here. I think that if instead of taking taunts of bullies seriously, kids are taught from an early age to look for what's absurd, illogical or laughable in unkind things that are said to them, they'll be far happier as they go through life than they will be if they take insults to heart. I mean, I know it's difficult not to get upset about them sometimes. But I think people will be better off if they realise from an early age that a lot of insults are just stupid, and that they're not really being bullied because of their physical appearance or whatever; the insults have far more to do with the bullies, and they say far more about what kind of people They are than they do about the person on the receiving end of them."

One student said, "That sounds good, but I can't imagine a three year-old enjoying a lesson about how to deal with bullies; imagine it: Their mum comes in and announces, 'Son, I have to tell you that one day you may well be bullied! I want to teach you how to cope with insults.' The kid might say, 'Thanks for letting me know the cheerful news Mum! And all I wanted to do with my day was play with my toy cars! Can't I do that instead?'"

The one who'd been talking before said with a pained expression but then a grin, "There are probably other ways to teach kids than that!"

Another student said, "I don't know how much three-year-olds could learn about it, but I think it's probably a good idea to teach older kids to laugh at some of the things other kids try to insult them with, instead of thinking they're worth getting upset about. When you really think about some of the things people get called, they sound daft! Like 'four eyes' for people who wear glasses. 'What, you really think I've got four eyes? Well that might be nice, but sadly you've mistaken the lenses of my glasses for extra eyes.'"

One girl said, "There was a girl at my school who used to call some people cowbags. I don't know to this day just what a cowbag is supposed to be! But one day she called me one and I said for fun, 'How many cows have I got in me?' She wasn't amused! I think she told me not to be stupid! She probably didn't get the joke."

One student said, "Imagine if someone did an experiment to see how daft insults had to get before kids didn't get upset by them but just laughed at them. 'Tennis ball nose!' 'chewing gum stick fingers!' 'Celery legs!' 'marzipan head!'

"Some kids might get upset and go home and say to their mums, 'Mum, do you think my head looks like marzipan?' 'Mum, do my legs look like celery?' 'Mum, have I got a really really big nose, like as big as a tennis ball?' 'Mum, what is it about my fingers that makes them look like sticks of chewing gum?'"

The one who'd joked about the insult 'four eyes' said, "It's funny what kind of words some kids use as insults sometimes, like swat, used for people who work hard, as if working hard's a bad thing! In a school where most kids don't think it's worth working, anyone who does want to work hard might get called a swat and looked down on by some of them, and because when kids are young teenagers I think they tend to assume the other kids in their class know what they're talking about, they might come to think, 'Hard work must be bad!' Or they might think that since kids around them seem to think it's bad, they'd better try to fit in and not work so hard in future. But maybe they could put the other kids off teasing them sometimes if they treated what they were saying as compliments, even though they knew full well they weren't meant to be really.

"So when they were called a swat, they could pretend to be really pleased and say things like, 'Wow thank you; that's really nice of you to say so. It's great to know people notice I'm working hard!'

"And if any of the kids laugh in a sneering way and say, 'That wasn't meant as a compliment!' they could still pretend to be pleased and say, 'Oh you're too modest! That was one of the best compliments I've ever received!'

"And maybe they can keep on pretending they're really pleased until the teasers get confused and walk off."

A lot of the students grinned and chuckled. But one said, "I think it's the contempt in a teaser's voice that's partly what upsets someone on the receiving end though. And often it's not just teasing; other kids might fling their books around and push the victim about and things. I think every school ought to have a good anti-bullying strategy, and teachers should be specially trained to deal with bullying. It shouldn't be up to kids to have to work out what to do."

The one who'd been talking before said, "Oh I know. But it's still good if kids know some techniques they can try to stop behaviour they don't like."

"Like martial arts," said one student with a grin.

Becky said, "My auntie Joan started learning a martial art when she was at school. Some girls used to tease her and throw little bits of clay at her across the room in a lesson after a pottery lesson they had, but as soon as she told them she'd started learning the martial art, they stopped, as if they were scared she'd already know how to throw them across the room or something."

One student said, "I've heard that some kids laugh at the way they're insulted sometimes and they end up being friends with the people teasing them. I heard a boy say he was called a chicken at school, and he did an imitation of a chicken in the playground, and the kids who'd been insulting him laughed, and they were friends after that."

The person who'd started the conversation about bullying said, "I suppose that's the ideal, isn't it, making friends with the people who are teasing you."

"Actually the ideal is to prevent people bullying in the first place," said another student.

The one who'd started the conversation blushed a bit and said, "Yeah, there is that."

Becky's friend Sharon joked, "If the woman who said she was heartbroken when her little boy got teased about his ginger hair thought just that was heartbreaking, I wonder how she'd feel if something more serious happened. If it was something really upsetting, maybe she'd think, 'Well I thought I was heartbroken before, but now I feel sixteen times as bad, so maybe that means I've got sixteen hearts inside me and they've all broken.'"

There was a ripple of giggling around the room.

The tutor said, "This is such an interesting conversation, I think it might be more worth having than the lecture I was going to give you. So perhaps I won't even try to give it now!"

The students felt a bit embarrassed, remembering that was what they were there for, and silence fell over the lecture theatre.

The tutor said, "Oh, well, if you're not going to talk any more, perhaps I will give what I can still fit in the time we have left of my lecture after all."

The student who'd started the conversation about bullying said, "Actually, there are still some things I'd like to say before you do. I didn't quite finish before other people started talking.

"I just want to say that I don't know how often making friends with bullies can easily be done. When it doesn't seem easy, maybe another way of dealing with it could sometimes be confronting the teaser.

"When people are teased I think it can sometimes be a natural reaction to feel demoralised and upset that people are being nasty, but some people might not get nearly so upset if they're taught from an early age to think, 'What's the matter with this person that they want to say things like this?' instead of taking it seriously and thinking there must be something wrong with Them.

"Maybe kids could be taught to ask the person teasing them questions like, 'What are you hoping to achieve by teasing me? Do you truly believe what you're saying? Even if there's some truth in it, why is it worth making such a big deal about? Why are you even using the word as an insult? Or if you just want a bit of fun, why don't you try thinking up ways you can have fun without upsetting anyone? Or do you think you'd find that very difficult? Or if you're teasing me because you're annoyed with me about something, why not just come straight out and tell me what you're annoyed with me about and we can have a chat about it and maybe sort things out?'

