An occasion unprecedented in the annals of educational history in our school: a meeting finished early!
Not only that, but the meeting also had a useful function! Just too much for an ordinary terminally cynical classroom teacher to take!
We were all sitting round an island made up of tables in the library and, as the meeting ended people were clearly shocked and didn’t move. Spanish people not moving and sitting down are, by definition talking. And so they talked – a sort of displacement activity for not going home!
Now I am a bit of an expert on the ending of Spanish meetings: they don’t. There is a morbid fear of meetings ending and so official or unofficial AOB can expand to take up any amount of time. I was horrified that so-called professionals could resist the clear opportunity to go home and in my desperation I started to inch one of the tables away from the other tables in the island while packing my brief case: I am nothing if not subtle and suddenly ambidextrous when it comes to getting away from school!
Eventually, just before things resting on the edge of my chosen moving table fell to the floor, other people realized that escape was possible and the general exodus began. I was away to my car before the others had drawn a breath! Experience always tells.
The weather has been rotten: close, cloudy and oppressive. A few raindrops were actually squeezed out of the humidity but nothing worth putting the windscreen wipers on for. We hope, as we have hoped for much of this year, for better weather tomorrow.
There are now sixteen days to go to the end of term: and counting!
Standard Four in my Junior School was a constant succession of Progress Papers specifically designed to lead to success in the 11+. We had homework on a regular basis which we suddenly didn’t have when a schools’ inspector was present. Not that we knew he was an inspector and not that we knew that as primary school children we were not supposed to have homework. I didn’t help matters by asking our teacher what the homework was and being completely mystified by an airy wave of dismissal from a teacher who had given us considerable amounts of homework on a regular basis and who had quite definitely suggested that passing the exam would be totally impossible without the constant attempting of paper after paper at home as well as in school.
Everything was geared towards the exam in a way in which I find creepily familiar in my present school. But this was education when I was eleven in a system entirely governed by passing an exam which would be the pathway to academic success in a grammar school or academic ignominy in a secondary modern school. My recognition of the bad old days (whatever the right wing and so-called New Conservatives say) in my present location does not say much for educational development in Catalonia.
Just as in my old primary school there are concessions to modern thinking. Every Friday afternoon we had a couple of periods when we could “do” projects. These were pages culled from some sort of forward thinking publication which allowed us to do a rudimentary sort of research and to present our findings in an interestingly graphic way. This “freedom” was strictly confined and the real education was via Progress Papers which forced endless practice of the types of 11+ exam papers with which we might be confronted.
The only paper I actually enjoyed was the essay writing. The stimulus for this piece of writing was a comprehension on, of all things, Victorian bathing machines! Just the thing that a lad just entering into the swinging sixties would be interested in! I was. I still remember the writing clearly and my description of the proprietor of the bathing machine as “looking like a Gorgon” which in turn says something for the extent of my reading.
Unfortunately my essay was never read as the piece of writing was apparently only used in borderline cases to give further evidence to justify a pass or fail. I was no genius at the age of 11 but I wasn’t on the borderline either.
In my present school the examinations are over and the pupils are all following a similar sort of “project” to those that I used to delight in all those years ago. Things are a little different I used books for my information and most of the pupils in front of me are using computers. My books always opened, which is more than can be said for the internet programs for these privileged pupils! Perhaps they would do well to go back to the old days and give each class a selection of reference books and see what happens.
Though, thinking about it, no, not a good idea. In spite of the fact the inevitable internet problems that accompany any attempt by a school to expand internet access to actual pupils in a working environment means that the amount of information which, in theory is vast, in practice becomes non-existent. Pupils therefore rely on the games and music and other fripperies that they have stored on their machines and research goes out of the window.
When I think back to a slightly more recent period when I was in university the real problem that I always had was finding somewhere to study. Yes, I had my own room on campus – but that was far too full of distractions to allow for concentrated study. And English students have, by definition, books, and the book on the shelf is always worth more than the book in the hand!
