School memories

Only ever got detention from a prefect – for being 'glib'. Translation: poisonous little brat

A friend and I got detentions and a serious telling-off by the Headmistress for the "appropriation and misuse of general notebooks", which we were supposed to use for rough work and notes etc. We'd actually stolen a couple of new ones from the stock cupboard and were using them to write stories in...very bad!

I went to visit a teacher who was terminally ill, 25 years after I left school (she never had any children and her pupils were her 'girls' and some had kept in touch) - several of us had arranged to go so I saw people at that visit that had been at school with me, but I hadn't seen for that long. One of the "girls" said to me "I hope you're still writing". I said "Why?" She replied "We all hated you because you would sit on the classroom step before class and dash off your essay and you always got top marks!" I loved school.

I too had a History teacher who dictated notes the entire lesson. These we wrote down in a hard-backed blue exercise book - quite a fat one, as I remember. She would lapse into anecdotes however, mostly about "....my son Richard...." and we would be dutifully writing all of this down before we realised which showed how much attention we were paying!

We also had a teacher who dictated notes, but also left time for discussion of the topic. In my last year, I opted to do classical history for the European history paper, so had to do all the work myself with the help of books lent to me by the teacher. He set and marked the essays, but I suspect that he knew little more about it than I did.

what is is with History teachers? We had an awful teacher who 'dictated' what was in our text book on our desk, we wrote it in our exercise book to learn for a test the next lesson! She did not enthuse one bit about history and as a result I found it dull. A couple of us used to crawl out of the lesson then knock on the door and apologise for being late. She never said anything..I feel really bad about it now..but she was so awful as a teacher!

Bags, sounds so like the teacher I had all those years ago.....killed off my love for history by literally just dictating the text book. When it came to the exams few of us had fully understood the subject. She too had been very sweet but totally ineffectual. Thankfully doing O.U. reinstated my love for the historic - which is just as well as I too am now 'historic'!!

P.S. just in case this is all the same teacher......hmmmmm doubt it. My school was in Swindon (yup sorry but someone had to grow up there) and was an ex Grammer school dieing on its feet from too much political interferrence. I beleive its a lot better now - Commonweal School.

I really disliked school. I was the only one in my group of friends who passed the 11+ and I was really upset that that I would be on my own. The all girls grammar school was awful and the bullying was horrendous.

You were unlucky, gillybob. I went to an all-girls Grammar school and although I can't say I loved it, I don't remember any bullying - the staff were very vigilant.

There was a lot of bullying at my school ana and dare I say clever bullies are possibly the worst kind! Mind you I was quite a softy. I think the staff in our school probably knew bullying went on but chose to ignore it.
As a result I couldnt wait to leave.

with regards to detentions, my ''naughty little sister'' once got two Saturday mornings in one week! You were given a Saturday morning ( into school for a written punishment on a Saturday morning) if you got two detentions in one week . You got a detention if you got five conduct marks in one week. Goodness knows what she got them for! I ran a nursery school and I always used to tell my Mums that the naughty children turn out to be the most interesting people, and my sister certainly is that.

At my grammar school, if you were caught by a teacher, or more likely, by a prefect, coming to school or going home without your hat on, you had to wear it all day in school. And after a spate of thefts, I got a detention, along with a few other girls, for not having my purse securely fastened to my person, the detention being spent doing just that. I hated school, used to look at my watch every few minutes, calculating how many hours and minutes till I could go home, never did understand the girls who wept buckets on the day they left!

Oh, yes, I'd forgotten that, number! I couldn't understand it either...

oh yes I went to a girls grammar and guess what, I had a history teacher that dictated notes . Lazy so and so he was. Did not help that we were doing 19th C legal reforms. I did not realise this was an interesting subject until I read Anthony Trollope.
I have to say that I feel a bit resentful towards most of my teachers. At best they did a competent job in terms of getting people through their exams. But given the raw material they had - how did most of them managed to make so much of the teaching boring. We should remember that the 11+ was highly selective and only a small proportion of kids went to grammar school. In some boroughs there were more places for boys than girls . We certainly had a raw deal with buildings. An English man said to me recently in tones of disbelief "How come you had no playing fields if you went to a grammar school". Because it was a bunch of draughty huts that had previously been a military hospital maybe?
So how come they manage to bore me, teach me only about 50% of what I could have learned and that the one number you went to managed to let you down completely?