"If the teaser says they're just teasing for fun, and insists that it's enjoyable so they don't want to stop, the kid on the receiving end could maybe ask them questions as if to get to the bottom of just why it's enjoyable. For instance, if the teaser says it's fun to see them get all worked up, they can ask, 'Well why is that fun', and keep asking questions like that till the teaser can't think of anything more to say. Or they could maybe say something like, 'Well that's just what people do when they're upset; do you think you look funny when you're upset?'

"So they can try and keep the focus of attention all about what might be wrong with what the teaser's doing, instead of getting demoralised because they don't like the fact that someone else thinks there's something wrong with Them.

"Mind you, sometimes just laughing things off might work better than taking the teaser's behaviour at all seriously."

One student said, "Hmmm! I agree with most of what you say, but somehow I think expecting the mum of that little boy who got teased about his red hair you were talking about to teach him to react like that might be a bit much, considering how young you said he was. I came across a website the other day where people had written in about funny reasons their toddlers had had tantrums. They were reasons like, 'She couldn't take her footprints from the beach'; 'I wouldn't let him drive the car into town'; 'I stopped her inflating herself with a bicycle pump'; 'I wouldn't let her lick me and she felt as if she just had to lick someone'; 'he wasn't allowed to wear his bike helmet to bed'; 'he wasn't allowed to put his ear wax back in his ear'; 'I wouldn't let her eat a candle'; and, 'he felt sure the sun was following him'.

"I mean, there might have been a bit more to the tantrums than that, but maybe not much more. So expecting a kid who hasn't yet got much past the age where kids might have that level of reasoning to put some complicated anti-bullying techniques into operation might be a bit much!"

The students tittered. The one who'd been talking about teasing blushed and grinned and said, "Yes I know that. I wasn't really suggesting kids that young do what I was talking about; I was talking about kids in general. Maybe at primary school they ought to be taught techniques like the one I was talking about. I didn't mean I think the mum on the train I was talking about should have taught her little kid to say all that.

"Actually, I can't really say that mum did anything wrong, because even if I thought the language she used in that little message she put on that forum was over-sentimental and she made being taunted by those boys sound like a disaster when it wasn't, thinking about it, it doesn't necessarily mean she was using language around her boy that made Him think it was a disaster so he took it far more seriously and thought it was something to get far more upset about than he needed to. And actually, she asked people on the forum to comment on a photo of the boy to tell him he actually looked nice, and loads did, so that must have made him feel a lot better, and it probably made him take any more insulting things about his hair colour less seriously after that."

One student said, "That's good. I agree with what you said about how the mum could have made a joke about the silly insulting things the boys were saying about her son's hair colour. Actually, when you think about it, kids bully each other for reasons that sound just as daft as the reasons those toddlers were having tantrums, like, 'she couldn't take her footprints home from the beach', as if they haven't grown up since they were that age; I mean, when you think of some of the reasons people say they were bullied, like, 'I wore glasses', or, 'My clothes were a bit scruffy' or, 'I talked a bit slower than they did', they sound like stupid laughable reasons for bullying someone, don't they. When people are on the receiving end, they can feel as if those things mean there's something defective about them; but if they look back later in life, they might realise those things are really stupid reasons to pick on someone. If they're taught to think about how silly the reasons are at the time, they might not get so upset by being taunted about them in the first place."

Another student said, "I've read that one reason bullies bully people is that they interpret some things as more hostile than they're intended to be. For instance, if someone goes past a bully's desk and accidentally knocks a book off it, the bully might leap to the conclusion they did it deliberately and jump up and attack them or something, whereas a more laid-back person might think it was probably an accident. Maybe part of anti-bullying strategies ought to be teaching bullies to try to think of several possible different explanations for why things might have happened and then try and find out which one it is before they react."

They were all thoughtful for a few seconds.

A Student Talks About a Questionnaire That Showed How People Can Jump to Wrong Conclusions About People Just By Interpreting One Thing Wrongly

Then another student said, "That stuff about interpreting things in different ways reminds me of a questionnaire thing in a magazine I did once. It was funny. It was all about whether we had the right balance of Yin and Yang, which I think are attributes given to stereotypical female and male personalities in Chinese folklore or something. Apparently everyone, whether they're male or female, should have a healthy mixture of Yin and Yang characteristics according to that. They say if you've got too much Yin, it means you're too feminine and that makes you timid and shy and not assertive enough or something, and if you've got too much Yang, you're too masculine so you get too angry and you're assertive to the point of rudeness and you can be reckless or whatever.

"Anyway, this questionnaire said we could find out whether our Yin and Yang were in a healthy balance so we had just enough of each, or whether we had too much of one or the other. We got points for each question, and the more points we ended up with, the more Yang we supposedly had. For every question, there was a choice of three answers, and answers that were supposedly a sign of having Yang characteristics scored the most points. I would have scored as having too much Yin, if it wasn't for just this one question, that gave me enough points to put me up into the range where we supposedly had a healthy balance of Yin and Yang.

"The question was about whether if we were working on the computer or some other piece of technical equipment and we had a problem getting it to work the way it should, would we ask someone for help, or go and look at the manual, or just give up on it or something. I put that I'd prefer to look at a manual, and that scored the most points.

"But I'm guessing that it scored the most because the person who wrote the questionnaire thought of it as a sign of Yang things like initiative, independence, confidence and that kind of thing, and they thought asking for help would be a bit Yin because it would be a sign of reliance on other people, or lack of confidence in technical abilities or whatever.

"But actually, the reason I'd prefer to look at a manual and work things out myself is because I'd feel awkward and maybe a bit nervous about asking someone else for help, because I'd worry that they might think I was silly for not knowing how to fix the thing, or they might be busy and think helping me was a burden to them. So really that's a sign of having Yin for me.

"So it just shows you how people can take things in different ways depending on why they think they're happening."

The Tutor Starts Talking About Herself Again, As If She Thinks It's More Important Than Giving a Lecture, and Then Realises There's No More Time For It

The tutor said, "This is an interesting conversation. I can identify with what was being discussed earlier about feeling differently about things according to the interpretations we put on them in our own minds, and that thing about taking things too personally. My mum forgets my birthday sometimes. Or at least, she says she does. I remember a few years ago, the day after my birthday I told her it would have been nice if she'd said happy birthday to me the day before, and when she told me she'd forgotten, I got annoyed and said, 'How could you have forgotten my birthday? It's the anniversary of when you actually gave birth to me! I bet you haven't forgotten doing That!'

