Humanising Language Teaching
Year 1; Issue 3; May 1999

This sociologist was walking in the city park one day, when she saw a gleam in the bushes. "What is this old lamp?" she wondered. She rubbed it and the Spirit whirled into her presence:

"I can give you riches, men, academic results, fame... Ask and you will receive."

The sociologist could not believe her luck... At last, after all these years... And then the Spirit said:

"But for everything I give you I will give each of your colleagues double".

The woman's face contorted in a grimace of academic pain.

She thought for a long while and then said:

"I want blindness in one eye!"

A couple of philosophers were pondering the above equation and decided they needed help in finding an elegant solution to it.

First they turned to a mathematician who said:

"It's simple, 2+2=4 and there is nothing more to be said"

The answer disappointed them so they rang up a statistician who explained that the equation had kept him awake at night for years:

"The most probable answer lies between 3.75 and 4.25, but will depend on a whole raft of variables"

To try and find some common ground between the mathematician and the statistician they approached a physicist:

"What does two plus two equal? Well, for all practical purposes it is safe to say that the answer is 3.9999999999 recurring".

The two philosophers did not know where to turn next. After some discussion they decided to choose someone from a young discipline and they opted for sociology.

When they got to the sociologist's office he said:

"Come in and sit down…. This is really something we need to discuss!"