School memories

You were unlucky, gillybob. I went to an all-girls Grammar school and although I can't say I loved it, I don't remember any bullying - the staff were very vigilant.

I really disliked school. I was the only one in my group of friends who passed the 11+ and I was really upset that that I would be on my own. The all girls grammar school was awful and the bullying was horrendous.

P.S. just in case this is all the same teacher......hmmmmm doubt it. My school was in Swindon (yup sorry but someone had to grow up there) and was an ex Grammer school dieing on its feet from too much political interferrence. I beleive its a lot better now - Commonweal School.

Bags, sounds so like the teacher I had all those years ago.....killed off my love for history by literally just dictating the text book. When it came to the exams few of us had fully understood the subject. She too had been very sweet but totally ineffectual. Thankfully doing O.U. reinstated my love for the historic - which is just as well as I too am now 'historic'!!

what is is with History teachers? We had an awful teacher who 'dictated' what was in our text book on our desk, we wrote it in our exercise book to learn for a test the next lesson! She did not enthuse one bit about history and as a result I found it dull. A couple of us used to crawl out of the lesson then knock on the door and apologise for being late. She never said anything..I feel really bad about it now..but she was so awful as a teacher!

We also had a teacher who dictated notes, but also left time for discussion of the topic. In my last year, I opted to do classical history for the European history paper, so had to do all the work myself with the help of books lent to me by the teacher. He set and marked the essays, but I suspect that he knew little more about it than I did.

I too had a History teacher who dictated notes the entire lesson. These we wrote down in a hard-backed blue exercise book - quite a fat one, as I remember. She would lapse into anecdotes however, mostly about "....my son Richard...." and we would be dutifully writing all of this down before we realised which showed how much attention we were paying!

I went to visit a teacher who was terminally ill, 25 years after I left school (she never had any children and her pupils were her 'girls' and some had kept in touch) - several of us had arranged to go so I saw people at that visit that had been at school with me, but I hadn't seen for that long. One of the "girls" said to me "I hope you're still writing". I said "Why?" She replied "We all hated you because you would sit on the classroom step before class and dash off your essay and you always got top marks!" I loved school.

A friend and I got detentions and a serious telling-off by the Headmistress for the "appropriation and misuse of general notebooks", which we were supposed to use for rough work and notes etc. We'd actually stolen a couple of new ones from the stock cupboard and were using them to write stories in...very bad!

Only ever got detention from a prefect – for being 'glib'. Translation: poisonous little brat