"It didn't help; she forgot it the next year too. I used to take it personally and think it must mean she didn't care about me; but then I realised it was probably just that she'd lost track of what date it was that day; she's always asking what the date is when she writes a cheque or has to write the date on something else. ...

"But anyway, I was talking about birthdays being rubbish before, wasn't I. It was some time ago now, wasn't it! But anyway, I want to finish what I was saying earlier about why I call myself Miss Ann Thrope and I'm fed up of people, because even the bits of life that are supposed to be the best ones are rubbish sometimes, because so many of us are rubbish at knowing how to enjoy them, including me.

"On my last birthday, my sister came over to see me, and I thought it might be nice, but she ended up getting all curious about an old classmate of mine who'd been injured in a house fire. So talking about that was never going to make for a nice birthday celebration!

"But I've realised I'm just as bad! I went to a Christmas party for the people where I worked, and ended up spending ages asking someone about her first marriage that ended in disaster! Thinking about it, she probably ended up feeling the way I did after my sister asked me all about my old classmate who got injured. I think I'm miserable company at parties! Actually I probably am most of the time, and just as likely to say thoughtless things as other people, despite best intentions! So I don't like myself any more than I like anyone else!"

Then the tutor looked at the time, and realised she had no more time to give the lecture she'd intended to give.

She looked embarrassed and said, "Oh no! I haven't got any time to give the lecture I was supposed to be giving now! I'm not very good at this, am I! I shouldn't have said so much about other things and let other people talk about what they wanted to! Mind you, it was interesting and useful. Perhaps I'll give my lecture next time. Or perhaps I'll give it a miss and see what else you come up with."

The students wandered out, wondering what on earth would happen next time.

At the Start of What's Supposed to Be the Second Lecture, There Are Still No Signs That One Will Actually Happen

When it was time for the chatty new tutor to give what was supposed to be her second lecture, even though she hadn't managed to do her first one yet, the students went into the lecture theatre where it was supposed to be taking place, curious to know what would happen.

Miss Ann Thrope came in, stood at the front and said, "Hello again. I was thinking about the things you said last time after our meeting and I realised I should have shown more appreciation for them, just like you were saying people should, because what you said was interesting, and I'd like to hear more."

Some of the students wondered if she had already forgotten that She was the one who was supposed to be talking to Them.

She continued, "I ran a little recovery group for people with anxiety problems when I did counselling for a little while, and before we started talking about anxiety, we would always have a little friendly chat to put everyone at ease. Perhaps we could do that here before my lectures."

One student said eagerly, "Oh, tell us about your recovery group. What worked best to help people, and do you have any idea what kind of success rate you had?"

The Tutor Tells the Students Personal Details About Herself They Think She Should Be Keeping To Herself

Miss Ann Thrope said gloomily, "I really don't know what my success rate was, because I never spoke to any of the people in the group after it had finished. We all went our separate ways. They were all nice people, so I hope the group helped them. But I don't think I'd run a recovery group now. I've grown less confident about being any good at helping people over time.

"I tried to help a few of the people I know recently, but that went wrong. Even little things I said seemed to have the opposite effect to the one intended. I mean, one example is that there was one woman whose son got arrested for assault, and he got remanded in custody till his trial. I was trying to be sympathetic and wrote in an email to her that I could understand that it was going to be daunting for her having to tell her relatives about it. I meant it to sound sympathetic, but maybe it was because when you're reading things you don't pick up the tone of voice someone would be saying something in, or that it brought it home to her all of a sudden that it might be horrible so it wasn't nice to read, but she got all upset and angry with me for saying it, and told me that actually she had no intention of telling them. Mind you, she wasn't a very nice person.

"She often got depressed, and she would email me telling me about how grotty she was feeling. I would sometimes email her back hours later sympathising. But by then, she was often feeling much better, and she'd get annoyed with me for reminding her of her problems. I realised that instead of interpreting what I was saying as sympathy, what was happening was that what I was saying was reminding her of her problems and triggering off the depressing thoughts that were making her feel miserable all over again. Even if I just said something like 'I hope you're well' it would do that, because it would remind her that she wasn't as well as she'd like to be and that other people were feeling better than her, so she'd start feeling hard done-by and get depressed again; or if she Was feeling well, it would make her start worrying about the possibility that she might not be well soon, so that would upset her too.

"And then she would assume that since she'd got upset right after she'd read something I'd written to her, I must be the cause of her being upset; so she'd get angry with me for saying what I'd said. So I decided that communicating with her was just too difficult and stopped having much to do with her after that.

"I realised that trying to help people was a lot more difficult than I'd thought it would be. So I started thinking I might have made a mistake going into psychology.

"But it wasn't just when it came to things to do with psychology that annoying misunderstandings happened. One example is that there was one time when I went out to dinner with some friends of my husband, and we'd had a nice meal, and the person who owned the house said he'd make us a cup of tea after he'd washed some things up. We said that would be nice and just chatted. He was washing up when someone who knew how much I like tea saw me drinking some water and said, 'I bet you wish that was tea, don't you!'

"I said, 'Oh yeah' enthusiastically, and the man doing the washing up seemed to interpret that as meaning I was impatient for a cup of tea and wanted one right there and then. He said in an irritated tone of voice, 'I told you I'd make you one when I've washed up!'

"But I hadn't been hinting at all, and was perfectly happy to wait! So that just made me feel more fed up of people."

The students sympathised for a few seconds, though some were wondering whether those were really good reasons to start hating humanity and calling herself a misanthrope.

The more the tutor carried on talking, the less confidence they had in her ability to teach them, although they thought she'd given them a Bit of useful information the last time she was supposed to be giving a lecture. They wondered if there was any point in paying attention to much of what she tried to teach them at all most of the time though. And it seemed she was telling them some things that should have been kept private, or at least not told to a bunch of strangers she'd only just met. One or two wondered if she'd counsel people and then go and blab their problems to random strangers outside on the streets! They hoped she wasn't that bad!

One of Becky's special friends, Sharon, plucked up the courage to say, "Um, I don't really think you should be telling us so much about yourself and the faults of people you know."

The tutor misunderstood what she meant and thought she was saying it was selfish to talk so much about herself and she ought to be finding out more about Them instead. So she said, "Sorry. I'd love to know more about you actually. Tell me all about yourself."

The Students Tell Funny Stories, the First Make-Believe, and the Others Apparently True

Sharon didn't want to tell her anything about herself; after all, she didn't know who might end up hearing it! So she decided to make something up instead. She said:

"Alright. I went to a special school for people who'd failed all the exams and tests they'd ever taken. For the first few years, they made us do things they said were really simple, like counting all the baked beans in a tin, and counting all the blades of grass in the school playing field. It was really boring.

