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1 July 2022, 14:54
Music teacher's baby stops crying when he plays cello
The amazing story behind one of the most widely-shared classical music memes, and the teacher that taught us all a lesson.
A few years ago, a tweet from a guy called Doug Mataconis shot around the world with 13,000 retweets, bringing laughter to many.
The tweet featured an exam question, with what seems appears to be, shall we say, a somewhat fundamental misunderstanding of how Beethoven’s music is made (ie. more players ≠ a quicker performance).
That's not how this works. That's not how any of this works. pic.twitter.com/EdSSJInqEp
— Doug Mataconis (@dmataconis) October 9, 2017
A lot of people enjoyed the ridiculousness of the exam question, poking a little fun at the clearly befuddled teacher who wrote it.
Read more: 27 classical music memes that will completely define your life
**gasps**
The viral tweet was spotted by the teacher who made the question. Claire Longmoor, a maths teacher in Nottingham, replied to Doug’s tweet, saying she had written the question for her class back in 2007. She then included the whole worksheet.
And note the little line at the top of the paper.
I wrote this!! How did you get this??? I am a maths teacher in Nottingham UK. Wrote this 10 years ago. Here is the original whole worksheet pic.twitter.com/jYX55GSBKz
— Claire Longmoor #FBPE #remain (@LongmoorClaire) October 11, 2017
“Beware there is one trick question!”
Well, it looks that Ms Longmoor caught out a lot of us.
Teachers are indeed wonderful, remarkable and will always come out on top in the end.