School Scars
from the '60s
by Gwen Boswell
To begin with,
I must explain that I was far more of a
humanities student at school, than ever I was a
science student and I am not quite sure what I
could offer by way of explanation for this. It
may have been just good old genetics, or down to
the over, or even under development of one side
of my brain. It may even have been the fact that
my brother often used to beat me around the head
with his school copy of “Science and the
Modern World,” when I interrupted him doing
his homework behaving, apparently, like an
annoying little ratbag. Either way, mathematics
was all Greek to me, confirmed I thought by the
inclusion in its realms of the area of Algebra
with its hidden city of Parenthesis, occupied by
the often-misunderstood population of Equations.
How can there by any variables where numbers are
concerned? You either have 10 of something, or
you don’t.
I shall never
forget the disappointment of my introductory
lesson to logarithms. Thank goodness I had the
intelligence not to actually turn up in dancewear.
I learned soon enough what the required equipment
was for this particular lesson - a pencil, a
Panadol, oh yes, and a large eraser.
Since my
beleaguered maths lesson days, I have read
somewhere that the logarithm is arguably the
single, most useful arithmetic concept in all the
sciences. Indeed? Well, I recall reading my table
of logarithms from cover to cover and still being
unsure of the balance of my pocket money, after
buying ‘x’ amount of Babychams on a
Friday night.
Science was as
subject that terrified me, as I lived in fear of
my life that should our presiding science teacher
turn his back to the class for one minute, the
‘bad boys’ might decide to use their
pipettes to measure and then blow, just the right
amount of hydrochloric acid required to
disintegrate the back of a school blouse worn by
a timid schoolgirl. I was less concerned about
being blinded, than I was about the results of
this cruel scientific experiment making me the
ridicule of the fourth year by revealing that I
still wore a vest rather than a Playtex.
Art was more
frustrating than traumatic. Paint this Mrs
Shepherd said, I looked up and saw, then looked
down and painted, looked up and saw, looked down
and painted and so on, and so on. My endeavour
and concentration were absolute, so why did the
simple white vase with a sunflower in it on Mrs
Shepherd’s desk end up looking like a
pineapple on my paper? What went wrong with the
apparent link of thought and action where my eye,
brain and hand were concerned? More ridicule, but
this time it was from the art teacher, ‘not
the best mentor in the world was Mrs Shepherd.
To finish, I
would just like to draw to the attention of
Generations ‘X’ and ‘Y,’ that
their privileged and somewhat soft school life
has come about by some severe emotional and
physical scarring to the Baby Boomers. For
example, the outcome from a teacher in the 1960s
wanging a blackboard rubber 15-feet across a
classroom at Baby Boomer Johnny for forgetting
one of the lyrics in the (still!) difficult ditty
known as the “Nine Times Table,” has
paved the way for the parents of ‘X’
and ‘Y’ to successfully sue teachers
for far less. Without little Johnny’s NHS
glasses smashing, thus distributing glass
fragments and vast amounts chalk dust into his
cornea, how would teachers since even realise
that this was unacceptable classroom behaviour? (I
am, of course, referring to the wanging, as
opposed to the forgetting).
Thanks to
those crash dummy years of the Baby Boomers,
lessons have also been reconfigured for the
benefit of the ‘X’ and ‘Y’
Generations, with some omissions from the
curriculum making the school environs nowadays
virtually vertigo free. Does any child now have
to suffer learning maypole dancing? I think not,
and it is thanks to a rather ungainly Mary
Sidebottom and her near garrotting experience one
lovely May morning in a Birmingham primary school
playground that it has been removed.
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