"But things were livened up one day when I went to the loo. I sat down, and the entire thing came off the wall, would you believe it! I tried to get off it, but I couldn't! So I had to walk back to class with the whole thing stuck to my bottom. No one knew how to get it off, and health and safety regulations said they weren't allowed to pull loos off people anyway in case they damaged them, So I had to walk around for the entire day with ..."

The other students had started grinning, and so had the tutor, but then it seemed she'd finally decided to call them all to order, and interrupted Sharon and said, "That's interesting, but I don't believe a word! Listen! I want to warn you all that you might think it would be a nice rewarding career to do a job where you're doing your best to help people and give them therapy, but it might not be anywhere near as easy as you think. It's so easy to say the wrong thing and upset people! You might end up being as fed up of everyone as I am!"

Some of the students started feeling a bit worried. But one smiled and said, "Well, at least things haven't been as bad as they could have been. You're upset about the misunderstandings that keep happening to you, but misunderstandings can be even worse if you don't even speak a language well. I heard about a German man who was in a cafe in England waiting for some dinner, and he thought it was taking a long time to come. He saw other people being given bacon and sausages and things, and wondered if he'd been forgotten. He wanted to ask when he'd get his dinner, but he wasn't sure how. The word for get in German is bekommen, so he thought the English equivalent was likely to be become. So he asked, 'When do I become a sausage?'"

The students giggled.

Then he said, "Something a bit like that happened to someone I was with once. I went on a sailing trip a few years ago with a few of my classmates at school and a couple of teachers. I don't know why, but the school thought it would be good for us. The skipper of the boat couldn't speak English well at all! I don't know if anyone at my school knew that before we went. He knew quite a lot of words, but his pronunciation was really bad!

"He was giving us some supposed safety information when we first went on the boat, and he was trying to tell us not to worry if the boat started sinking because there were pumps to pump the water out. But instead of pumps, it sounded as if he said bombs! So he said, 'You don't need to worry if the boat starts to sink because we've got bombs on board!'

"I thought, 'Oh, you mean we can blow the boat up and put ourselves out of our misery quickly so as not to prolong the agony of dying?'

"Then he said, 'Let me show you a manual bomb!' I thought, 'I'd rather not see the bombs if it's OK with you! I don't know what might set them off!' Mind you, I knew what he meant really.

"The trip lasted a few days, and the last day we were there, the skipper said, 'There's no need for spit!' meaning, 'There's no need for speed'. And then sometimes he'd talk about trimming the sails, but instead of trim he'd say dream, so he'd say, 'We need to dream!' He sounded like some motivational speaker trying to get us to imagine a better future or something!"

The tutor laughed, along with some of the students. But one said, "I don't think it's fair to laugh at that man; he was probably doing his best."

"Maybe you're right," said the student telling the story, thoughtfully. "Actually, I blame the company for what happened, not him. There could have been bad safety consequences if he'd been trying to communicate something important and we couldn't understand him. They should have made sure all their crew members were easily understandable, and our school should have made sure the company they sent us with did that.

"Mind you, laughing about what he said did serve one purpose: We needed to find Something to amuse ourselves with while we were there, because there wasn't much else that was funny. But then, a few other funny things did happen."

Another student said, "That story reminds me of a song I heard. I don't know what it really says, but it sounded as if it kept saying over and over again throughout the whole song, 'My lemon ain't quinine.' It made me think about how funny it would be if the whole song kept saying different things that sounded like other weird things but weren't really, like, 'My orange ain't washing-up liquid; my chocolate bar ain't a can of drink; my car ain't a toothbrush; my computer ain't a block of cheese; my toothpaste ain't a hose pipe; my chair ain't a radio; my bed ain't a box of cornflakes; my house ain't an aeroplane.'"

The student who'd been talking about the sailing trip he'd been on at school grinned and said, "If it had been talking about that sailing holiday I went on, it might have said, 'This sailing boat ain't a palace you know!' That would be an under-statement! There were about four boats with people from our school on. There were about eight people to each boat, including a couple of crew members, one or two teachers, who were supposed to be caring for us, and us.

"I came away having decided that sailing is a barbaric, outdated, slow, primitive method of transport that belongs firmly in the past where it came from, which probably wasn't what our school, or the company that organised the trip, or my parents who paid for me to go on it, were hoping we would end up thinking, but still!

"One of the first things they told us when we went there was how to use the loos. There were two on our boat. They didn't call them loos though; they called them heads; they said it was because they're called that on boats because in the olden days, like the days of Nelson, they used to put them at the front of the boat under where the head sail was, where not many people went, because they didn't have the technology in those days to make them smell OK, or maybe it was just because it was more private there; so when anyone wanted to go to the loo, they'd say something like, 'I'm just going up the heads'.

"I don't know why they didn't say bog or stench pit; well maybe some of them did; but heads just seems like quite a delicate euphemism for hardened sailors; but anyway we were told that's what they called them. I started calling the loo the room of doom. Someone else called it the loo of shame.

"One of the first things we were told when we got on the boat was that we needed to be careful about how much loo paper we used, because the loos couldn't cope well with non-human waste, for some reason."

Everyone was quiet as the student talked, including the tutor, as if she was enjoying the story and somehow forgetting she was supposed to be giving a lecture again.

Then another student said, "It's nice that we can talk about toilet paper and loos and horrible smells in lectures at university. Imagine how much we'd have been told off if we'd tried to do that at school! It's good that they treat us more like grown-ups here and don't mind us doing that kind of thing."

Actually they didn't normally do that kind of thing at all, so they didn't really know how the other lecturers would have reacted. Miss Ann Thrope was really pondering whether she ought to bring the conversation to an end and start giving the lecture she was there to give them, but she thought that since she was going to be teaching them for the next several months, it would be nice to find out what they were like; so she let them continue for a while.

The student who'd been talking about sailing said, "Yeah, it's nice that the tutors aren't so fussy about what we say. Anyway, these loos were special seawater loos. There was a pump instead of a chain. I suppose it was good technology really, at least it would have been when it was invented, however many hundreds of years ago that was. Or maybe it was only about 50 years ago or something. I suppose we should have been grateful that there was a way we could flush stuff away. I don't know if they would have had that luxury in the olden days. Well, maybe people just did things in a bottomless tub and they just went hurtling straight into the sea or something.