At my Catholic convent, unfortunately, quite a few of our teachers were nuns a real hindrance in history because it was taught from a very biased stance, I don't know if it was my imagination, but we permanently seemed to be stuck on Henry VIII and the Reformation where it was conveyed to us how persecuted Catholics were. When we went on to Mary Tudor, we were taught that she was one of the finest monarchs our country had ever known because she restored the true religion, even if she did burn a few Protestants at the stake whilst doing so, because apprently it was no more then they deserved! Could never argue with them they were completely intransigent. My school was also almost opposite a hospital, every time an ambulance went past we had to say three Hail Marys, which was almost all the time. I'm surprised I learnt anything there, come to think of it I don't think I did!

I got a lifetime detention from my headmistress.
I only befriended a girl on my first day of secondary school and she did not tell me she was the daughter of the headmistress.
A few years later I was married to her.
Still it could have been worse. One of my friends married the daughter of a teacher at his infants school.

Frank

LOL Frank.

I think that must have been how history was taught because we had a teacher who dictated everything too until a bright, young thing started. She was willing to answer questions and discuss everything in detail and oh boy did we take advantage. Nearly every lesson someone asked "Miss, who owned the Channel Islands at this point?" and bless her she would try to work it out or look it up....end of that lesson.

We'd grown up in an 'us and them' system so when a teacher tried to engage us or take our interests into account we saw them as soft. We loved her but we couldn't resist taking the mickey.

We also had a French teacher who was a little vague and we found that if we could distract him by asking him about his son we could lose a lesson. Needless to say we all failed our O level

With us it was the temporary geography teacher we had for two terms in the VI form who dictated the notes

We had two excellent history teachers, both nuns, one from the community that ran the school, the only labour-voting nun in the order. The other from another order of nuns who ran a girls hostel in the town. She only taught in the VI form for A level and would discuss anything with us including the importance of some of the mistresses of various important members of the government in the early 19th century. She was also quite openly critical of various aspects of the catholic church. All this in the 1950s.

My history teacher, referred to above, used to regale us with tales of how he won the war (so did the maths teacher but that's another story). He was in the Royal Navy and smoked like a chimney as did all the ex-service teachers, most of whom later died of smoking-related conditions. Many of the women teachers were single because they had lost fiancés in the war - some of the older ones, then on the verge of retirement, had lost them in the first WW - they had taught my mother! Some of the oldest and tattiest books in the store cupboards went back to the days when my mum and my aunt were at school!

We never burnt a guy on November 5th because my mother had been to a convent although we did burn the Archbishop of Canterbury once!
My most shame making school memory is of the poor student who tried to teach us geography once. Someone stared talking and was told to stand on her chair. This started us all laughing and we finished up with the whole class standing on our chairs and the student in tears. Our real teacher went absolutely ballistic when she walked in. We were the top stream in a grammar school and definitely expected to know better

Gosh, I must have been lucky to go to a co-ed grammar school with no bullying.

I was a bolshie little sod though, and refused to acknowledge any power that prefects had, so when one put me in half hour detention for taking my beret off on the way home, after I went down my own garden path, I refused to go. The headmaster got in on the act and put me in teachers' one hour detention. I said I was OK with that as I respected him, but not prefects!!

But that night I discovered a fact of life that has stood me in good stead all my life: the naughty people are the most fun and most interesting! I was the youngest there, and the others were very nice to me. All we had to do was polish the school silver.

After that I was quite fearless. For instance, I was in the top stream and the best was expected of us, but I'm very bad at rote learning. So if we had to learn a poem, she would select about three people in class to recite it. This was a 10% chance of getting caught, with detention the worst outcome. My parents never read my report book closely enough to even notice the detention record anyway. I never learned the poems and never got caught because I didn't look guilty or worried.

I have been on the wrong end of unruly class behaviour. I went to work part-time in a sec-mod in Norfolk. The classes I 'inherited' from the head of English were cross that their teacher had been changed and for that I couldn't blame them. They tried everything to get rid of me, the 'best' being the stink bomb which they let off at the beginning of the lesson. 'Miss, there's a bad smell in here.' Me: 'Oh, is there? I can't smell anything...' And I made them sit through the entire lesson, pretending that I had no sense of smell. There were plenty of other episodes, but I think that was the one that told them their efforts were getting them nowhere.

I can't stop chuckling at the thought of BAnanas school and the Hail Marys. Like something out of Miranda or Father Ted .