Cormack Kirby

No surprise, surely, to note that this thread was begun by a white oak which is a compelling amalgam of the simple, pure and natural with the gothic dreamy and enchanting. Do we become like our names?

You should spend some time in the company of my wife, Sally, who hails from Belfast, where jokes and swift repartee are part and parcel of everyday life and common to both sexes. I can't keep up with her! My sister-in-law (from Cork) also has a great sense of humour - and when the two of them get together... Doesn't Irish English just ooze humour anyway? I've just finished watching extracts from Victoria Woods' sketches in the top five comedians series on TV. She makes me laugh a lot, and I reckon she stands a good chance of winning. Dawn French is up there with her too. Maybe it's a cultural or regional thing. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Incidentally, that wasn't a criticism of women. Repartee and humour are very different from jokes. The former are much more closely linked to wit and have to be linked by coherence to the topic thread whereas jokes are pre-rehearsed routines which are hard to respond to. I'm sure we all know the stress of waiting for a joke to end & wondering if we will be able to fashion an appropriate response whereas repartee and even anecdotes creat a warmth in conversation and advance relationships. God save us from jokes and let's have more humour.

Girls' relationships would be destroyed by the normal jockeying for attention that boys delight in. The cruellest mockery is brushed aside instantly and the greatest adulation is accorded to the lad who can make the others laugh. If he fails, it's instant derision. No wonder so few women tell jokes

Teachit is great but you do need to join as, occasionally, the materials contain significant errors you'll have to edit out yourself. A handout on grammar for KS3 has the sentence, "Britney goes to the shop" and underlines 'shop' as being the object and follows it with a number of sentences with intransitive verbs where, presumably, the adverbials are supposed to be underlined and called objects. Publishers would be unlikely to make those errors so you do have to be extra careful.

I'm Cormack Kirby and am Head of English and of Post 16 Education (IB Diploma Coordinator) at the International School of Toulouse. I was previously Head of English at Northlands school in Buenos Aires and before that Head of Humanities at Yeovil College in Somerset, UK. I have also taught in Devon and Harrow in the UK.

Often the books that moved you as an adolescent can seem as dated or embarrassing as the clothes you so proudly wore at the same time but, for me, the book I read and then instantly re-read and have since returned to still gives pleasure and insight. It's Point Counterpoint by Aldous Huxley and it's what I thought University would be like. It was, in part, but the intensity of the search for truth, meaning and pleasure in life of the characters in the text has never been quite equalled in reality. Then I found out the novel was a roman a clef so it opened up for me the works of all the real-life counterparts of the fictional characters. And I never looked back.