NY was thinking very hard :
(*) One of the "masters" (teachers) at school had been a boy there 15 years
earlier and he had a foot in both camps when it came to allegiance, so he
told us how "when I were a lad" they used to all slide their desks-and-seats
towards the front, in unison, whenever the teacher's back was turned. They
did it so gradually that like the legendary "boiling frogs" experiment, the
master didn't notice what was happening, The goal was to have the master
penned into a corner by the end of the lesson :-)

:')