OK....
I work in IT support, so these moments are common. In a 16+ college, no less, so a lot of the moments are from senior staff who teach reasonably complex subjects and Should Know Better. The facepalm comes close to drawing blood when you've had too much coffee and therefore have an all too clear recognition that these people have managed to get out of bed, and travel across town to do their job, whilst also clean, clothed and fed without help of a carer, and will do the same in reverse in the evening, including operating a cooker and the telly...
But they still can't turn on a powerpoint projector with the equivalent of a stick, an ass-finding radar, and a large-print sheet entitled "how to find your own ass" attached to the relevant item by a bit of string. Or in the case of one lovely lady who never ceases to amaze, still-can't insert a DVD into the computer and play it without inexplicably switching the whole system over to the entirely seperate set-top-style DVD player and fruitlessly mashing buttons on its remote. What I want to know is how she made the disc (or any of her powerpoints) in the first place, as it wasn't a commercial one... Major hand-eye-brain communication disconnect somewhere, I'm in awe of how you can get things so wrong when the correct method is both a heck of a lot easier AND spelled out for you. Obviously missed her calling - should have gone into local government instead and found a happy niche putting traffic lights on roundabouts that should have been built as grade seperated junctions in the first place, if the previous postholder hadn't blown all the earthworks and concrete money on signalised gyratories.
(The "correct" method being either... turn on the dvd player and eject the tray, as you would one at home. insert disc and close tray, as you would with a normal one. turn the projector (ie the "tv") to dvd channel, and away you go. As you would. Simply in this case the "tv" is 80 inches across. OR, if you're already using the PC... eject dvd tray. insert disc and close it. wait 10 seconds. press "OK" when it asks if you want to play the disc. sit back and watch. What's so hard?! If that's beyond you for god's sake don't try using a microwave or crossing a road.)
Mind you working in frontline education does seem to take it out of people mentally, and it's easy to mock when you're working instead in the equivalent position of the guy who flies a Hercules on supply runs over friendly territory and occasionally patches up a blood-splattered assault rifle whilst at the base camp, which jammed when the panicked ex-owner did something dippy with the safety catch.
On the flipside of that, the OP's description is (sadly) just highschool kids being exactly that. It was pretty much that way when I was in a similar classroom 12-ish years ago. The thickest ones also tend to have the most confidence (as they have no concept of their own shortcomings, but plenty of that of other people's; it's similar for the real semi-savant brainboxes, but they tend to sacrifice the necessary charisma that is the thickie's saving grace and true power), and the loudest opinions, so they become the natural ringleaders, regardless of how accurate the stuff coming out of their mouth is. Everyone else except for one or two "er, what?" dissenters go along out of peer pressure - either the ringleader's mates, or wanting to be in that circle, or to just avoid being beaten up by them. They don't actually know or even care what the truth is or which is the "right" side.
Luckily most will grow out of it, or at least, without that critical condensation nucleii, will not feel confident enough to speak up and cause trouble, and can go on to be productive and even advanced members of society. The former ringleaders soon find adult life outstrips the abilities that served them well in the cosseted school environment, and descend instead into various positions where they can't do much harm, though sadly this isn't _always_ the case (and "not much" is far from being "no" harm, but I'm talking on a national level). Or they too can evolve, have a moment of "wow, i'm being a twat" and grow into more balanced individuals. I occasionally had it bad just for being a bit geeky and inconfident, an obvious target (no need to be gay... particularly in a boys school). But as the perps stopped being kids, many of them lost the taste for it, some actually became friends in a wierd way, and a couple even came out. After leaving of course - they weren't ever THAT thick.
