Memories of a Hillhead infant

It was this picture that started it. I've been rummaging among my old teaching materials and came upon a small buff book, with cartridge-paper pages that are half blank, half ruled in light and heavier red. This pre-dates all the other stuff I found, as it comes from my childhood. From 1952, I would say, when I was in Infants 2 in Hillhead Primary School in Glasgow. A chance remark on the Facebook conversation that followed its publication there brought memories flooding back - far too many for that medium. And it struck me that this is social history as well as my history, and I find it fascinating. That's what brings me back to Blethers after so many months. I want to write it down before I forget, or before no-one who was there is around to remember with me.

Let's begin with Christine Findlay, pigtailed in Primary 2. By this time she will be almost 7, because her birthday is in September. This meant that she started school in January, already 5 years and 3 months old and able to read. She is no longer playing with Plasticene and lacing cards (the latter, for some reason, a great thrill; something never seen at home).

Presumably for reasons connected with accommodation - and perhaps staffing - her class was called 1e and the school day began at 1pm and ended at 4pm. She travelled by tram from her top-flat home in Hyndland along Great Western Road to the foot of Cecil Street, where she crossed the main road with the help of a traffic warden. (He was once knocked down while she waited beside the road - perhaps this story will reappear). The lunchtime journey cost a ha'penny - the "Ha'penny Special" for school children; the return a whole penny. A yellow ticket at lunchtime, a blue to go home. Six months later her class became 1a and attended school in the morning. I cannot recall - see: it's going already - if the beloved Miss Buchanan survived the transition to morning class or if it was then that Mrs Reilly appeared, a red-haired, vivacious woman confusingly addressed by older pupils as Miss Forrester.

It is her class that provides this book, and some of my clearest memories. I can actually remember writing some of the legends in it, drawing the pictures to go with the writing exercise. In the course of it, we moved on to joined-up writing, copperplate. But before I go there, a vivid, stressful moment...
We were writing the letter l, lower-case, on the same kind of ruled paper as is above. And I couldn't work out how long the letter l (lower case) should go on. How many lines? Two thick and two thin? It looked far too long and wavering. I was distraught. We were forbidden erasers. Even when I saw a friend - was she a friend? - doing what looked a more correct version, there was no way I could hide my shame. I was a fool, and I blushed. That perky child in the picture - wearing, I notice, the regulation school winter jersey with the collar (striped in school colours) through which one threaded the school tie under the gym-slip - was feeling anything but perky.

But I progressed. My writing became fairly spectacularly neat copperplate - an example occurring in the day we learned about Diogenes. There is a wonderful picture of someone else's vision of how he might live here, but this is what I drew.

On other days we drew such things as the Glasgow coat of arms (so hard, these fish!) and a cuckoo which still looks quite convincing. All with this amazing writing underneath. Of other learning I remember less; I was bored much of the time during reading lessons because I was already a fluent reader and became cross at people who read aloud each individual word. Clearly, I was not destined to be a patient person.

I think there were forty children in my class, boys and girls equally distributed. The "a" designation referred to our birth dates, and all of us had our birthdays between September and December. We were the oldest class in the year group, we had had two terms of education more than the rest of the year. We felt superior, and no doubt we acted that way. We had embarked on our Hillhead journey. And the next time it's raining and I have little more to do, I'll regale the waiting world with a few memories of the next stage of that journey ...

Moving swiftly on: parenting and education

Considering my own childhood - and I realise it must seem odd to many - led me inexorably to think about my own role as a parent trying to encourage children to learn, do homework and so on. I was about to say that by comparison with my own parents' involvement, I was a complete failure - but then I thought about the outcome for both sons and decided that was a tad sweeping. So what do I remember?

The Word Tin. Son no.1 used to produce this, when he was in P1, with a look of doom. We had to pick words out of a tobacco tin (where on earth did I lay my hands on this item?) and he had to recognise them. At the time he was four and a half and it was torture. Later, there was more amusement to be had in thinking up outrageous sentences with which he could demonstrate the meaning of words. And that, I have to admit, is all I can remember from the Primary school years. I have very little recollection of what - if anything - I did to help no. 2 son. He used a thing called the word-maker, and progressed to a sentence-maker, but I didn't seem to do anything. Could this be because by then I'd gone back to work?