The library in Swansea University was modern and well appointed, though during the lead up to my finals the authorities decided to try and stop the whole building sliding gracefully into the sea and so had an extended period of pile-driving which was anything but an encouragement to revision or learning. I once went into the library during the height of the pile-driving and saw rows of finals students looking more and more paranoid as each earth shaking thump echoed through the erstwhile sepulchral calm of that centre of academe!
The library anyway was not a good place for me to study as it was full of, yes; you’ve guessed it, books. With my magpie mind the subject of an individual book was not really important and I often found myself engrossed in some abstruse tract which had nothing whatsoever to do with the ostensible subject that I was officially studying.
Ironically it was a library that was my final and most useful choice of working environment. Not a “real” library in which there were books which begged to be read, no, another place altogether.
The Department of Chemistry in Swansea University had gone through a period of megalomaniac power building which saw a number of phases of construction as a professor got his budget increased exponentially. The end result was laboratories which were used for such things as the storing of cardboard boxes rather than the teaching of students – true I saw the cardboard boxes with my own eyes and was told the epic tale of vaulting Chemical ambition by one of the technicians! And a Chemistry Library is, almost by definition filled with incomprehensible books and, given Chemistry students’ disinclination to read around their subject it provides a location which no one used.
Except for me!
Once discovered, I treasured this arid oasis of calm and used it to complete essays and read and annotate those odd books through which even I had to struggle; books like “The Fairy Queen” which, to be fair, even the clinical surroundings of the Chemistry Library didn’t encourage me to read all the way through!
I`m not sure that even the spaciousness of retirement (when ere that might be) will tempt me to plough my way through the whole thing!
It rained solidly through the night and, working on the third floor, I heard that melancholy drip, drip, drip which is the sad watery percussion that I grew up with! This year continues its depressingly skittish approach to summer and as I sit here I can see through the window banks of threatening cloud, though there is also a band of brightness which promises some amelioration. Eventually!
Not only that, but the meeting also had a useful function! Just too much for an ordinary terminally cynical classroom teacher to take!
We were all sitting round an island made up of tables in the library and, as the meeting ended people were clearly shocked and didn’t move. Spanish people not moving and sitting down are, by definition talking. And so they talked – a sort of displacement activity for not going home!
Now I am a bit of an expert on the ending of Spanish meetings: they don’t. There is a morbid fear of meetings ending and so official or unofficial AOB can expand to take up any amount of time. I was horrified that so-called professionals could resist the clear opportunity to go home and in my desperation I started to inch one of the tables away from the other tables in the island while packing my brief case: I am nothing if not subtle and suddenly ambidextrous when it comes to getting away from school!
Eventually, just before things resting on the edge of my chosen moving table fell to the floor, other people realized that escape was possible and the general exodus began. I was away to my car before the others had drawn a breath! Experience always tells.
The weather has been rotten: close, cloudy and oppressive. A few raindrops were actually squeezed out of the humidity but nothing worth putting the windscreen wipers on for. We hope, as we have hoped for much of this year, for better weather tomorrow.
There are now sixteen days to go to the end of term: and counting!
Standard Four in my Junior School was a constant succession of Progress Papers specifically designed to lead to success in the 11+. We had homework on a regular basis which we suddenly didn’t have when a schools’ inspector was present. Not that we knew he was an inspector and not that we knew that as primary school children we were not supposed to have homework. I didn’t help matters by asking our teacher what the homework was and being completely mystified by an airy wave of dismissal from a teacher who had given us considerable amounts of homework on a regular basis and who had quite definitely suggested that passing the exam would be totally impossible without the constant attempting of paper after paper at home as well as in school.
Everything was geared towards the exam in a way in which I find creepily familiar in my present school. But this was education when I was eleven in a system entirely governed by passing an exam which would be the pathway to academic success in a grammar school or academic ignominy in a secondary modern school. My recognition of the bad old days (whatever the right wing and so-called New Conservatives say) in my present location does not say much for educational development in Catalonia.
