Subjects they should have had at school

[boudicca]

Remember, Claire, that we weren't all educated in schools with a strong Jesuit ethos emphasising the practice of Roman Catholic religion both in the church and in the community

What, Poland is a Catholic country, ergo the reason I know where it IS is because I spent 8 years of my life in that curs'ed institution? Try and spot a hole in that logic!

"Myrtle green", indeed...

Ad majora natus sum
That was our school motto, it's Latin for "yer arse!"

[mh]

Oh, and don't get me started on the bint of an Irishwoman who while teaching us about W.B Yeats said Jaques Du Molay was an Irish sympathiser murdered by the English, when he was the head of the Knights Templar, murdered by the King of France, and had probably never set foot in England..

And don't get me started on the bould WB.

One of my favourite memories is pointing out to my English teacher that one of his poems blatantly contradicted itself, and seeing the poor guy almost smash his glasses into his face in horror, as if he knew it only too well but was hoping nobody would pick it up.

Well, OK, it's not really too funny, he could have hurt himself or broken an expensive pair of glasses, but from the perspective of a 16 year old at the time, bored rigid in a freezing cold classroom, it brought something to the day.

[smiscandlon]

"Myrtle green", indeed...

Ad majora natus sum
That was our school motto, it's Latin for "yer arse!"

I didn't realise you had an Alan Partridge claim to fame in fellow Aloysius Alumni Armando Iannucci (how's that for a terribly tortuous tongue twister?)


AMDG

[eotunun]

I wouldn't have minded Home Economics, actually. I have finally learned how to make pasta without exploding anything, or creating food the texture and consistency of Shuttle Re-Entry Tiles.

I think that subject is underated. Nowadays I wish I had taken it.
I didn´t ever explode anything when cooking. But often when eating what I cooked, I wish I had..

[boudicca]

I didn't realise you had an Alan Partridge claim to fame in fellow Aloysius Alumni Armando Iannucci (how's that for a terribly tortuous tongue twister?)

Yep. They had his biography in the school library. I don't know why, he went more than a little off-message from them!
Then again, he was Italian, like every other f**ker in that place except me . It was full of the sons and daughters of Glasgow millionaires' chip shop and pizza joint dynasties...

I'm a member of The Aloysian Association - simply by virtue of having gone to school there, you have no choice, they will keep sending me their f**king newsletters 'til the day I die.
It's like a Catholic version of the Masons, I swear to God they had something to do with the assassination of JFK.
(Incidentally, I knew one of his relatives, who went there. Also Richard Branson's goddaughter).

AMDG

HOW did you know about that?

[Planet Dave]

My metalwork teacher (at an otherwise predictably grim catholic skoo) taught us how to grow magic mushrooms, in our first year

He died the next year, midway through revealing the formula for perfect MDMA.

[Debaser]

Never mind subjects they should've taught....what about 'the type of child you'd like to have taught'

Mine would have to be the one that quit whingeing about what they didn't want to be taught, or how badly done to they felt and got off their arse and actually researched what interested them in the first place.

I don't think I've ever said 'OOOoooh no, you mustn't read a book about that period of history coz you only have to know about the history of medicine.....'

[eotunun]

My metalwork teacher (at an otherwise predictably grim catholic skoo) taught us how to grow magic mushrooms, in our first year

He died the next year, midway through revealing the formula for perfect MDMA.

..which makes it likely that he wasn´t exactly aware of how that is done?

[mh]

Never mind subjects they should've taught....what about 'the type of child you'd like to have taught'

Mine would have to be the one that quit whingeing about what they didn't want to be taught, or how badly done to they felt and got off their arse and actually researched what interested them in the first place.

I don't think I've ever said 'OOOoooh no, you mustn't read a book about that period of history coz you only have to know about the history of medicine.....'

No necessary, cos you're actually damn right. And the sad irony is that a lot of the kids I went to school with, who totally focussed on the precise stuff on the curriculum to the exclusion of everything else, ended up as straight A students in school but then totally screwed up university.

[Planet Dave]

My metalwork teacher (at an otherwise predictably grim catholic skoo) taught us how to grow magic mushrooms, in our first year

He died the next year, midway through revealing the formula for perfect MDMA.

..which makes it likely that he wasn´t exactly aware of how that is done?

Maybe not, but he was raving like a bastard when we went down.

[DeWinter]

Never mind subjects they should've taught....what about 'the type of child you'd like to have taught'

Mine would have to be the one that quit whingeing about what they didn't want to be taught, or how badly done to they felt and got off their arse and actually researched what interested them in the first place.

I don't think I've ever said 'OOOoooh no, you mustn't read a book about that period of history coz you only have to know about the history of medicine.....'

