I started school in August 1932. Classes began at nine o-clock and ended at four in the afternoon. There were two ten minute recesses and a lunch break of one hour.
A single County Board of Education governed Catholic and Protestant systems.
Primary school was six grades. Secondary School was five. Legal age for leaving school was fourteen.Successful completion of third year Secondary earns a General Certificate of Education. I'm not sure certification existed then.
At five, I was dipping a pen into an inkwell,placing my thumb and forefinger over two holes in the pen stem and sweating over the formation of letters to the standard expected by our permanently sour headmistress, Sister Alphonsus. Blots and smudges were the bane of my existence.
We read aloud,learned religion,literature, spelling, grammar,drama, history,geography arithmetic,art,knitting sewing,gym, choir and The Latin Mass in Plain Chant.
History went back to Queen Boadicea and her Chariot, Alfred of the Burned Cakes and another fellow who learned a valuable lesson while hiding in a cave, watching a spider spin his web.
We learned of wars and Kings and Queen's and a poor opinion of Good Queen Bess, a Protestant, while her cousin Mary,Queen of Scots and a Catholic, was close to sainthood.
In geography, we learned of colonies, continents,countries,capital cities, major rivers,mountain ranges,surrounding oceans,the Gulf Stream and climate,natural resources and manufacturing industries.
Sister Alphonsus was an art teacher. Our Art classes were of serious dimension.
We were a working class community. The order of teaching nuns were not. We were taught God loves the poor and it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter heaven.
We were not encouraged to aspire. If lessons were mastered we went on to the next class. Standings were not circulated. Obviously, if informed we'd done well, we might have had ideas above our station.
The poorer,the grimier a student,the more physical abuse and degradation was his lot. Gratuitous cruelty regularly contradicted the Message of Christ.
In Secondary school, our subjects were advanced. We had mathematics with geometry and algebra , French and Latin languages and science in a laboratory.
Compositions changed to essays. Reading plays and novels and writing poetry was English. Figures of speech were the last formal lesson I recall and the word "Onomatopoeia" stayed in my head ever since.It is a word derived from a sound.
We had lay teachers as well. But Nuns were in charge, They founded the school in my mother's time.
School was not a fun place to be then either..
University was the next stage. Few students were expected to advance from St Mary's Primary School. It wasn't because university was too expensive.The only criteria was competence. It was because most families could not or would not support a student beyond the legal requirement.
Then again, many career skills, like nursing, were acquired by doing and attending lectures and taking exams during off duty.
Formal school was not necessarily the end of an education. It was a foundation for learning.
I don't think it's the same now.
Nor do I think it's getting better.
A student with access to a computer can learn independently and hide the deficits.
Wednesday 21 October 2009
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5 comments:
What a fantastic post. I really enjoy how you weave your words together.
Now I'm going to go look up the story of Alfred of the Burned Cakes.
Have a great day, my friend!
I work for a school board. Yesterday I was visiting a classroom and the teacher was writing on the board. The project for the day was about "traffic" but what appeared on the board and remained uncorrected in large letters for the students to learn about was "trafic." (I did not correct it as I am not a teacher and therefore have no standing or credibility when it comes to "classroom stuff").
I work with 2 people who constantly use the word "digress" when they mean "regress". A couple of weeks ago I heard a sports reporter on CBC say, "Her and her skiing colleague are preparing hard for the olympics."
Language, grammar, literacy, spelling, punctuation are my bugbears (just ask my children!) and I am appalled by standards, or lack thereof, today. I too learned how to print and master cursive writing using a pen dipped into a messy inkwell. Penmanship was important and we took pride in it. Today it is difficult to find a student who can produce cursive writing let alone a sample that is legible.
Thank you for your post.
Proper spelling/grammar is important to me. Making sure I spelled correctly was a good way to earn a few extra marks in public school, and throughout high school. I don't know what happened, but very few people share my opinion on the importance of grammar & spelling.
At work a few weeks ago I was advised to tell a customer that if his new contract was "56 weeks or less, there would be no extra fee". I didn't know which was proper, but heard myself telling the customer "56 weeks or fewer". I looked it up. "Less" ain't the right one. But I'm definitely the minority, all day long I hear everyone saying 'less' instead of 'fewer'. What do you think?
I have a colleague who seldom uses capitalization in her emails. Turns out she doesn't use it at ALL, because it's faster just to type and let her wordprocessor capitalize where necessary. Neat idea, I suppose. I'm a little confused when I get an email addressed to "dear heather", though.
My 10 year old was 'diagnosed' with a reading/writing learning disability in grade two. The allowances made because he's got a 'learning disability' are really astounding at times. I'm all for choosing the learning method that works best, but ALL aspects are important. In this day and age he may never need to put pen to paper and write a composition without a keyboard, spellcheck, grammar check, etc - but does it mean he shouldn't learn how??
This one is a hot topic for me. I'm eager to hear what others think!
Heather I am absolutely thrilled to make your acquaintance! I have always felt as though I am from a different planet when it comes to valuing language, grammar, spelling and punctuation. We have a beautiful language and it is worth preserving in its correct form.
Hallelujah!
Signed
Anonymous
October 22nd, 9:18
P.S. I remember being appalled when my children were in kindergarten, Grade 1 & 2 and the flavour of the day in teaching was "creative spelling." I could not understand an approach that allowed words to be spelled any old way and then later saying to a child after having spelled the word in that way for ages, "Wrong! Now this is the correct way!" Why not teach the correct form from the beginning? I taught my children how to spell correctly as soon as they developed fundamental language skills.
"Creative Spelling" - I love creative spelling to an extent. When my son was quite young (maybe 5?) he loved to write stories. I always encouraged him to just fill up the lines with his story, we could work on the fine-tuning later. Some of his creative spelling was particularly ingenious. He wrote once about a 'vakashun to the cottij'- I copied that one down into his baby book. BUT - we corrected it as we reread it.
Maybe the difference is now, as I read recently, it's taboo to tell people they're wrong, they've made a mistake. In the interest of keepign everything level we're supposed to be totally politically correct and unbiased and offer constructive criticism only when absolutely necessary. But someone told you 2+2 = 5 would you tell them that as long as they're not offended you'd like to suggest they review their answer, or would you just tell them the sum is 4. I guess it's all in the approach.
It's great to teach our children to sound out the words when they're young and learning. But there comes a time when 'cottij' is no longer acceptable.
Here's a link I enjoy. And another.
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