When your children attend the secondary school in which both parents teach, the experience is somewhat different from the norm. I was certainly involved in helping both sons with English - rescuing one from having to do North and South for Higher by spending a whole Easter holiday studying the Larkin set texts so that he could use them in the exam a month later actually involved me in the most God-awful scene with his class teacher, who happened to be my boss. I did a bit of Standard-grade Latin with both of them. And when no.1 son became editor of the school magazine, he recruited me as the Editor-in-chief because it was more convenient for him - and look where that got us.

Actually it got me into what I see as the most important single piece of education I ever undertook. I don't know how many evenings I spent in the school while both sons in turn ran the magazine, teaching myself to do desktop publishing (Adobe Pagemaker) when they left and the boy who knew how to do it let us down, sharing hilarious pressure with successive generations of student journalists when the photocopier jammed/ran out of ink/got too hot, going off with them to competitions in Edinburgh and to the Scottish Parliament, sitting in on interviews with Frank Pignatelli, then Director of Education for Strathclyde, and John Smith, leader of the Labour party. Pupils who were shy learned to use the phone, to contact advertisers, to sell advertising; others learned touch-typing without ever taking Business Studies, coaxed ancient Macintosh Classics to work years after they should have recycled, learned to use the scanner and the value of white space on the page.

Did this make up for the fact that we had television on every night? That there was a small telly in the older son's bedroom, linked to the ZX Spectrum but also to an aerial? That they both had radios and listened to music incessantly, from an early age? That we allowed an 11 year old to have a modem and a year's subscription to BT's precursor of the internet (what on earth was it called?) so that he would come and beg: "Can I go online now?" before he was in secondary school? At the time I felt I was failing, when I'd find one of them sweating over something for the magazine the night before some important exam, but now I'm less sure.

But there's so much more to think about in this early exposure to the medium I'm using now that I think I'd better leave it to another post. It's a long way from the Word Tin ...

Aleatoric Iggle Piggle

Hmm. Both hands
Originally uploaded by goforchris.

There's something wonderful about watching discovery happen. Catriona, who's just two, realised at the weekend that her grandad could play Iggle Piggle's tune (if you don't know, you've not been around young children recently) on the piano. She instantly recognised the tune and wanted to join in. After a few solo explorations of the keyboard came the joyous moment of the duet - Grandad playing around her tiny hands, while Catriona picked out notes for herself.

Actually the result was slightly unsettling, like the sound-track to a Hitchcock movie or The Turn of the Screw - the jaunty, familiar melody juxtaposed with the sudden sourness of dissonance. But she was enthralled.

Another great moment was inspired by the finale of the Cowal Games, as we watched the bands march down Argyll Street, each playing their own tunes. Catriona found the pipes too loud (they are, actually) but loved the drums. (I think her father has got to her). When she came home afterwards, she had the gallus walk of the tenor drummer to a T - and the hand movements as she drummed away at the air, laughing like a mad thing.

I guess I'll have to wait for the outcome: the grand piano on stage, or the draggled march behind the pipers ...

Home and study

This recent line of thought about learning has taken some interesting twists. I suppose most of us take for granted our own peculiarities - until we're brought up against the effect they may have on others. I was intrigued by Katya's comment about home education for her children: how does one educate one's own? I mean, I know I chucked in the odd bit of input when my offspring were doing English, or Latin - but they were pretty young when I stopped interfering with their maths homework. My own parents helped me - I've already mentioned how my father supplemented the lamentable teaching in English that my otherwise admirable school provided, and my mother used to sit poring over passages of Virgil until she had, as she put it, "broken the back" of the nightly translation exercise for me. But how extraordinary that my father (with his 1st in English) should then turn his attention to my struggles with Physics, in order to assist me in understanding, if I remember correctly, the principle of moments.

I hadn't thought about this for years, until Mrs H pointed out that for a family of four to sit in one room every evening with the homework going on at the table while individual tuition took place at various moments between the hours of 6pm and 9pm was, to put it mildly, unusual. My sister and I had masses of homework, and yet I never, in all my school and university career, worked later than 9pm - because my father was sure that any work done past that time wasn't likely to be worth much. (And here I am blogging at midnight - was he right?) After 9pm I would look forward to an hour or so's reading before bed - we had no telly in the house until I had graduated from Uni. So structured, so easy to fall in with - would I have succeeded at all if he'd been less interested? Or would I simply have pursued my own interests and never, ever have passed higher Maths?