Just as in my old primary school there are concessions to modern thinking. Every Friday afternoon we had a couple of periods when we could “do” projects. These were pages culled from some sort of forward thinking publication which allowed us to do a rudimentary sort of research and to present our findings in an interestingly graphic way. This “freedom” was strictly confined and the real education was via Progress Papers which forced endless practice of the types of 11+ exam papers with which we might be confronted.
The only paper I actually enjoyed was the essay writing. The stimulus for this piece of writing was a comprehension on, of all things, Victorian bathing machines! Just the thing that a lad just entering into the swinging sixties would be interested in! I was. I still remember the writing clearly and my description of the proprietor of the bathing machine as “looking like a Gorgon” which in turn says something for the extent of my reading.
Unfortunately my essay was never read as the piece of writing was apparently only used in borderline cases to give further evidence to justify a pass or fail. I was no genius at the age of 11 but I wasn’t on the borderline either.
In my present school the examinations are over and the pupils are all following a similar sort of “project” to those that I used to delight in all those years ago. Things are a little different I used books for my information and most of the pupils in front of me are using computers. My books always opened, which is more than can be said for the internet programs for these privileged pupils! Perhaps they would do well to go back to the old days and give each class a selection of reference books and see what happens.
Though, thinking about it, no, not a good idea. In spite of the fact the inevitable internet problems that accompany any attempt by a school to expand internet access to actual pupils in a working environment means that the amount of information which, in theory is vast, in practice becomes non-existent. Pupils therefore rely on the games and music and other fripperies that they have stored on their machines and research goes out of the window.
When I think back to a slightly more recent period when I was in university the real problem that I always had was finding somewhere to study. Yes, I had my own room on campus – but that was far too full of distractions to allow for concentrated study. And English students have, by definition, books, and the book on the shelf is always worth more than the book in the hand!
The library in Swansea University was modern and well appointed, though during the lead up to my finals the authorities decided to try and stop the whole building sliding gracefully into the sea and so had an extended period of pile-driving which was anything but an encouragement to revision or learning. I once went into the library during the height of the pile-driving and saw rows of finals students looking more and more paranoid as each earth shaking thump echoed through the erstwhile sepulchral calm of that centre of academe!
The library anyway was not a good place for me to study as it was full of, yes; you’ve guessed it, books. With my magpie mind the subject of an individual book was not really important and I often found myself engrossed in some abstruse tract which had nothing whatsoever to do with the ostensible subject that I was officially studying.
Ironically it was a library that was my final and most useful choice of working environment. Not a “real” library in which there were books which begged to be read, no, another place altogether.
The Department of Chemistry in Swansea University had gone through a period of megalomaniac power building which saw a number of phases of construction as a professor got his budget increased exponentially. The end result was laboratories which were used for such things as the storing of cardboard boxes rather than the teaching of students – true I saw the cardboard boxes with my own eyes and was told the epic tale of vaulting Chemical ambition by one of the technicians! And a Chemistry Library is, almost by definition filled with incomprehensible books and, given Chemistry students’ disinclination to read around their subject it provides a location which no one used.
Except for me!
Once discovered, I treasured this arid oasis of calm and used it to complete essays and read and annotate those odd books through which even I had to struggle; books like “The Fairy Queen” which, to be fair, even the clinical surroundings of the Chemistry Library didn’t encourage me to read all the way through!
I`m not sure that even the spaciousness of retirement (when ere that might be) will tempt me to plough my way through the whole thing!
It rained solidly through the night and, working on the third floor, I heard that melancholy drip, drip, drip which is the sad watery percussion that I grew up with! This year continues its depressingly skittish approach to summer and as I sit here I can see through the window banks of threatening cloud, though there is also a band of brightness which promises some amelioration. Eventually!
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