They'd probably respond with "What do you think YOU'RE for??", as I remember doing once to my Geography teacher. Or telling him that my parents tax money paid for the desks, so I was perfectly entitled to put my feet on them. He described me as the worst person he had ever met "arrogant and supercilious"! I just really disliked him, god knows why, poor fellow..
Worst thing I saw was the behaviour of parents when their little darlings were ever disciplined. They trooped into the school all righteous fury and proceeded to outright disbelieve any possibility that their child didn't sit at the right hand of God himself. I'd never be a teacher!

Anyway..
I think proper Sex Ed would have been a good idea. We were given ours at 11 at our C of E school by our openly gay Headmaster. He started the lesson by drawing a picture of an erect penis in profile on the whiteboard, but it was so out of proportion to the rest of the body that the man sporting such an appendage would either faint through loss of blood to his head, or just lose balance and fall flat on his face. We reckon it was just wishful thinking on his part.

[markfiend]

Proper sex ed would have been a good idea, yes, but we have the blue-rinse-Daily-Mail brigade to thank for its absence.

'the type of child you'd like to have taught'

Certainly not one particular fellow in our Chemistry lessons, who would pipe up with "is this going to be on the 'O'-level paper?" on a daily basis. Particularly when it was something interesting (like making flash paper) that obviously wasn't on the paper.

[EmeraldSignal]

Subjects they should teach in school:

1)symbolism
2)mind control (Derren Brown's 'The Heist' was fascinating viewing)
3)Life Skills i.e sort yourself out early and you wont have to endure a life of financial slavery i.e mortgages, student loans, TAX..........


4) The Sisters' first album, '.it's a grim world, even in Belgium it's a grim world....................it's about how to deal with the world through the medium of women, drugs and roads.....( I can't remember the whole interview but it was funny and cool).

5) Song Lyrics
a) 'white people go to school where they teach you how to be thick' - The Clash
b)'we learnt more from a three minute record than we ever learnt in school' - BRUCE
c) 'dont wanna be taught to be no fool' - The Ramones
d) 'Baggy Trousers' - Madness

[Maisey]

Sex ed!

Amazing. I remember it so clearly

Our tutor was a young lady in her 20's, and pretty hot at that.

We all sat down, boys and girls in a circle together (this was year 11, 5th year to the oldies).

She pulled out a big box of dildos on stands and passed them out, 1 between 2.

she then took out a bag. Took out a condom, opened it, demonstated it on the dildo. Then a a femidom thing, then lube, then some things for oral sex that resembeled rubber hankies (adding "I've never needed to use one of these")

She then passed out the condoms and instructed us all to have a go.

It was an excellent afternoon.

[DeWinter]

Proper sex ed would have been a good idea, yes, but we have the blue-rinse-Daily-Mail brigade to thank for its absence.

Oh, I dunno. We've had sex education at increasingly early ages over the past twenty years, and it hasn't stopped teenagers acting like alley cats. I was taught before I left my primary school, so I must have been about ten or eleven. If theres a single girl of 13 who doesn't know what sex is and the results can be in Britain, I'd be amazed. To indulge my own inner Daily Mail reader, perhaps if we didn't offer a house and a guaranteed income for 16 years if they're careless, they'd be more circumspect. Hell, if I was offered that and all I had to do was a raise a child without any decent standard of parenting expected of me, I'd happily accept it.
Now where's my Daily Mail, and foreigner-poking stick..

[Francis]

Stuff they should teach in school? Something that would enable the 60%+ of non-academic 14 year olds to get a job: like plumbing, car mechanics or brick-laying. Shakespeare my arse. Don't get me started again...

[boudicca]

Sex ed!

Amazing. I remember it so clearly

Our tutor was a young lady in her 20's, and pretty hot at that.

We all sat down, boys and girls in a circle together (this was year 11, 5th year to the oldies).

She pulled out a big box of dildos on stands and passed them out, 1 between 2.

she then took out a bag. Took out a condom, opened it, demonstated it on the dildo. Then a a femidom thing, then lube, then some things for oral sex that resembeled rubber hankies (adding "I've never needed to use one of these")

She then passed out the condoms and instructed us all to have a go.

It was an excellent afternoon.

Bloody hell!

Seems they really did shelter us with those Catholic values! We just got a diagram of the uterus and that's yer lot

[nick the stripper]

An A Level in formal logic and the scientific method certainly wouldn't go amiss. And it should be a requirement for humanities students if they want to be allowed to have discussions with the grown ups -_-;

Sorry, but far too many Geographers/Philosophers have told me that "Theory" means unproven...

oOo and can we abolish RS please? Nobody'd take an A Level in Organic Chemistry without the rest of the subject, so why should we treat Philosophy any differently?

