Memories - early or general

I went to 7 schools including preschool and felt a lot like choirboy at the end of every year, term, week.

Helen, I was going to write something clever here, but have thought twice. !!!!!!!

Quite right Don't worry, I wasn't thrown out of any of them

Helen, now you are sounding like a naughty little rebel to me, and I don't think you have changed much. As long as you keep up the good work for us on here and make my day, you are my kind of rebel It's past my bedtime - nighty night.

You've summed up exactly how I felt about school. From the age of just under five, when I started in state infants school, I hated the idea of having to give up the biggest chunk of my time for five days a week. This feeling of working out a prison sentence lasted until I was seventeen, when I left grammar school. On my last day, it felt as if large lead weights had finally been lifted off my shoulders. From an early age, I was never interested in a lot of subjects: history - pointless waste of time; all in the past; gone for good; irrelevant; geography - learning about foreign countries - I wasn't even interested in England! composition - I've never done fiction, or make-believe, or stories; I'd sit there with a blank sheet of paper for hours; when I was eight, my report said "composition - he lacks imagination"; teacher was correct; scripture - when very young, I believed what we were taught, because you had to believe what adults told you, otherwise you'd get a ruddy good clout - education by fear; And so on. I quite liked maths and science, and languages came naturally to me, without even trying - I found languages a piece of cake, but lost interest when we had to do set books (literature) - fiction rearing its ugly head again. To balance it up, I probably enjoyed about a third of my time at school, but I always had my own agenda of important stuff to do (engineering based, mainly). I was never interest in putting in extra time for the school, especially sport and PE, another waste of human effort. Why would a prisoner, in his/her right mind, want to prolong his/her sentence? "...did not cater well for the odd-balls but coercively forced a reversion to the mean." I never felt like one of the herd. I always felt different to everyone else. I'm a late developer. I now read books on history and other subjects that were inflicted on me when I wasn't ready. That's the problem with our education system. Thirty five kids in a class - naturally, one or two will be swat/boffins, one or two will be slow learners or strugglers, but the syllabus is designed on the "one size fits all" basis. However, most of us do not have aristocratic parents who can afford private education!

Hello, None of us ask to be born, so we arrive into whatever circumstances. Me, born with feet the wrong way round, I was hardly going to be an athlete, but I was never lazy. I wanted to do things, so for me it had to be the top of my body, not the bottom end. Suddenly, at age fourteen I felt normal. I do have instep weakness, but it's no issue. 1962 saw the end of my life in Paybody hospital & clinic. I'm not preaching, but I was made aware of just how fortunate I had been to come through that. No, I could never have joined the armed forces, or civil police force, putting it in prospective, but I've done much finance work for solicitors & so on. I pretend that I was plain clothes, hey!

My feelings about subjects were always connected to the quality of the teachers. Teaching could be revolutionised for all kids but the model we went into the last century with hasn't changed substantially. Lessons still rely on the abilities of the individual teachers. Think of the best documentary you've ever seen. The script developed by those talented in communication. Content devised by experts in the subject. Illustrated by photography and graphics no school could afford. Delivered by someone who has a clear and compelling speaking style, who can do it over as many times as it takes to get it perfect but then never gets tired or bored saying the same things over and over. Teachers should be experts on kids. They should be concentrating on them. Who is struggling? Who is bored? Who is unhappy and why? We ask teachers to be all of those things and it's not logical or fair.

Hello, There's so much of my past education history, that although I made good of it, I hate the thought of not all children not being privileged. Even King Henry V111, was a free entrance until politics got involved around 1850. Folk don't realise the ramifications or history of our educational systems. I don't believe that there's one right answer in civil society.

Slim, we travel(led) on parallel paths. I remember one occasion in year 8 or 9 (2nd or 3rd form) when for homework we had to write an essay using 'stream of consciousness'. I thought I had done an honest and creative job only to be humiliated by the english teacher tearing the pages out of my exercise book and throwing them in the waste bin in front of the class saying it was utter rubbish. I had either misunderstood the point of the homework or my stream of consciousness was not acceptable on this planet. Needless to say, I did not find this method of encouragement particularly helpful. At this point I started absenting myself to walk to the Central Library to read what interested me and became an expert forger of my father's handwriting and signature. I think it would only be fair to add a postscript. About a year later the same english teacher asked the class for those who had received a mark of better than 70% for a particular answer in an examination question. I tentatively raised my hand. He asked me to read my answer to the class. To my surprise he said it was better than the mark he had given and added several percentage points to my exam score. Perhaps the previous humiliation had taught me how to mask my autism more effectively.

In the main I have only good memories of my High School and its teachers. Virtually all of the teachers had served in the war and would take no nonsense from scruffy teenagers, however, I never saw any excessive punitive action carried out on pupils. Some detentions and occasional sending to the head for a caning but that was not excessive. All together a good atmosphere for learning. Any academic failures were down to me. However, the sixth form was a disaster for those of us who took sciences. We were the first sixth form in the school and our physics and maths teacher was new to the job having come from Jodrell Bank and we had little equipment for the experiments, in some cases making it ourselves. For chemistry we had to travel to Stoke Park Girls school to attend lessons in their lab, as we did not have one. As teenage boys that experiment was a disaster.