"Anyway, they told us that what we had to do when we wanted to use the loos was pump some seawater into the toilet bowl to help it flush afterwards, and then when we'd done what we went there to do, push a switch over to the other side to change what the mechanism did and pump everything out, and then switch it back and pump a bit of fresh seawater in for the next person."

The tutor wondered just how graphic the description of what happened was going to get. But she thought it was a welcome relief from telling the students about her own woes, thinking she'd perhaps spent a bit too long doing that last time, and she was finding the story quite entertaining, so she let the one who was talking about it carry on.

He continued, "We tried to use the loos the way we were told to, but they got blocked. I got the blame at first, because I was the one who was using them when they did. Twice! The foreign skipper, funnily enough, seemed to have all the right pronunciation when he gave me a lecture on how I must be using too much toilet paper and how it just had to stop. But when no one on the boat could unblock the loo it had seemed I'd blocked, someone from the organisation that owned the boats came in, and they spent over five hours unblocking it!

"They said it wasn't just one person who'd blocked it, but that the pipe the waste was flushed down had got narrower and narrower over time, because people had put bleach down it to clean it and also not pumped wee out of it properly, and both those things were bad because when bleach and wee mixed with seawater, it made minerals that went solid and stuck in the pipe so it got narrower and narrower till there just wasn't enough room for waste to go down it. So it turned out not to be my fault after all that it got blocked. They had to take the whole pipe out."

The tutor supposed she really ought to be bringing the class to order and giving her lecture, since that was what she was paid to be doing, so she said, "This is interesting stuff, but I think I should be starting my lecture now."

But after groans of disappointment from the students, she decided to let them carry on for a little while longer.

The student who'd been talking about the sailing trip, an extrovert who had fewer inhibitions than average when it came to discussing topics that some people might be embarrassed to talk about, continued, "Anyway, after they got the loo unblocked, they decided that to be on the safe side, it would be best if we didn't use toilet paper in there at all, just in case it Was toilet paper that blocked it next time. The skipper got these great big bin bags, and they told us that every time any one of us went in there, we had to take one of them to put our toilet paper in, and then put it on a pile of them to be thrown away later. They seemed very big for just a few bits of loo roll, but maybe they thought, 'Well it might not have been their fault the loo got blocked That time, but we know what they're like! They're probably still using way too much paper! We'd better give them a great big bag to use each time in case the blighters use an entire roll each time they go in there!'"

The other students laughed.

The one telling the story continued, "Hardly anyone washed, all the days of the trip, because there just wasn't really room in the tiny loos. But there were showers in there, surprisingly. They were just things that could be attached to the tap, and then the water would come out all over the floor, and a pump could pump it all out. Thankfully it was a mixer tap, so people could just turn it to whatever temperature they wanted. One evening, someone used one, but the pump broke, so there was a load of water all over the floor for ages, literally ankle deep, and one of the crew put some boots outside the loo, and anyone who wanted to use it without getting their feet soaked had to put them on every time they went to the loo, so they could wade around in there and stay dry."

Everyone laughed.

The student talking knew the tutor must have expected only a Short funny story. But he expected the lecture to be a shambles just as the last one was, so he thought he may as well go on for some time. He was enjoying the fact that the other students were finding it entertaining, so he continued,

"Anyway, the loos weren't the only problem. The sleeping cabins were tiny. I had to share one with a teacher. I had to sleep with him in this little double bed thing. He kept me awake every night snoring! Sometimes he sounded like a tractor, and I thought that if the BBC ever lost their tractor sound effects that they use in their radio plays whenever there's a tractor in them, he could visit their studios and go to sleep and they could record him snoring and use that!

"Then at other times he sounded like a cat purring loudly. I wondered whether if he recorded himself snoring and played it to a cat, it would wander around the room trying to find the other cat it would think must be there!

"Then sometimes he'd be a bit quieter, but then he'd sound like an air bed being blown up!

"And it wasn't just his snoring that bothered me; he would sprawl out in his sleep and dig his elbows in my back. Or he'd snuggle up to me as if he thought he was married to me or something.

"And that wasn't the only thing! Great big drips of condensation would drip on us at night. After the first couple of nights we opened the window in the ceiling a bit to try to stop that happening, and hoped it didn't rain!

"Anyway, after a couple of nights of hardly any sleep, I thought I'd try sleeping with my head up the opposite end to the one where the teacher's head was. I didn't hear him snoring so loudly, but in the middle of the night, he rolled over in his sleep and made it so there was hardly any room for me to move. I couldn't bend my knees up! I was uncomfortable in the cramped space, and kicked him gently a bit in the hope he'd turn over in his sleep so I could have more room. I couldn't get comfortable, so I kept moving around. And I pushed my knees against him a little bit when I tried to bend them up.

"But he started waking up. He even swore at me! Not very teacherly behaviour really! I won't use the swear word he used, but he asked me why I kept kicking him in the bum. I told him he'd rolled over so much I couldn't bend my knees up, and he told me to stop complaining and get back to sleep! You know, it was as if there was a new school rule we didn't know about before that says, 'You shall not bend your knees up when you go to sleep on a boat, and if you try, a teacher will be there to discipline you and restrain you so you can't bend them up any more, and if you try you shall be sworn at!'"

The students laughed, and one said with a grin, "Imagine a school rule that said part of a person's punishment was to be sworn at by a teacher!"

The tutor said, "I went on a sailing holiday once, just with my sister. We somehow managed to nearly get in the way of a ferry and had to struggle to get out of the way quick! But other than that, we enjoyed it."

"Your life seems to be full of mishaps!" said one student, grinning.

"Well she's not the only one!" said the student who'd been talking about his sailing trip. "I fell off the pontoon the boat was tied to and went somersaulting into the sea the last night we were there! Well, more like I was knocked off it! We'd all been into the town near where we were moored up, and we bought some food and had a bit of a picnic in a park in the evening. The skipper who talked a lot but a lot of what he said we couldn't understand bought a couple of bottles of wine and drank them there. He refused to give us any, saying we were too young to drink. He offered the teachers some, but when one accepted the offer, he seemed resentful and just poured her a little bit, as if he was only asking out of politeness and really wanted to drink it all himself. He often seemed to drink quite a bit; every day as soon as we finished sailing for the day, he would open a bottle of wine and drink most of it himself.

