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At the chalkface: Are you mediocre?

Teaching staff
Good will be just good which will be the average, or less, which will not be good enough because average will no longer be good enough, and the above average will therefore become average, which isn’t good enough...

Don’t we all sometimes feel a bit “mediocre”? With the Not Top 8th year on a wet Thursday afternoon?

What a creepily vague word! What exactly does it mean? Time for a little pedantry. Pay attention at the back.

It’s from the Middle French “médiocre” or the Latin “mediocris” meaning “ordinary, mean, average, inferior” – or literally “half-way up a mountain”, from “medius”, “middle” and “ocris”, “jagged mountain” (cognate with Greek “okris”).

Okay? Is that you? An old goat stuck half-way up a mountain? Not much cop? Average? Mean? Lacklustre? What a dispiriting appellation! Could it sometimes describe your chums sunk over there on staffroom sofas, burned-out, battered foot soldiers, clapped-out idealists?

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