Whilst browsing through the racks of a certain low-budget card shop today, I noticed something I have so far been ignorant of - greeting cards for teaching assistants.
Yes, you read that right.
Whilst I can just about live with the cacophony of choices that the greeting cards industry forces upon us, for me this is a bridge too far. Cards for teachers are bad enough (what's wrong with just saying "thank you"?), but do we really need to express our gratitude for teaching assistants in this way too? And come to think of it, why do we even need teaching assistants?
I did most of my schooling in the Eighties, with classes of over 40 kids, all presided over by one person. This person was called Teacher. Are classrooms so bad now that they need tag-team learning? Are students so unruly that authority figures have to go in two by two, like a scholastic Noah's Ark?
What's next? Thank-you cards for paperboys? Get-well-soon cards for lollipop ladies who get mown down by single mothers on the school run?
Here's an idea: let's just have cards for greeting card shop assistants, and cut out the middleman. They can give them to each other whilst they're stacking them on the shelves and save the rest us of a lot of time and money.