"Anyway, by the time we went back he was a bit drunk. I was one of the first to get to the boat, and he charged up past us to open the gate onto the boat, which was just a flimsy wire thing, part of the flimsy wire rail around the boat we could hold onto when we were near the edge on there if we wanted a flimsy way to try to stop ourselves falling overboard. When he went past me, he knocked into me. I stumbled sideways a bit and fell in the sea! I'm glad I can swim! Actually I didn't really mind it in there because it was quite warm - or maybe it partly felt like that because I had my clothes and a coat on.

"When I got out, they told me to go and have a shower in one of the loos on the boat. So I did. But I didn't know how to pump the water out, so that loo turned into one of those loos people had to put boots on to go in if they wanted to keep their feet dry while they were wading around in it too. And I was covered in soap when the shower water ran out. They managed to pump more water into the tanks and then I managed to rinse myself off.

"I didn't mind falling in the water myself - I mean in the sea, not in all the water on the floor in the loo that people ended up having to paddle around in. The only thing was, my mobile phone and my watch got ruined! I deliberately didn't have them on me all the time we were sailing, assuming that if I was going to fall in, it would be while we were actually sailing. But I had to fall in at the very time I had them on me! I was annoyed they got ruined."

The tutor asked, "Did the company you went sailing with offer to replace them?"

"No," said the student who'd been talking. "I didn't know they were ruined beyond repair till after I got home. My teachers knew they'd gone in the water, but they didn't say anything about seeing if the company would replace them.

"Still, I learned a lesson, and that's that if I ever go on such a trip again, - not that it's at all likely! - but if I do, I won't take things like that out with me unless I'm sure I'm going to use them! Mind you, part of the reason I did was because I wanted to protect them from the damp that was all around my cabin from the condensation, and from our clothes that had got a bit wet when it rained and we hadn't quite managed to get them dry. Maybe I could have wrapped my things in something as dry as I could find and left them there though."

One student joked, "Ah yes, but just think! If you'd left them on the boat and it had started to sink, those 'Bombs' might have gone off, and then they'd have been ruined anyway!"

The students laughed.

Then another one grinned and said, "What did the foreign skipper say about all the water on the loo floors? 'Don't worry about the water; we've got bombs in the loos we can get rid of it with.' You'd think, 'Blowing them up is a bit of a drastic way to clear out the water', when really he'd just have meant there were pumps in there it could be cleared out with."

The students laughed again.

Then the one who'd been talking about his sailing trip said, "Talking of doing damage, actually it's strange: I didn't hurt myself when I fell in the sea, but a few days after I came back from the holiday, I hurt myself from just lying in bed! I think I must have been lying on a bed spring that was poking out of my mattress all night. I sat up one morning and something in my chest made a cracking noise and started hurting. I think I pulled a muscle or tore a bit of cartilage somehow. It took a few weeks to get better. I slept in a chair for a few days till I was over the worst of it! It didn't hurt most of the time when I was sitting still when I first hurt it, but it did when I used it a lot, and it really hurt when I sneezed! I suppose it must have been putting some kind of pressure on it."

One student advised, "If you put your tongue on the roof of your mouth, or squeeze your nose, or put your finger over the holes in your nostrils when you feel as if you're about to sneeze, the urge goes away. It might not work all the time, but I think a lot of the time it does."

"That's interesting. I'll try that," said the student who'd had the pulled muscle or torn cartilage. "I don't know if falling off the pontoon into the sea or trying to get out when I did that could have weakened or jolted it a bit somehow and that's why it seemed to get damaged so easily later. I wouldn't have thought it would happen so easily at my age though. Maybe I'm getting old!"

"What, at 18? ... Actually I suppose you must have been even younger then!" said one student with a chuckle. "Oh dear, I really hope people don't start falling to bits with age as young as this!"

One student joked, "Maybe some seawater seeped through the pores in your skin and corroded your insides a bit."

The students giggled, and the one who'd had the injury said with a chuckle, "Don't be daft!"

Then one said, "I suppose it's lucky in a way that you were the only one that skipper knocked into the sea; imagine if he'd come charging up and bashed into everyone as he went along, knocking everyone in one by one."

There was more laughter.

The Tutor Starts Talking About Getting Around to Teaching Them, And They Challenge Her About Whether She'll Do a Good Job, and End Up Joking

The tutor was quite enjoying listening to the students talk, and she started feeling less despondent about her own problems with misunderstandings after hearing about the skipper on the sailing trip. But she was a bit concerned that for the second time in a row, she seemed to be losing control of the class. She reflected that yet another life lesson she'd just learned was that if a teacher wants respect from a class, it's probably best not to tell them all you hate them and discuss your shortcomings immediately you introduce yourself to them. She said,

"It's interesting hearing what you've got to say, but since I came here to teach you, I suppose I'd better get on with it."

"Oh you don't have to!" said one student with a grin. Then he asked, "Since you were saying last time you decided you were no good at counselling, what made you think you'd be good at teaching other people how to do counselling and that kind of thing?"

The tutor said, "Well, the advantage of teaching is that You can set the agenda ... I mean I can set it. So I expect to be able to do a better job at this. I can think through what to say before I have to say it. People aren't going to keep coming up with unexpected things I have to deal with without being able to think about it much. I can plan beforehand what I'm going to say, and make sure I've memorised everything I want to talk about, and then make sure we stick to the topic."

So far, she hadn't been any good at keeping to the topic of what she was supposed to be lecturing them about, so how good she was going to be in the future was anyone's guess.

One student said, "It might not be as straightforward as you think though, just as counselling wasn't. I mean, for example, we have discussion groups where we can bring up anything we like, even if You choose what the lesson starts off as being about. What would you say if one of us asked you out of the blue a question like, 'If a person with body dysmorphic disorder was out in a thunder storm, would they be more likely to want to rush home like most people, or would they want to stay out there hoping the part of their body they hated would be struck by lightning and got rid of?'"

The tutor said thoughtfully, "Well, apart from the fact that I imagine they'd be just as keen to get to shelter as anyone else, because if they got struck by lightning, they'd know the Whole of them would probably be toast, if you asked me a question I didn't know the answer to, I'd tell you to go and look it up, and you'd probably think I was telling you to do that as some kind of initiative test, not realising it was because I didn't know the answer. So I don't suppose there would be a problem."

She began to grin. But one student said with a chuckle, "You're too honest for your own good! Now we'll know that if you ask us to go and look something up, it's probably because you don't know the answer!"

Another one asked the tutor, "Have you ever taught psychology before?"

She said she hadn't, and the student said, "I think you ought to know that even if a person can do a thing well, that doesn't mean they're going to be good at teaching it, because to teach it, people have to be good at explaining things, not just doing them.

