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My view of the past,
particularly my schooldays, is like looking down a telescope the wrong way
round; everything is clearer,
smaller but even further away. Also
what I was can be only be judged against what I am now.
This contribution was
prompted by my re-reading Paul Wood’s contribution (to our Members’ Newsletter, Salix) whilst waiting for my
computer to re-install its operating system and thus having an hour when I
could do nothing but sit and wait for it to ping at me. His memories were
both poignant yet were frighteningly true to my memories. They caused me to
ponder what a frail and delicate thing the past is, yet with the power to transport us back
the best part of 50 years.
For me 50 years ago the
divine Muriel Kent decided, in her wisdom, that it was vital that we know
the proportions of carved Roman alphabet characters (capital letters only -
the Romans fortunately never got to lower case). And so we devised rhymes
and a mnemonic to help us regurgitate them all when tested. (If you doubt
this ask John Luff). Last week I
was asked to carve the word ‘onions’ in Spanish onto a chopping board …
… and back it all came: CDGMOQW, AVHUNTXYZ and BEFJKLPRS. Where
did that come from?
Wasn’t it all like this? More
often than not, it was about getting our heads around bizarre and distant
stuff that it was vital that we came to terms with – for use in a vague and
misty future. For me it was made even more vague as I turned out to be “BD”
(Before Dyslexia) so that I was gifted with the ability to invert images
and letters: this means I can write
backwards and upside down but find sentences and logical sequences really
difficult. Quite recently I was
asked whether, when I wrote a
sentence, I knew ‘where it was
going?’. And I had to confess that
in most cases I didn’t. For me a
letter was much like a drawing: you
kind of start somewhere and with a bit of planning and wobbling about, you sort of work it out as you go along.
(Try doing a drawing by starting top left and finishing bottom right). So I was described as ‘bright but can’t
write’ or just a bit ‘thick’. Some time later, too late for me and
secondary schooling, they devised a
name for it.
The biggest nightmares for me
were languages: English, French and
Latin! What! There was this
wonderful system, which in a different time would be called ‘aversion
therapy’, where each homework piece
seemed to be marked out of 100, with one mark taken off for each
mistake. I rarely got more than 10
out of 100. So I developed a
strategy (though I was never usually that premeditated) of making the
homeworks as short as possible, or
avoiding them whenever I could (a string of pathetic excuses - my dog ate
it, my granddad used it to clean his bike,
etc.).
Just like others around me, I
set out to create a situation where I could be successful (that’s sociology speak for ‘I messed
about and caused as much disruption to the lessons as possible’). Generally
I did all I could to disguise the fact that I was ‘rubbish’ at
language-based subjects. So I
became a class clown, witty, relatively popular, but a real pain in the backside for the
less than charismatic teachers. I
didn’t realise that there was a simple solution or even that there was a
problem, but to be honest, neither did my teachers. My ‘condition’, to my knowledge, wasn’t yet identifiable.
So my discomfort with what
was essentially an ‘academic’ curriculum and a ‘going on to university’
ethos, was exaggerated by the fact
that I was essentially a part of the ‘artisan’ class -
that is, I made things. Essentially I learned by doing (through
the ends of my fingers). None of
this has ever caused me to have any need to attribute blame or regret. Secondary school wasn’t ‘wonderful’, but neither was anything else (I think
the concept was beyond me for some time after that.) I emerged with a ‘bag of beans’ (GCE O
levels) that got me onto the next
level, and 5 attempts later one of them became English Language.
Looking down the telescope,
still the wrong way round, I’m
struck that whilst we were all so very different, by today’s standards we were so incredibly alike in many
ways. If only Ian Reddish could
have been black and Muslim as well as the only posh vegetarian ‘in the
village’ he could have represented more cultural diversity in one person
than there was in the rest of the school (at least as far as I was aware -
apologies to anyone else I didn’t notice).
We were all part of an
emerging ‘educated’ class.
Most, it seems, for the first time in our families’
histories. And because I didn’t
follow in my ancestors’ footsteps to become a sheep stealer, a miner, an engine driver or a police constable, I guess it worked. I have a lot to thank the school for
and as those grim years called adolescence (yet another relatively new term
for our generation) had to be spent somewhere, there could have been,
for me, nowhere better than
Carlton le Willows.
Like Paul Wood I eventually
became a person with no first name (a teacher - Mister Lawler), but only teaching things I was good
at: design and technology –
teckie and arty stuff. This
gave me the opportunity to use my disruptive talents to entertain and mess
with the heads of several generations of other people’s children, with the best of intentions and the
benefit of 40 years of educational and psychological research. At least I could use my own experience
to try to recognize those, like
me, with deviant learning
styles, in a more informed way.
Although nostalgia isn’t what
it used to be, it is all I’ve got to remember it by.
And so onwards into the
future looking backwards…
Tony Lawler
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