The teachers were useful there. Bands of them wandered through the mountains, along with the tinkers, portable blacksmiths, miracle medicine men, cloth pedlars, fortune-tellers and all the other travellers who sold things people didn’t need every day but occasionally found useful.
They went from village to village delivering short lessons on many subjects. They kept apart from the other travellers, and were quite mysterious in their ragged robes and strange square hats. They used long words, like ‘corrugated iron’. They lived rough lives, surviving on what food they could earn from giving lessons to anyone who would listen. When no one would listen, they lived on baked hedgehog. They went to sleep under the stars, which the maths teachers would count, the astronomy teachers would measure and the literature teachers would name. The geography teachers got lost in the woods and fell into bear traps.
People were usually quite pleased to see them. They taught children enough to shut them up, which was the main thing after all. But they always had to be driven out of the villages by nightfall in case they stole chickens.
Today the brightly coloured little booths and tents were pitched in a field just outside the village. Behind them small square areas had been fenced off with high canvas walls and were patrolled by apprentice teachers looking for anyone trying to overhear Education without paying. The first tent Tiffany saw had a sign which said:
Jograffy!
Jograffy!
Jograffy!
For today only: all major land masses and oceans
PLUS everything you need to know about glassiers!
One penny or All Major Vejtables Acsepted!
Tiffany had read enough to know that, while he might be a whiz at major land masses, this particular teacher could have done with some help from the man running the stall next door:
The Wonders of Punctuation and Spelling
1 – Absolute Certainty about the Comma
2 – I before E Completely Sorted Out
3 – The Mystery of the Semi-Colon Revealed
4 – See the Ampersand (Small extra charge)
5 – Fun with Brackets
Will accept vegetables, eggs and clean used clothing
She found what she was looking for at a booth hung with pictures of animals including, she was pleased to see, a camel.
The sign said:
Useful Creatures. Today: Our Friend the Hedgehog.
From Terry Pratchett's Wee Free Men
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