Third grade report cards

Below is a photograph (click on it) of my school report cards from Year Three (i.e. from 1985). I particularly like the bit that says, “An interesting sense of humour”.

Allow me to paraphrase that: MWAhahahahahaha!!!

Fragments of education

Sometimes I wish that I had more records about what we were taught in school, largely because when I converse with people who were educated elsewhere, looking at differences in curricula can inspire interesting discussions about differences in culture, and the underlying philosophies of the educational systems. I enjoy those discussions but they make me wish I had more data to contribute.

What follows is a bit of a ramble involving selected memories of my secondary school education.

Ode to a computer game

In 1993, I was in eleventh grade at school, and the theme for that year’s Come Out festival was Medieval.

At these festivals (which are sort of fairs for schools that take place every two years) students take part in costume parades and perform other activities for an audience based around that year’s theme. Every class also runs a food stall.

In 1993 my grade eleven class all dressed up as monks, and read Elizabethan poetry that we had composed in preparation for the event. The poetry was to be a sonnet, but we were not taught the proper rhyming scheme for Shakespearian sonnets. It had to be in Elizabethan English, and it had to be a love poem for an inanimate object. Here’s mine.

Handwriting standard

I was in one of the junior grades at school when a new handwriting standard was introduced into schools by the state government educational department. Students in my year level were the first to be taught the then-new standard, called South Australian Modern Cursive, and the first to never be taught the funny old-fashioned style with extra loopy bits all over the place.

In theory, we were occasionally reminded, school policy was that primary school students were expected to adhere reasonably closely to this standard, whereas secondary school students (i.e. grades eight and up) had the right to use whatever handwriting style they wanted. I’m not saying that’s how it worked in practise, but it was reported to be the policy.

Consequently, I grew up seeing the shapes that one chooses to give letters and numbers as a significant form of self-expression. I’m not talking about the aspects of handwriting which are inescapably unique to each individual and mostly generated at an unconscious level; I’m talking about the aspects of handwriting which are a deliberate, conscious choice. Consider a scenario in which you are appointed Emperor, and it becomes fashionable among the nobility to write the same way you do. That doesn’t mean the nobles would literally share your handwriting, but the aspects that they could share, that lend themselves to hypothetical standardisation, those are the aspects I’m talking about.

Invisible ink

For my twenty-first in 1998, various people submitted written anecdotes. The following was submitted by my grade four teacher, Miss Norman.

It was end of year exam time. Everyone, including Adrian, was furiously putting their ideas on paper. Imagine my surprise at the end of the lesson when Adrian handed up a blank sheet of paper. When questioned about the lack of writing I was told it was written in invisible ink and if I held it up at the window I would be able to read it. This was perfectly true. Apparently Adrian’s pen had run out of ink the lesson prior to his exam but he had relentlessly carried on. Needless to say he re-did his story using a new pen. Some teachers just don’t seem to have a sense of adventure!

Incidentally, everyone used to complain about my handwriting. Were these complaints justified? Click on the thumbnail below to see samples of my handwriting from when I was nine, and judge for yourself.

Fictional diseases

My exercise book for the second half of Grade Four (written when I was nine) contained a glossary. Being unfamiliar with the word “glossary”, I called it “The Helper of understanding the story’s in this book Dictionary“.

Most of the entries were diseases. Fictional diseases, that I’d made up. This would have been around the same age that I asked Uncle Rodney (a doctor) to identify the worst disease he’d ever heard of (he nominated several, but I don’t recall which). A child’s imagination is not constrained by adult sensibilities.

Here are some examples:

Schoolbook archaeology: Antherus

I still have a couple of my school exercise books from when I was around 9 years old, as well as some other writings from the same timeframe. For example, as I said earlier, the adventures of Antherus were an obsession for many years.

[Update: Other posts based on material found in my early exercise books can be found here and here.]

Antherus himself was drawn as a hovering upside-down tear-shaped figure with three bands of colour, and could, among other things, become more and less solid at will, easily slipping like a ghost through solid objects if he chose. I had no idea at the time that “Antherus” was also one spelling for the name of the nineteenth Pope. This is perfectly fair: the Pope has no idea that I wrote fiction, or indeed, that I exist.

University

I promised to follow up my posts about education with a post about what I did at university. The time for that post has come, though this will only be a brief overview.

My school years

I started talking about the educational institutions I attended, and I think it’s time to pick up that theme. This post covers where I went to school from June 1983 onwards; I’ll leave talk of university for another day.

[Update: see the Education category for more posts about education.]

Early education

As already mentioned, my first school (for a few months in 1983) was Meadowburn Primary School, in Bishopbriggs, Glasgow. (We still have an old Meadowburn Primary schoolbag, which I’ve photographed below.)

I have some memories of it, but they’re fragmentary, like trying to remember a dream. This post was originally going to have a wider scope - a few words about all the educational establishments I’ve attended - but as I sat and thought about it, various bits of memory about school in Scotland came back to me and so I’ve decided to list them. This isn’t really about education; it’s more about memory, and how odd it is that we remember certain things and not others.