Tuesday 1 December 2015

To my teachers

Miss W: if you hadn't sent me out of the room (for standing on the table) I would never have run home. Actually I think I was quite enterprising for one so small (5 years old). But you should have noticed I'd gone. You had a duty of care, didn't you?

Miss R : I know we shouldn't have been climbing trees during school time, but we were pretending to be monkeys. And we were only  nine years old.

Miss B: I'm sorry about the mice. Why didn't you send me to the head? I certainly deserved it. Just saying "Frances, I think you should put those away now" wasn't going to do the trick, was it?

Miss D (the head): I promise we weren't doing anything sinister. We just discovered that if we rolled a roll of toilet paper under the partitions, it would unravel itself all the way along the row of lavatories. It was just a bit of fun. We were all sent to you, and I still don't understand why.

Miss Y: that essay on "silence" you made me write, because I was pretending to be an opera singer. You weren't supposed to hear me.You weren't even in the room when I started.

Miss D (head) again: making me write out the school rules with reasons was a waste of time. I still won't underage what they were for.

To the person who gave me (another) disobedience mark: that was totally unfair. There was no school rule about collecting the cream off everyone's school milk and making it into butter. It harmed nobody. Plus, it made excellent butter.

I hated school.

19 comments:

  1. I really feel sorry for the teachers.
    Not really. They get plenty of time off to recover.

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    1. I think we had some very narrow, humourless teachers. There were good ones, of course, but teachers can make or destroy a subject for their pupil(s).

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  2. You could write a whole book about school - as could every teacher, I suppose. With my impatience and need for things to be neat and tidy, I'd be the worst teacher ever, I guess (which is why I didn't choose that as a career).
    Like most people, there were times when I liked school and times when I didn't. I had some excellent teachers and some less so. Just average, I'd say.

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    1. PS. The butter-making should have earned you extra points. You learned something there, it was almost a science project!

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    2. Meike, the butter making was something we did at home. We were hard up; butter was expensive.It was lovely butter, too!

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  3. I can just imagine the merry dance you must have led them, Frances! Sometimes, the punishment just doesn't fit the so called crime.

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    1. Rosemary, I don't think I was a bad kid; just didn't really fit iinto school very well. And secondary school was an exam-orientated hothouse. Horrible.

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    2. Definitely not bad - I didn't tell you what I sometimes got up to. I enjoyed your mischief!

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  4. I bet it was fun to be your friend at school, Frances. I used to walk out of school when I was 5, cross a railway line and a busy main road and in the end the headmistress threatened my family with the police and it was only the fear of my parents being thrown in jail that made me behave!
    And I hated school too xx

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    1. Teresa, that puts me in mind of a (then) 3-year-old grandson, who went walkabout when his other grandmother wasnt' looking, crossed a road, went up the street to the sweet shop, filled the pockets of his dungarees with sweets, and returned to hsi (distraught) grandma. Nobody noticed this diminutive shoplifter, or tried to stop him.

      Crossing the railway line sounds dodgy. I'm glad you survived!

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  5. I enjoyed school, but I was not academic and hated studying. I am still in touch with one of my best friends at high school even though I left my home town when I was 19. My one memory of being reprimanded was when I was 11 and reading a comic under the desk. My teacher at the time, Mr O was a big fat sweaty, nicotine fingered man. He walked up the aisle and I had no time to hide the comic. He walked back down and gave me the biggest crack round the back of my head. He'd probably be in serious trouble if it happened today.

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  6. I either quite liked school, or have forgotten that I disliked it.

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  7. Not exactly a school story ( I was quite well behaved I think!) but I was walking home from school alone ,aged about 10,and as I crossed a corner of some waste ground I saw a little glass bottle on the ground. By way of experiment I picked it up and dropped it…it broke! Unfortunately there was a policeman passing by on his bike ( yes, it was that long ago!) and he called me over to him and made me trot alongside him for several minutes before releasing me. I was terrified.

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    1. Frances,, my son was walking along the top of a wall, and absently chucked a pebble onto the road...and the roof of a police car. Ouch. He never did that again!

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  8. I disliked school too, Frances.

    Prep School headmistress: You must have pride in your work.

    Me - 6 years old: Miss, you've just told us that pride is one of the seven deadly sins. I don't understand why we should have pride in our work.

    I regret that totally innocent 6-year old question to the extent that I can remember the verbal consequences to this day.

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    1. Oops! But you were polite. A very bright grandson recently wrote at the bottom of his maths homework, "too easy". It did not go down well (although he was right). I think some people just aren't made for school.

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  9. I must say you’ve got some great writing skills and I can say that because I also write sometimes. I’ve also written quite a few poems and articles but one thing that irritates me the most is attending online classes which is why I often Hire Someone To Take My Class Online on my behalf.

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