Teacher QMs

If you saw my review of Monday’s UC match between the OU and UEA, you might have read my comparison of Jeremy Paxman to Amol Rajan, both of whom I described as two contrasting types of schoolteacher. This was tongue in cheek. Apart from anything else, the two endeavours of teaching and presenting a quiz are pretty different in my experience.

In some way’s being QM down the club has been hard, inasmuch as I have had to fight to control myself over the teacher’s instincts. When you’re a teacher you learn pretty soon in your career that no matter how carefully and clearly you explain something, somebody in the class is not going to understand it and is going to ask you a question you’ve just answered. That even happens when all of the kids have been listening and it’s far worse when some of them haven’t. So you learn that it’s important to have them be quiet and listen. So whenever I ask a question in the club, and I can see the teams still talking to each other while I’m asking it, I have to fight my instincts to tell them off and order them to be quiet. And when someone asks me to repeat a question, I have to bite my tongue to stop myself saying – you should’ve been listening to me, or some such. It’s the teacher in me which makes me sometimes burble on about why a particular answer is wrong, and why my answer is right. Mind you, in my eyes that’s better than saying my answer’s correct because I’m the question master and the question master is always right.

I’ve written about this on more than one occasion in the past, but I don’t think school teachers automatically make good quizzers. It’s 15 years since the last schoolteacher won a series of Mastermind (modesty forbids).