It's hard to imagine that happening now, and yet I still believe that if parents don't interfere in their children's education in some way these children have a much harder row to hoe. They have to provide their own motivation, find a silent space away from the telly, resist the temptation of Facebook or Second Life - or use these and other tools creatively in the educational process.

And does anyone still prepare translations of Virgil any more?

Learning patterns

Following on from my previous post, I've been thinking some more about how we learn. First there was an interesting conversation with Mrs Heathbank about the differences in our upbringing, and then a further nudge from Kimberly's little dig about a lapse of memory on my part. Now, it would be easy to dismiss such a lapse as a consequence of advancing years, but in this case it simply wouldn't be true.

I have always had trouble with remembering bare facts. I remember earnestly staring at vocabulary lists, committing them to memory only to have forgotten them by the next morning. Yet I gained such good marks in unseen Latin translation in my second year at Uni that I was given an exemption from this paper in the degree exam. You would think from that that somehow the laboriously learned vocab had stuck, but no. It was the ability to see the words in context and to make the imaginative leap to the meaning of a whole sentence, a whole paragraph, and the added facilty in reaching for an acceptably lucid and idiomatic expression of same that piled on the marks. Obviously using language in context was what I needed - and what makes me an inspired guesser when faced with a torrent of French in a restaurant.

And this is part of what we were discussing today. The difference between the kind of linear thinking that moves methodically through the stages of something to reach a conclusion, and the thinking that, as it were, makes a jump into the new idea and, having grasped its essentials, finds a means to convey it as cogently as possible. The latter is how I have worked in the past, and is still how I explore new ideas. I have a feeling that's why I write poetry rather than prose when it comes to imaginative writing: poetry is the keeper of the space between the words where the truth lies. And when I'm reading rapidly, I know I don't read from right to left, but focus on the middle of each line so that I take in the whole line in a one-er. This is not to say that this is in any way a superior way to acquire learning, but it's the one I'm stuck with.

So it's unlikely that I shall ever be able to remember J and P in a vacuum - though I may manage with Q....

Reflective pupils?

Edubloggers whom I read and admire, like Mr W and Edublogger ipse, often comment on how blogging has tended to make them more reflective practitioners of the art of teaching. Tonight I have been reflecting on how teaching has made me a more reflective student - because from time to time, in my new life, I find myself in statu pupillari in a small mixed-ability group.

I must've been a pretty awful pupil in some respects. In English, especially, I never in the whole of my six years in secondary had a decent English teacher other than my dad - and God alone knows how he found the energy to enthuse me after a day's teaching. (I taught, briefly, in the same department as one of my former teachers and confirmed my suspicions: she was every bit as dire as I had suspected) But I digress. The thing was that when I became bored I used to read a book under the desk (possible in a class of 40) and eat Mintolas. I simply opted out of the whole process - and this was in the top class in a selective school.

Back to being in a mixed-ability group. In some ways it's quite like the teaching involved when pupils are expressing their ideas about a piece of writing and you're being encouraging and trying to guide them towards coherence and actual understanding. I find myself holding back - not interrupting, for the most part, and trying not to ask the question which will destroy the idea newly presented. There is a huge temptation, when you see the "answer", to leap in with a swift summary to demonstrate your own understanding without necessarily taking anyone else with you other than the "teacher" - but because I've been the teacher myself I know this can't be allowed because the rest of the class won't all be there with you. And there's the knowledge of how irritating it is if a pupil interrupts before a teaching point is properly made - or, worse still, interrupts another pupil so that they almost come to blows.

And all this brings me round, in a circuitous sort of way, to reflecting on the problems faced by our pupils in a class, whether mixed-ability or streamed. Unless a pupil is working solo, there must be long periods of boredom, irritation, frustration - and a sense of how much more rapid learning could be taking place if the rest of the class weren't there. I know this doesn't allow for the sparks generated in a really good-going discussion - but how much of my own enjoyment of this as a teacher was because it felt as if I was doing a good job?

I am happy to report, however, that I learned a new word today: pericope. And I felt as if this was a word I have needed to know and use for all of my life. Wonderful.