Bah, beat me to it.

[Dark]

Sex ed!

Amazing. I remember it so clearly

Our tutor was a young lady in her 20's, and pretty hot at that.

We all sat down, boys and girls in a circle together (this was year 11, 5th year to the oldies).

She pulled out a big box of dildos on stands and passed them out, 1 between 2.

she then took out a bag. Took out a condom, opened it, demonstated it on the dildo. Then a a femidom thing, then lube, then some things for oral sex that resembeled rubber hankies (adding "I've never needed to use one of these")

She then passed out the condoms and instructed us all to have a go.

It was an excellent afternoon.

Same with us. We got a whole day off lessons to learn about various things, from contraception, protection, STIs, to where to get help. It was actually really useful.

[Purple Light]

Sex ed!

Amazing. I remember it so clearly

Our tutor was a young lady in her 20's, and pretty hot at that.

We all sat down, boys and girls in a circle together (this was year 11, 5th year to the oldies).

She pulled out a big box of dildos on stands and passed them out, 1 between 2.

she then took out a bag. Took out a condom, opened it, demonstated it on the dildo. Then a a femidom thing, then lube, then some things for oral sex that resembeled rubber hankies (adding "I've never needed to use one of these")

She then passed out the condoms and instructed us all to have a go.

It was an excellent afternoon.

Same with us. We got a whole day off lessons to learn about various things, from contraception, protection, STIs, to where to get help. It was actually really useful.

We didn't get any of that at our school.

We got one 1 hour lesson for sex ed during the whole 8 years or so I was there, in which a (clearly uncomfortable) female teacher pulled out a banana & put a condom on it. She then drew a few pictures on the blackboard & ordered us to draw them in our books. No more.

That's rural Yorkshire for you.

[smiscandlon]

We didn't get any of that at our school.

We got one 1 hour lesson for sex ed during the whole 8 years or so I was there, in which a (clearly uncomfortable) female teacher pulled out a banana & put a condom on it. She then drew a few pictures on the blackboard & ordered us to draw them in our books. No more.

That's rural Yorkshire for you.

Rural Renfrewshire obviously followed the same curriculum.

20 years later and I still can't figure out what I'm supposed to do with the banana...

[Episkopos]

Some rants on the education system, Volume One:

- if you want kids to learn a foreign language, start teaching them young - not long after they've started to get their heads round English - and have native speakers doing the teaching, please. The current theory says languages are best learned young, by osmosis, not during adolescence by repetition. Yes, you can learn foreign languages at that age, but it doesn't work for everyone (we're not all ), but the exposure technique works for more or less everyone. Why d'you think Continental English speakers are so damn good with vocabulary, even if their grammar's a bit wonky? Passive exposure, that's why...

- start sex ed. at twelve, when the kids are becoming sexually mature, and knock the age of consent down there as well. Most of 'em are going to start f**king before they're sixteen anyway: take the taboo off it, get rid of the institutional hang-ups and generally be sensible about the whole thing.

- on a related note, abolish single sex schools. Seriously. They do no harm to outgoing kids with lives outside academia, but sad little nerdlings like me get set back years.

- two words. Continuous. Assessment. Less of the testing to rate the schools, less of the emphasis on finished product. Rather than the current "turn in work, have it marked, it's in the system, now bugger off" setup, introduce a system where feedback actually means something worthwhile. It's ever so much easier to learn from your mistakes with this method running, and you can gradually shift the emphasis onto the way the real world works later in the process...

- no testing in primary schools. At all. The poor buggering kids have so much to learn about being human without worrying about learning to jump through hoops to make teacher look good for the Government.

Gods, but I could go on about this for hours.

[markfiend]

abolish single sex schools. Seriously. They do no harm to outgoing kids with lives outside academia, but sad little nerdlings like me get set back years.

And me.

[Planet Dave]

abolish single sex schools. Seriously. They do no harm to outgoing kids with lives outside academia, but sad little nerdlings like me get set back years.

And me.

Don't worry about it boys, I went to a mixed thingy school and came out a sad little nerdling.

[EmeraldSignal]

subjects they be teaching at school:

All those things that Von was going on about in 'that Virgin Interview' that make up a shared belief system - then we can start talking to each other again.



Oh and bring back rote learning, because in the old days people never understood anything, couldn't do anything but at least their heads contained some facts.( which helped them in a pub quiz). Nowadays people dont understand anything, can't do anything and their heads contain no basic facts at all (like where Leeds is - I kid you not)