Saturday, November 14, 2009

Last period notices

So the admin assistant of the year level I was teaching comes into my lesson this afternoon. No problem there. She's lovely and the kids are little-kid-watching-blair-witch scared of this lady. A great lady to have on side and supportive of you. But I digress.

She came into the room with a pile of red leaflets for me to give out as they were leaving. I kid you not - these were blood red pieces of paper, with HEAD LICE WARNING emblazoned directly over the top of the page in Times New Roman in size 30!

There is no scarier font than Times New Roman that big. It's scary at size 12. I really don't know why I tolerate it as the horrid default for this blog - I never allow the devil of fonts to be a scourge on my documents. All serif fonts give me the heebie jeebies (official diagnosis - I'm not making the term up) and you can give me the information that one of my sweeties has intestinal parasites and therefore cannot sit still while I'm eating - that's fine... in fact it gives me a reason why the child just will not sit still for more than 30 seconds - but use a serif font on your powerpoint and I will be wanting to go all Mr Miyagi on yo' ass. And, no, not a nice Miyagi-san.


My new favourite for my own powerpoints is Comic Sans. I find that they will read a 'fancy' font more willingly and CS is one that both my computer at home and the school has. I also don't mind Papyrus or Harlow, or even Minya Nouvelle (which contrary to the above is a serif font). But they're not interchangeable and I end up with 2 hours of work transferred into Arial. Arial??? Why would I want to write in that? Not a serif, so granted is much nicer than Times (what newspaper is so egotistical to have called a font after themselves anyway?) but so predictable. Verdana and Tahoma have almost joined Arial is perfect respectability. Like a Stepford Wife.

Anyway, back to the story. I got these ruby red leaflets to hand to my horrors and that line just jumped out at me (how could it not?) So now I've got 45 minutes to teach this lot and I'm circumspectly looking at their heads - who's got it? Swine flu, meh, whatever. 48 hour bug that everyone has at the moment, I laugh at you. Head lice? Holy no!

I've been itching psychosomatically for hours.

I blame the font.

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