Mailbag #160
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I'm a high school teacher. Like many of us who perform, I find myself in this sort of public facing role, where magic can come up more than it probably should. (Resisting the urge to make a Karmilovich joke). I teach students as young as grade 8 and as high as grade 12. It's tricky to find a presentational style to bridge this gap while also maintaining professionalism and building a sense of "teacher lore".
It helps to have a sense of "lore" around you as a teacher, especially in a private school setting. "Lore" here means a mixture of stories, personal details, and inside jokes that students gradually discover over a longer period of time.
I've found a Jerxy style Universal Presentation for teachers that I've been using for the past year or so:
You tell your students, offhandedly, at a random point in the school year, "I'm going to Magic School". It's a night school for people who want to work on their magic, but it's expensive and you commute really far for it. You do it after hours.
The name of the fictional magic school weirdly aligns with the actual school you work at, but you don't draw too much attention to this. So if your school is called, for a made up example, the Willard P. Jameson School (WPJ), here's the bit. At night you are attending the "Wizards, Psychics, and Jugglers" (WPJ) school. I've found this is juuust enough of a wink that the older students will get it and the younger students might not. And if they do, cool, it's a bit. :)
Some bullets about what this provides:
- This is the perfect excuse to try things that are untested without hurting that precious teacher aura... "hey my coins teacher needs me to do 3 variations on this coin trick and I wanna test variation two, do you have a second? Thanks so much".
- It also gives you license to mix real magic terminology with absolute bullshit. I try to make some of it plausible or real and some of it complete nonsense. "Diagonal Palm Shift" sounds like made up bullshit already, which is nice... but now you can invent whole new moves. "I need to work on my 'lefty ghost recurrence move' can you help?"
- I supplement this with posts on my instagram, which some students follow, where I take the idea of "magic school" very candidly and realistically with no winks at all. Yes, here's my acceptance letter from the WPJ. Here's my school schedule. Here's my homework assignment. Do you believe everything you see on social media, children?
- If anyone seriously corners you and sincerely asks "hey uhh there's no way you actually go to magic school, right?" you can either give it to them and be like "yea well done, do you wanna join?" or commit to the bit and obfuscate and play dumb, like I know you like to do, based on what the situation might require.
- This also sets up the "supporting cast" you mention in one of your books (Here Be Bunnies, I think), of The Rival, The Mentor, and many others....
- Most importantly, like any student, I get to have strong opinions about my teachers that I can share for those that are curious: "My card magic teacher is amazing on the basics but he's a bit boring and his tastes differ from mine. Enough with the packet tricks, Mr. Jefferson!"... "My coins teacher is a stickler for details and a bit of a hardass...." —KM
Yeah, I think stuff like this is great. The only point I would add is that you don’t have to be a teacher to take advantage of this kind of structure. While it’s nice to have the symmetry of the student/teacher dynamic, you can really set up the same storyline regardless of what job you have. A butcher. A baker. Perchance even a candlestick maker. You’re just one of these things and you’re taking some sore of magic class.
This has similarities to the original White Wand Society concept I wrote up back in 2017—an overarching storyline that can fit any trick you want to perform.
Re: Friday’s post
Not that I think this means anything but I love conspiracy wank so I can explain how all that 1:1:1 stuff works, in case you or your readers want to construct this kind of imp on the back of a napkin.
Most numerological codes consist of following a method to derive significant numbers from essentially noise.
Often this involves adding together the letters of a word where a=1 b=2 c=3 etc to see if it makes a significant recurring number.
Anyway the 1:1:1 stuff is just digital roots.
That is to say 2026, broken into its digits is summed, so 2+0+2+6 which is 10, and then 1+0 is 1.
This is kind of like those tricks where any number multiplied by 9, if you add the digits and then add the digits of the result until you get down to one digit always equals 9, except there's no trick to it
Notable that the 28th of the month is used in this list (2+8=10, 1+0=1) but you could easily get away with the 29th for an extra 11. Maybe if there are too many it feels less significant.
Either way its worth noting that in 2027 you can digitally root it down to 11 so there will be another slew of these dates, not forgetting that if you sum those digits you get 2 and maybe 2 is the important number in the trick if you're performing this on the 20th of February.
I'd argue the ability to construct and break down these things on paper for the participants in a trick can sell them on the significance far more than a viral image full of 1s.—SS
Yes, I would always break down with them how these numbers are “calculated.”
I’m going to do a“Basic Numerology Bullshitting” post in the future because numbers are everywhere so they’re very easy to incorporate into effects and give some significance to any random date or time you want.
And it makes many math tricks go down much smoother. Even people who hate math often are interested in numerology.
Look at these fucking idiots. —CA
Okay, that’s a little harsh.
Look, guys, I’m not here to trash you, I want to help you out by informing you this shit is utterly soulless.
It’s also corny. “You chose the King of Spades. And look, here’s a picture of me bursting through the King of Spades.”
It’s not just that it’s AI. It’s also that it’s the most bland, hollow, and charmless use of it.
I know you think it looks cool. I promise you, it doesn’t. It looks terrible. It looks generic, cheap, and like you put the least amount of effort you could into this. You may have been lucky enough to be underexposed to this sort of thing, but trust me, it’s everywhere and people are already tired of it.
Honestly though, even if this type of imagery wasn’t played out—even if it was 20 years ago and you actually shot this picture for real in a studio—it would still suck. “Look! Here’s me crashing through the card you chose!”
Uhm… why? What emotion do you think something like that taps into for an audience?
Literally taking 12 seconds to draw a stickman holding a King of Spades and then using that as a reveal—saying your granddaughter drew a portrait of you—would be infinitely more appealing to people than that image. (And that’s just one of 1000 better ways to reveal a card.)
I’m not trying to shit on you for having bad taste. I’m trying to warn you how that image will come across to the overwhelming majority of people.