So don't take a seeming classroom full of homophobes that badly. Puberty is both a bad time to address such subjects, and the perfect time. Lots of hormones flying around, lots of difficult mental adjustmens, lots of pressure to prove yourself sexually and in the odd arenas of competitive teenage male or female cliques. Being gay is pretty much the complete antithesis of all this (and a shy geek, maybe halfway along the same line) and the very idea will baffle the already confused straight teen. You may also find the most vocal of them turn out gay later on - nothing like someone's own insecurity over being possibly outed to make someone act homophobic and ultra-straight against their own nascent instincts. (Which is why it's a good time to potentially nip extreme attitudes in the bud and challenge people's preconceptions... make them think out of their own little, inexperienced box... screw filling your head with facts, that sort of exercise is something schooling is particularly valuable for)
Getting back to facepalming. Channel 4 news (UK) earlier. A discussion panel on the subject of and ahead of the Copenhagen climate change blah blah agreement. One of our own representatives involved (jetting off almost direct from the studio - sleeper trains no good for you then?*), and also someone, possibly an MP, who had been directly affected by the Cumbrian floods when her home in Cockermouth had been flooded. Lots of emotion flying around. Lots of blinkered dumb, too. ((didn't catch who else was there as I tuned in part way))
OK, let's consider some things. Cumbria - Lake District - Westmorland - etc is a bad place to be if you like being warm and dry and don't carry chapstick and hand cream around. It rains a lot. It's windy. Heavy clouds scud across the steep hills and minor mountains at speed, on their way from the north atlantic to the north sea or vice versa, and are frequently provoked into dropping some of their cargo because of it. The rocks are not particularly porous. The soil is not particularly good, thanks to glacial scour, a clay base and the above factors leaching all the remaining or added nutrients. There's a lot of water carved features, including some impressive and marked floodplains and about the only things that grow are uninteresting trees, sheep, and dry stone walls. You'd have to conduct a purposeful and quite concerted program of DELIBERATE climate change to make it parched and sunny. It does have it's nicer days, and the rivers got low (or what passes for it, ie you can wade across them and survive) during the notorious but not-often-mentioned-in-these-things summer drought of '76.
Cockermouth is built at the confluence of two major rivers, the Cocker and the Derwent, one of which drains from a large nearby lake and the other off a steep mountain catchment area. The output is the fastest flowing waterway in Britain. The historic parts of town appear to be in two pieces, one the lower MAIN Street (NOT "high street" as was reported - it's comparitively low!) which has the appearance of a market area, and another also markety bit on a bit of land several metres higher up. Almost as if it was built, but flooded or regularly got boggy in the pre-tarmac days, so they had a second shot on firmer soil... but left the original bit for use in fairer times. The structures are made of heavy, resilient stone after all, and before the mid 20th century wouldn't have had much to spoil on the ground floor apart from food, a few rugs, curtains and bits of poorly varnished softwood furniture - and nothing that couldn't be quickly carted upstairs. Nowadays of course there's a heavy toll to be paid in terms of LCD TVs, computers, 3-piece suites, fitted carpets, heavyweight white goods, plasterwork, wallpaper... etc. So an event that was previously inconvenient but not beyond salvage is now disasterous.
Plus people have done the most boneheaded thing and started building - industrial estates, council officies and even homes - on an obvious floodplain. You can see the sucker on Google Earth for heaven's sake. There's a massive clue in the name of this geographical feature which no amount of defences, reinforced as they were, can properly guard you against. At least, not without having movable, interlocking baffle boards that can block off every road, footpath, alleyway, door, window, vent and drain that could let the raging torrent through (notice how those are all manmade physical features?), which would probably cost more than the actual damage payout.
I have family in Cumbria, including both sides of the collapsed Workington bridges. I've made reasonably regular visits, and stayed in other parts when on trips with friends. You would have had to pay me preeeeeeeetty handsomely, even before this event, to have a "permanent" home in any part of Cockermouth that wasn't on the South side and well away from the Main Street (ie the hilly parts that didn't flood this time), having previously seen how quickly and how far the river rises and how fast it flows even with what classes as "normal" rain for the area - including a worrying brush with it when staying upstairs in a weekly rental guesthouse and the ground floor flooded slightly (water entering through a bank-view balcony). And even then, i'd be wary of landslips. Almost every time I can remember going along the (often built on an earthen bank) A66 or up the Cockermouth bypass, there have been fields somewhere along the way that are flooded out.
