In this work, I play a game of badminton against rotating audience participants while reciting a text about computers and about learning to read. The text thinks about matters of prediction, expectation and anticipation both in pedagogy and in the flow of speech; the disciplinary logics of education and surveillance; the history of badminton, and the innovative misuse of educational tools as weapons or as sports equipment. Running through the text is a refrain of doubled meanings, misrecognitions, (false) equivalences, errors, and instabilities of language. Over the duration of the game, the reading is destabilised as I become exhausted, continuing the sequence through shortness of breath.