School Daze
Thursday, February 12th, 2009 12:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
caddyman…and calm.
I have decided to take a few minutes out and think about just about anything other than the feeble-minded, knuckle-headed dunderbrains that make up our elected representatives.
A couple of nights back, Furtle and I were talking about this and that and the subject wandered around to school days, particularly primary school.
Furtle tells of the time she was asked a question about sums by the teacher and couldn’t get it right, no matter how many times she tried, so she just copied it from someone else. The teacher asked her how she got it right and Furtle squirmed a bit before admitting that she had copied it, making the teacher laugh because she was clearly so exasperated. This made me think about my own terror one time when old Joe Lineton, our junior school headmaster wandered around the class pointing at people and asking questions from the multiplication tables. I reckon I was about 8 or 9 at the time.
“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”
“Er. Um. Er, ooh...”
“It’s forty-nine, as everybody knows”.
A few minutes later, having randomly wandered around the class:
“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”
“Forty-nine, Sir, as everybody knows.”
He had a good sense of humour, did old Joe Lineton, and my downright cheek got me out of more than one corner.
It never occurred to me that you could have a favourite multiplication, but it seems quite by chance that Furtle’s favourite is seven times seven. Spooky.
It turns out too, that despite the passage of years and being in different parts of the country, kids’ playground antics are often conducted in the most unsubtle of ways. In Furtle’s day, Star Wars was the preferred game in the playground and she got into trouble because she got fed up with always having to be Princess Leia when the boys could choose whatever they wanted to be. Preferring to be (in order of preference) either Chewy or Han, she settled the argument by decking one of the lads after a long argument.
In my day, the preferred game in the junior school playground was, for a long time, Thunderbirds (later supplanted by Captain Scarlet and then the Champions).
Everyone wanted to be Thunderbird One, meaning you could race around the school yard with your arms held back making satisfying zoom noises. It wasn’t unusual for the fat kid to be Thunderbird Two, but these were up for negotiation and most people got a turn at one or the other. Plus there were Thunderbirds Three and Four to play and the Mole or any of the various things that had to be rescued, like the Sidewinder and other such fun things.
Invariably, however, the smelly unpopular kid was always Thunderbird Five, the space station. We told him that he was really good at it and no-one else could play it like he did. He always stood on one leg at the corner of the playground and sometimes we waved at him as we zooooomed past.
I have decided to take a few minutes out and think about just about anything other than the feeble-minded, knuckle-headed dunderbrains that make up our elected representatives.
A couple of nights back, Furtle and I were talking about this and that and the subject wandered around to school days, particularly primary school.
Furtle tells of the time she was asked a question about sums by the teacher and couldn’t get it right, no matter how many times she tried, so she just copied it from someone else. The teacher asked her how she got it right and Furtle squirmed a bit before admitting that she had copied it, making the teacher laugh because she was clearly so exasperated. This made me think about my own terror one time when old Joe Lineton, our junior school headmaster wandered around the class pointing at people and asking questions from the multiplication tables. I reckon I was about 8 or 9 at the time.
“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”
“Er. Um. Er, ooh...”
“It’s forty-nine, as everybody knows”.
A few minutes later, having randomly wandered around the class:
“Bryan, what is seven times seven?”
“Forty-nine, Sir, as everybody knows.”
He had a good sense of humour, did old Joe Lineton, and my downright cheek got me out of more than one corner.
It never occurred to me that you could have a favourite multiplication, but it seems quite by chance that Furtle’s favourite is seven times seven. Spooky.
It turns out too, that despite the passage of years and being in different parts of the country, kids’ playground antics are often conducted in the most unsubtle of ways. In Furtle’s day, Star Wars was the preferred game in the playground and she got into trouble because she got fed up with always having to be Princess Leia when the boys could choose whatever they wanted to be. Preferring to be (in order of preference) either Chewy or Han, she settled the argument by decking one of the lads after a long argument.
In my day, the preferred game in the junior school playground was, for a long time, Thunderbirds (later supplanted by Captain Scarlet and then the Champions).
Everyone wanted to be Thunderbird One, meaning you could race around the school yard with your arms held back making satisfying zoom noises. It wasn’t unusual for the fat kid to be Thunderbird Two, but these were up for negotiation and most people got a turn at one or the other. Plus there were Thunderbirds Three and Four to play and the Mole or any of the various things that had to be rescued, like the Sidewinder and other such fun things.
Invariably, however, the smelly unpopular kid was always Thunderbird Five, the space station. We told him that he was really good at it and no-one else could play it like he did. He always stood on one leg at the corner of the playground and sometimes we waved at him as we zooooomed past.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 01:05 pm (UTC)Superheroes (duffle coats worn by their hoods only as super hero capes)
Hawk The Slayer(duffle coats tied by toggles around the neck as cloaks)
The A-Team and/or He-Man (warm weather pretend play, no duffle coats)
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 01:38 pm (UTC)I always ended up being R2D2* as this required no knowledge of the plot...
* as I have since realised that R2 is the mastermind behind it all, I am quite happy with this really.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 01:56 pm (UTC)In Northumberland the invariable was unfortunately "beat shit through the southerner every break time" with occasional breaks for "let's talk about this sex rumour thing and compare notes on what we've found out".
In Morayshire it was all snowball fights, singing songs and climbing on the railings.
In Hatfield it tended to be British Bulldog or Join The Crew.
Only in WGC did I get to play imitation games like The A Team or (more commonly) Chips.
Despite me not being that much older than the Furtle, I don't recall seeing anyone play Starwars!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 02:10 pm (UTC)You have to be one of those rare creatures that is universally popular to cross classroom lines.
This is more for girls I think because boys will 'zoom' with anyone but girls draw up the demarkation lines very quickly
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 03:00 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 03:09 pm (UTC)My poor old juvenile brane took a reasonable while to cotton to the fact that things like 7x3 is the same as 3x7.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 03:18 pm (UTC)Though I do remember spending most of one summer pretending to be a tiger with 5 of the other lads at school about the age of 6. With identity cards to prove that we were tigers.
I blame Nici Hawkins. I think he liked drawing tigers.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 05:09 pm (UTC)I remember:
1)Being rubbish at (all)sport
2)Being very jealous of Justin Martin's extensive colletion of Target Dr Who novels, and his AT-AT figure
3)Mrs Grant telling me that the SAS had stormed the Iranian Embassey
4)Watching the Mansion at the end of the playing fields and seeing the twins from my brother's class waving at the window before being pulled away from the window be their guardian after their father was carted off to jail for murdering their mother with a pair of scissors and attempting to burn the body in an old carpet in the back garden while we were playing rounders.....
...yes happy days.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-02-12 06:26 pm (UTC)