"My sister went on a course, and the tutor had done some impressive things in the industry he was teaching about, but he wasn't very good at teaching about it! One thing that annoyed her was that whenever she asked him a question, he would say, 'What do you think?' Well, she said she could have come up with forty possibilities as to what the answer was, sitting on her bed thinking about it all day! But she thought, 'What would be the point of that?! What I want to know is the actual Answer!'

"And he did other things that annoyed her."

The tutor looked discouraged and said, "Well I'll try my best."

Another student said, "Mind you, even when someone's got a teaching qualification, they can still be rubbish at teaching! There were a few teachers like that at my school, as well as ones who got remembered for all the wrong reasons!

"I remember one at my primary school who annoyed me once, because we always had a break in the afternoon between lessons and we were allowed to eat sweets in it, but one day I was busy doing something and I didn't have time to eat my sweets till near the end. So just as her lesson was starting I shoved three in my mouth at once, hoping I'd finish them before she came in. But she walked in not long after I'd started them. She saw me chewing and asked me what I was eating. When I told her, she told me to spit them in the bin. Just why she thought it was best that I did that, I don't know! And anyway, I'd always been told spitting was bad manners! But I obediently spat them in the bin, feeling annoyed. Doing that certainly didn't help me concentrate on her lesson more! And actually about the only thing I remember about her lessons now was the time she made me spit my sweets in the bin!

"She died not long ago, and there was a notice in a letter we were all sent asking us to send in our memories of her, because they were going to have some kind of commemoration service. The only thing I could remember about her was the time she made me spit my sweets in the bin, but I thought she probably wouldn't appreciate being remembered for that, so I decided it might be best not to write in and tell them that memory! I wonder how she'd feel knowing that was the only thing I remember her for!"

One student said with a grin, "There you go, Miss Ann Thrope. Don't ever stop us eating in your lectures, will you!"

Another one chuckled and joked, "Yeah! How about you let us all eat in your classes! We could bring burgers and chips and chocolate and things in here and have feasts while you're talking to us!"

The tutor said, "I expect it's been decreed from on high that people aren't allowed to eat in lectures."

One student joked, "What do you mean 'from on high'? You mean God's commanded it? Do you think maybe one day Jesus stood up and said to the crowds, 'Thou shalt not eat in lecture theatres!'"

Another student laughed and said, "Somehow I don't think they had lecture theatres in those days!"

Another one joked, "They might have done. Maybe Jesus spoke in lecture theatres all the time, and we've just misunderstood what the Bible's saying about where he was. You know, like sometimes it says he was standing on the Mount of Olives; well maybe the Mount of Olives wasn't a mountain but a pretty decoration made of dried olives, mounted on an exquisitely-designed velvet pedestal in a lecture theatre, and Jesus went and stood on it to do his talks one day, the vandal!"

They laughed.

It was anyone's guess whether the lecture they were supposed to be having would actually take place.

The Tutor Finally Gives As Much of the Lecture As There's Time For, About Coping With People With Dementia Who Get Aggressive, and Reasons Why They Do

Then the tutor said, "Come on, you might be an entertaining group of students, but I suppose I'd better get on and do the lecture I came here to give you!"

One student said, "Oh there's no real need! You could give it next week instead!"

The tutor said, "Yes, but knowing what my memory's like, I'll have forgotten it all by then!"

They laughed. Then she said, "OK, we'd better at least get a Bit of work done! The only thing is, I've only got time to give you Half the lecture I was going to give you now. Shall I give you the first or the second half?"

She began to grin as she said that.

A few students joked, "Give us the second half."

She joked back, "OK, here goes: ... only wearing their pyjamas under their coat, so when they take their coat off in the restaurant, not realising anything's wrong, the relative who's taken them out will likely be embarrassed unless they ... No, actually, I think my lecture might make more sense if I started it from the beginning, and just told you as much as I've got time for at the moment."

But then she looked at the time and thought she might not even have time to give them half the lecture. So she decided to just give them the most interesting bits.

She told them she was going to give them a mini course on old people's psychology, and that she was going to start by telling them about how psychology could help people look after others with dementia. She finally got down to some serious lecturing. Some of the bit of lecture she gave them went:

"Some people with dementia start getting aggressive. Sometimes it's at least partly because the part of their brain that controls impulses to do things stops working, so they start doing what they feel like doing no matter what. But with a lot of people it can often be because as they find it more and more difficult to work out what's going on around them, they can be startled more easily, and aggression's a defence mechanism against what they mistake for a threat. Also it can be the only way they have left of coping with difficulties after their ability to voice their opinion and argue diminishes a lot. I'll give you some examples, from a book you'll probably find in the student bookshop if you look. I've listed it at the top in the handouts I'll give you. You might find some of what I say upsetting, but hopefully you'll get over it:

"Sometimes people with dementia get given anti-psychotic medication because their behaviour seems to be totally nuts and threatening, when actually a bit of psychology could prevent it getting to the stage where it seems to be getting out of hand. One thing that's quite common is for that to happen in nursing homes after arguments that shouldn't be happening happen.

"An example of the kind of thing that can happen is that a person with dementia might comment one morning to no one in particular that she'd like to see her mother. A nursing assistant might tell her sympathetically that her mother's been dead for a long time, and the old woman might say she can't be dead because she saw her earlier. The nursing assistant might keep trying to reason with her, to persuade her that her mother is dead, because they might have been taught that the healthy thing for nursing staff to do is to correct the mistakes the people in their care make so as to keep them grounded in the real world, trying to keep their memories as accurate as possible while they can.

"But for people whose brains are fast packing up, it's more important to help them to Enjoy life while they can. Trying to reason with them and tell them things they won't want to hear will likely only distress them.

"So the person with dementia will likely just get more agitated the more the nursing assistant tries to persuade her her mother's dead, getting all the more upset because she'll think they're just being mean and nasty and telling her vicious lies. In times gone by, she might have given them a tongue-lashing for it, but if she's losing the ability to put sentences together, aggression might be the only way she has of trying to stop things she doesn't like from happening, so she might slap the nursing assistant. The nursing assistant might call for help, and the old person might be put in uncomfortable restraints, tied to a chair for hours and given anti-psychotic medication.

"But the situation could have been dealt with in a way that kept things calm. All that effort trying to make the person come to terms with reality would likely be a waste of time anyway, because they'll likely have forgotten the whole conversation soon.

