School memories

Just after the war there was an interesting mix of teachers in the all-boys grammar school I graced with my rather grubby presence... Some of the younger ones were trickling back after being demobbed, others had been brought back out of retirement to fill the vacancies.

Our RI teacher was great, a Welsh novelist who wrote some pretty purple prose - I listened to his [i]Moulded in Earth[/i] on Woman's Hour and gained a new respect... no tweed jacket with leather elbow patches for him - always the bespoke suit. "Tell me boys," he said "how many of you smoke?" - hands rose, hesitantly. "Hmm" he said "smoke a pipe. It's much better for you..." End of subject!

A few years ago I found myself talking to a pleasant lady at a reunion (we had a sister girls school) - only to discover that her father was the teacher I loathed most! One day I had picked up my satchel, and some bread crumbs left from a jam sandwich (!) fell to the floor. He pounced, sent me to the headmaster, with a note - it apparently accused me of 'fouling the classroom'! The headmaster mumbled 'bit much, really' and let me go - obviously it wasn't the first time the man had gone over the top. I didn;t mention it to my new friend... nor did I tell her of the time I saw her father running for his life through the hall, pursued by a fifth form boy with a knife, both chased by the head shouting 'Don't do it, Jack! Don't do it..."
I certainly never saw 'Jack' again - I have no idea how it all turned out. Drama, in Muswell Hill!

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Ahh! The good old days when education was really excellent! How did we all get so far... honestly some of the teachers I had would be struggling to get employed today and would have been disciplined for the aggressive and bullying behaviour or total lack of care as to whether we did anything or not!

Mad Mrs Madaro the maths teacher who either did not notice or care that I went form 100% failure in homework to 100% success overnight..I had secured a copy of the answer book! Obviously I failed my mock 'O' level as she did not 'teach' anything she just told you stuff and as long as you got an answer right , never mind the working out, she was happy!

Some however were fabulous..the lovely Miss Grey who taught our A level RE group and my American English Lit teacher..he was brill!

Ann Packer (of Olympic fame) wisely let me slope off to bu**er about at the end of the games field pretending to play rounders whilst she coached the girls who enjoyed PE and were already good at it!

Unlike these days, being a girls school we only had female teachers and other staff. That was, apart from the caretaker, a miserable old sod called Mr. Wolf. Many were the times that he was followed around at lunchtime by a line of girls calling out "What time is it Mr. Wolf?" I t used to make him furious!!

Some of the teachers were the worst bullies in the school. Apart from hockey, PE was hell for me and one of the female teachers went out of her way to make sure it stayed that way. Her main motivational technique was to shout loudly about the size of your bum, thighs etc if you were plump and the scrawniness of your bum, thighs etc if you were very thin. She also thought it amusing to make you run around the 400m track a second time if she didn't think you'd tried hard enough the first time which of course was every lesson. One of the science teachers pushed a girl down a flight of stairs and broke her arm.

Then there were the creepy ones who didn't differentiate between sex objects and pupils.

It was one English teacher who inspired me too! I must have been in the second year at grammar school and, having always been a very fast reader, soon finished the set book that the others were ploughing through in a silent reading lessons. She noticed, and gave me the key to the English stock room. Heaven! The first book I found was "The Hobbit"!

In the late 50s and early 60s I attended an all girls Sec Mod school, with an all boys Sec Mod next door. At lunch time we had to walk in crocodile formation through the playgrounds to reach the dining rooms which were attached to the boys side. Woe betide any of us if we talked or even looked at any of the boys!!!!
Most of our teachers were a complete and utter waste of space, bullies in the main, unable to control a class and taught (not really) by rote. We had to chant out great chunks of the Bible (why) and copy copius notes from text books!!!!!! The needlework teacher was the worst. She once held up an example of my attempt at a hand sown buttonhole as the worst that she had ever seen and a disgrace to the school????? Hence my hatred of dressmaking and anything involving needles!!!! Except there was one teacher-an English Lit/Language teacher who fired up my love of language and books. She was great and believe it or not I bumped into her a few years ago and she remembered me!!!! We had a coffee and discussed books which we had read! I asked her why she recalled me and she said that it was my love of English and that she was glad that she had done something for at least one pupil and that it had all been worthwhile.

Sounds as if the teachers were bullies too, kitty . Good thing you ignored her re the family

I hated school. Bullying was rife and the aim of the teachers seemed to be to belittle anyone who didn't come near the top of the class. I think I've mentioned the Domestic Science teacher who told me I'd better not have a family after I rubbed sugar in with the butter and flour when making pastry!

When I was still training and doing teaching practice, Year 9 lowest set maths pupils would bring bags of sweets to class and have them open on their desks during my maths lessons. This was against school rules. I said nothing but helped myself to the sweets as I passed the desks of those who were trying it on. They were outraged and put the packets away.

Our history teacher used to write all the notes on the board, in a sloping hand, and we then spent the lesson copying them! It was a double black board, and his writing was small....

Oh, and double "A" Level Latin on a Friday afternoon in a small, overheated classroom! We took it in turns to nod off quietly, but there were only six of us, so it didn't work very well.

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

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

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

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!

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?

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

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!

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.

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.