The weather conditions that caused this to happen were freaky... but not unknown. It was something like a 1-in-200 year occurrence, and probably bumped up the scale by a good 100 years because of easily pointed-out human interference that CO2 has no bearing on - paved roads, bridges, drains... riverbed interference, even? Heavy, typically British rainclouds came over those troublesome mountains just a few too many at a time and too often, and became the camel's fatal straw. But 1-in-200 years doesn't exactly make something biblically unusual and worthy of investigation, so long as they're not happening every 5. It may have only been a couple of percent worse than a typical "bad month", but that's enough to burst a bank and send a percent or two of the total river flow into places it shouldn't be and wreak havoc (if it was, say, twice as bad as a normal rough month, there'd be no evidence left of the town; if those two rivers together only had as much flowing through them as deluged the town, they'd look frighteningly low).
The Derwent in the Workington area is a difficult thing to cross, because of - again! - the floodplain it runs through (and on which the only buildings to flood in Workington were built). Which is why the Barker Bridge built by the army is only for pedestrians, and in the arse end of nowhere compared to the road bridges. Even the heavy duty kit they sent up there (I passed the crane trucks on the motorway - they're f*cking MASSIVE even compared to the usual mobile cranes bumbling along at 40-ish) must have had trouble getting anything across it and had to choose a site based on structural considerations rather than ease of access. Serious foundations are needed and quite a bit of reinforcement for anything beyond a simple walkway. Obviously the Northside one didn't have it's piles sunk deep enough, and a life was lost when it suddenly dropped; the Calva only stayed standing because of reinforcement work carried out in the 60s as it was already crumbling. They didn't so much fall because the force of water was massive, but that it was just high enough above anything they'd previously experienced to in the first case expose hitherto concealed design/construction issues, and in the second drive a final nail into the coffin of the already weak original structure and severely stress the probably rusty steel plies that became the only thing holding it upright.
Plus I hadn't before heard anyone link all this tragedy and disaster to global warming / climate change in anything but a joking and sarcastic way. Climate science is having a pretty rough patch at the moment, what with the figure-fiddling fiasco ... the rabbit hole goes deeper than the mainstream news reports - and just wait for the shitstorm should some bored journo also run across the hush hush revalations about sea level monitoring equipment being largely badly installed/maintained and experiencing similarly poor record keeping practice (there's a particular asian harbour whose dataset was used as a basis for some apocalypse-coastline predictions until it was found the figures were the result of a heady mix of corruption and incompetence rather than the port being inundated). It may be better for a while to focus on a mixture of "well, we can't prove we're having an effect, but do you really want to bet against it?", "dumping waste energy into the environment is a bad idea anyway from an entropy perspective"
and "most of our provision still comes from innately finite fossil fuels..." rather than OMG EVERYTHING BAD IS BECAUSE WE PUT CO2 (oh, and...er.. methane and steam) IN THE AIR LOOK AT THAT TEMPERATURE CHART!
So... with ALL of the above...
Why were these supposedly learned people who will be having actual, meaningful input to legistlation that will affect all our lives and result in the spamming away of squillions of euros that could maybe be spend on more beneficial things...
Going on about how we have to reduce our CO2 to "stop Cockermouth flooding again"?
Argh.
Argh argh argh.
I don't even work in the field, there's just a mild personal connection, but I feel like I have a better grasp of the easily-pointed-out facts here. Why? How?
NURSE! IT'S HAPPENING AGAIN! GET MY PILLS!
Oh hello Mr Unicorn, aren't you glad we live in a world where no-one in a position of influence does or says anything stupid and harmful on the basis of trying to salve the easily-avoided misfortune of a colleague?
I'll be glad to get back to work tomorrow and return to an existence where operating a VCR is a black art for some people, and experienced colleagues will argue til they're blue that it's possible to send fully working VGA (not component RGB/YPrPb... VGA) down a 3x RCA link... Lose oneself in the administrivia and avoid the BIG, depressing stupidities of which the above is only... heh... the tip of the iceberg. Don't get me started on ID cards (coming europe-wide - thanks to Lisbon it's probable that a Tory govt coming in and dropping our own scheme will be a futile gesture), Project Veronica (car tracking/auto throttling), internet-wide DPI and their ilk. All things where it's hard to tell if it's just blinkered stupidity (to the very real possibility of these systems being abused on either a small-time or national-administration level... imagine how Schindler would have got on with his mission hobbled by a car tracker/limiter/disabler, having to get hold of faked biometric RFID ID-cards, or communicate through inspected emails, with his movements regularly captured on CCTV...) or active malice behind their introduction.
