During my year nine class a boy tried to tell a joke: 'How do you make a Jew scream? Put him in an oven.' I dread to think where he got that from. Besides even if you are anti-Semitic it doesn't really work, if you put most people in an oven I imagine they'd scream. It's a bit like saying 'How do you kill a Scandanavian? Shoot him in the head.' It's kind of stating the obvious.

I challenged him on it and asked if he actually understood the 'joke'. He didn't so my SATs revision lesson suddenly became a discussion about the Holocaust. I explained about the Nazi's wanting an Aryan race, about the gas chambers and about concentration camps. They had good questions too, like: 'how did Hitler know who was a Jew?' which had me a little puzzled as my own knowledge ran a little short.

I wish I could get them that interested in discussing triangles. At the end the boy said to me: 'but what have ovens got to do with it?'