"What can resolve the situation far more happily is gently distracting the person. For instance, if a woman said it would be nice to see her mother, the nursing assistant could say, 'Tell me about her.' They could ask questions about her that encourage the person with dementia to reminisce. Then the nursing assistant could relate something she says to something that's going on in the home. For example, if it's just before breakfast, they could ask the person with dementia what her favourite meals were that her mother used to cook when she was growing up. When the person talks about it, the nursing assistant could say that sounds yummy, saying it's making them hungry. Then they could ask if the old person's hungry too, and if she says yes, suggest they go for breakfast. They could sit her down next to a friend of hers there if possible, and before long, she'll likely be chatting happily to her, having forgotten all about her wish to see her mother.

"That kind of approach takes care of the emotion of loneliness and need for attention that might have made the old woman start longing to see her mother in the first place, instead of thinking of the unreasonableness of the request as the all-important thing and focusing on that.

"Another reason people with dementia can get aggressive is that as their sight and hearing begin to go, which will partly be because the deteriorating brain can scramble the signals it gets from the eyes and ears a bit, they can mistake things for other things.

"For example, a woman with a husband who's got dementia might hear a crash and a yell from the other room and discover her husband's just picked up a stick, smashed a lamp and seems to be shouting abuse at it. While again, this behaviour might seem totally nuts, what might have happened is that the man saw the shadow from a tree blowing in the wind crossing the window and mistook it for an intruder trying to get in, and picked up a stick and aimed it as best as he could at where he thought the intruder was.

"If the wife asks the husband what the matter is and he says an intruder was trying to get in, when actually there can't have been one because the window's shut, and the wife guesses what must have really happened, then rather than trying to convince the upset husband he's wrong, it can be best to reassure him by saying the intruder must have run off, and then to distract him by involving him in something else, and then to buy thick curtains and always draw them at sunset so shadows can't be seen through the window any more.

"Another reason people with dementia can get aggressive is if they're startled and don't know what's going on; so moving slowly around them and explaining what's happening, especially if you get close or touch them, can cut down the risks of that happening.

"For example, there was a helper who came in to cook dinner for a woman with dementia. She cooked her some warm soup and brought it into the other room to give her. But noticing she was enjoying herself looking through the window at the birds outside, it seemed a pity to disturb her, so she crept up quietly behind her and put the soup on the table in front of her without saying a word.

"But the woman with dementia was startled by that, and because her powers of reasoning were dying so she couldn't just work out what had really happened, she immediately assumed she must be under threat, jumped up, picked up the soup and threw it in the helper's face, ordering her out of the house and saying she'd better go quick or she'd call the police.

"The helper went out, sat in her car for a few minutes, wiped her face, took her soup-splashed jumper off, and then went back to the house. She knocked gently on the back door, and when the woman opened it, smiled and said, 'Hello, I'm Carolyn. I've come to do some chores for you. Where do I begin?'

"The woman with dementia welcomed her and suggested they had a cup of tea together.

"Sometimes it isn't easy to work out what's making a person with dementia aggressive, but it can help to write down everything that was happening just before they did something aggressive each time, including what was going on outside, whether there were any unusual smells or noises, and so on. Then people can look back over what they wrote later and try to work out patterns. For instance, it might turn out that it happens a lot when someone turns the television on loudly, or when it gets darker so it's more difficult to see, or when the house is unusually busy or something. Working out what leads to the behaviour can mean there's an opportunity to do something about it, for instance going with the person into another room when the one they're normally in is busier than usual because it's being tidied in preparation for visitors, and so on.

"There was a man whose wife had dementia, and one day he had visitors, and she was with them while he went into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. Suddenly she got up, went over to the visitor sitting opposite her, and shoved her repeatedly on the forehead shouting, 'Stop it! Stop it!'

"The husband came in and led his wife into another room. He apologised to the visitors and they left.

"Before he knew much about dementia, he would have assumed the disease was making her hallucinate that the visitor was doing something bad. But instead, he sat where his wife had been sitting to try to work out what had upset her, and discovered the sun was shining directly in his eyes, so it must have been shining right into hers, coming from where the visitor had been sitting, and she must have been trying to beat the unpleasant sensation away in the best way she knew how.

"He closed the curtains, and both he and his wife started to feel calmer.

"If a person with dementia is already worked up, it's often best to speak to them as calmly as possible, and slowly, in short simple sentences, to help them take in what's being said."

The tutor talked on for a while, and then had to stop because it was time for the next lecture. The students thought what she had to say was interesting, and thought it might have been better if they'd kept quiet before and let her give the full lecture. But she said it was allright, because she could tell them the rest of what she'd been going to say another time.

She met Becky and a few other students as they were going out the door. One of them looked worried and said to her, "It's horrible to think that some of us might be just like the people you described in your lecture one day! Old age might creep up on us more quickly than we think!"

Becky said, "It's my birthday in a few weeks."

Miss Ann Thrope laughed and said to her, "Somehow I don't think old age will creep up on You that soon! And by the time it does, they might have found a cure for dementia, for all you know. So try not to have nightmares."

One student asked her, "Talking of nightmares, are you going to give us any lectures about dream interpretation?"

Miss Ann Thrope said, "No. Psychologists don't really know all that much about that, and the deeper you delve into it, the more likely you are to come across quackery."

"So it's hard to avoid quacks then?" said the student who'd asked about it. "Hey, I wonder if ducks ever dream, and I wonder if other animals do."

"Wow, just think!" said another student with a grin. "If you woke up one morning and discovered you'd been sharing your bed with a spider, you might think, 'Oh yuck!' and want to kill it, but it might have just been innocently dreaming about making webs all over you or something!"

They chuckled.

The next time Miss Ann Thrope came to do a lecture, she didn't complain about all kinds of irrelevant things for ages like she had the first time she came in, but instead got straight down to business ... almost. Before she started the lecture, she just said, "I'm going to give you another lecture in my series about psychology in old age; but I don't want you to feel too depressed at the prospect, since I think what I said depressed some of you a bit last time, so here are a few funny quotes I found on the Internet about old age:

"Someone said, 'Time may be a great healer, but it's a lousy beautician!' And someone else said, 'The older I grow the more I distrust the familiar doctrine that old age brings wisdom!' Someone else said, 'You can live to be a hundred if you give up all the things that make you Want to live to be a hundred!' And another person said, 'All diseases run into one - old age.'"

The students smiled.

Over the next couple of months, it turned out that the tutor gave quite a few interesting lectures, so they decided she was good at teaching after all. And she started enjoying their company. One day, she told them to stop calling her Miss Ann Thrope, saying she was getting to like people more since she'd met them.