Tilly the Cat’s Christmas Lesson

Written By: - Date published: 3:30 pm, December 19th, 2009 - 3 comments
Categories: education - Tags:

Not related to anything in particular, Peter Giddens has written a sweet little Christmas story that I thought it would be fun to share:

Tilly the Cat’s Christmas Lesson . . .

Tilly was a very bossy cat. She was in charge of the whole house, or so she thought. The people in the house thought they were in charge because they had all the money and they were taller. And there were mice in the house too, running, squeaking, and eating everything they could get their dirty little claws on. They were young and foolish and smelly.

And there were rats of all shapes, sizes and colours (but not beige because they had an agreement about that). The rats were the clever ones. The rats were so clever they trained the mice.

One day Tilly did a very clever thing for a cat. She read a book. To be fair it wasn’t a very difficult book like Great Expectations or How to Run a Student-centred Education System. Tilly liked her book so much she wanted to read it to her friends but she didn’t have any so she decided to read it to the rats.

The rats gathered around with their cheeky grins and their sneaky glances and Tilly began to read. The book was about an animal called Delly the Llama who was a very content animal even though he had almost nothing.

As Tilly read enthusiastically the rats sniggered and poked each other with their elbows and smirked and some, the country-rats from the garden, even snorted in an agricultural way. And when Tilly finished, she closed the book and rested her paws in the awfully polite way that she’d been trained to by the people.

‘You rats should stop asking for more things and be happy with what you have.’

‘Silly Tilly,’ shouted one of the rats, ‘What do you think we have now? Beds of goose feathers and paté de fois gras and business-class trips to Brussels? And do you really think that we think more stuff will make us happy. Gee, if we thought that we’d take our BComs and go work for the National Bank, or we’d take our teaching diplomas and go work for very high paying schools in Zurich or Moscow or New York or Sao Paulo. And Tilly, who do you think taught Delly the Llama about contentedness?’

So the rats tickled Tilly until she peed on the people’s carpet and made it smell bad. The people came and shouted and then kicked her outside into the muddy garden, which she didn’t like at all. The people looked at the rats and thought about throwing them out too but they needed the rats to keep all the mice in order.

‘Silly Tilly,’ sniggered all the rats as they prepared for their Christmas holiday.

— Peter Giddens

In other news, 86% of Principals responding to a survey have “serious misgivings” about the national standards policy…

3 comments on “Tilly the Cat’s Christmas Lesson ”

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  1. Deus ex Machina 1
    19 December 2009 at 4:30 pm

    Sorry, too sophisticated for me but will probably have deep meaning for all the BComs out there.

    Didn’t seem particularly relevant to Christmas, either.

  2. gitmo 2
    19 December 2009 at 4:37 pm

    Very good here’s some more of his work –

    They should all get down off their high horses, the Hone bashers I mean.

    I have a lot of sympathy for the kids who skip school. I missed one or two days myself back in the 70s. It was a boredom thing. No really how many supply and demand graphs and mitochondria and great expectations should a kid have to take?

    I’ve also been to Brussels, almost. I walked some of the way from the train station into the city centre. It was overwhelming dull and dark and grim and not a Brussel Sprout Museum in sight. I skipped back to the train station and carried on through Wilfred Owen country to Luxembourg which proved far more interesting, cheerful and delicious. So I understand Hone throwing a sickie.

    And Hone’s right about Paris too. It’s a very cool city. The Louvre of course with Lady Liberty leading the way, the river into which one can briefly step and so be called temporarily insane, les patisseries, more than a few vin rouges of course, tarte au citron, the Eiffel Tower And if the rain decides to heave down you can shelter in L’Arc de Triomphe at the top of that Champ’s Street, which is pretty bon.

    I’ve not been to Tasmania but if I was ever there I think a trip to Darwin would be definitely on the cards. It’d be a ‘while I was in the neighbourhood I thought I’d drop in for a cultural chinwag’ sort of a thing.

    But here’s the thing wasn’t he supposed to be at work? Throwing a sickie when you’re a kid and the class is doing yet another turgid Wilfred Own is one thing. But skipping off from representing all NZers to the EU that’s rather another thing. And lying to your boss about it. That’s almost as bad as lying to your grandmother.

    I know it’s difficult to compare Hone’s work trip to Tasmania and his trip to Brussels with my recent work trip to the basement of the Thames Hospital for a Economics thing. He wasn’t chauffeur driven for a start. And he probably didn’t have paint peeling from the walls in an artistic sort of way.

    My work trip to the basement of the Thames Hospital was paid for by just the one taxpayer me; while his trip was paid for by all taxpayers. The other difference was that I did the right thing and stayed, while he did the wrong thing things actually skipped off, lied about it, and then used very crude language at the people who dared to challenge him about it.

    Ironic really. Paris. Marie Antoinette. Let them eat cake. The revolution. Out with royalty and in with democracy. Hone.

    — Peter Giddens

  3. Swampy 3
    19 December 2009 at 8:36 pm

    The union’s bias is well known, the survey should be done by an outside organisation.

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