I was playing hide and seek with the kids in Fyren, the local park, yesterday and I got talking to one of the other dads. Hearing that I worked with English, he asked me if I knew which words were the only completely interchangeable synonyms in English. It was something he’d learnt in school and had never forgotten.
Of course I didn’t.
The answer was gorse, furze and whin: all of which describe ulex europaeus.
A useful ice breaker at a dinner party if you’re sitting next to an English teacher and really can’t think of anything interesting to say. Otherwise, not a desperately useful fact.
But our heads are, I suspect, full of this sort of thing. Nuggets, reverently saved from schooldays.
Richard of York won battles in vain. That sort of thing.
Anyone else got any treasured facts learnt at school, useful or useless, that they’ll never forget?
I think you’ll find it’s Richard of York *Gave* Battle In Vain – the G standing for Green.
I can’t recall anything particularly enlightening from school, but I remember Arthur Fowler in Eastenders pointing out “all that glitters is not gold” is wrong because Shakespeare actually wrote “glisters”.
‘I can’t recall anything particularly enlightening from school’
Very true. Stephen Moffatt once wrote a school-based sitcom called Chalk. I remember a scene in which a teacher asks the neurotic head to explain why he said something along the lines of, ‘lurking in the psyche like a French teacher.’
His explanation ran, ‘We give them funding, classrooms, whole wings of schools sometimes.’ ‘Yes. And …?’ ‘Well doesn’t it strike you as suspicious that none of us can speak French?’
I’ve always remembered Arthur Daley saying this a mantra that I’ve tried to live by ever since.
I learnt it as ‘gained’ battles – seeing the top of google search when you start on the phrase both turn up.
Also, Jeremy Beadle on his late 70s radio show said that TYPEWRITER is the longest word you can make from the letters on the top row of a typewriter. An unbeatable chat up line when you’re 14 and trying to work out what to say to girls.
I had a typewriter when I was 14, and that didn’t impress the girls much.
Richard Of York…….. still sometimes used for colour coding audio multicores instead of numbering the connectors.
My very easy mother just served us nowt
My daughter taught me that one
I’m not sure about the slight on the mother’s virtue, Bisto!
According to the urban dictionary, posh people say: my very educated mother just served us nougat.
hang on, I very much doubt that any of us were at school after Pluto’s demotion. Where’s the P?
The one date every schoolchild remembers even had a book written about it.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1066_and_All_That
Surely there must be other equally important years?
Universal sufferage? The first hit by the Beatles? The start of the NHS? The arrival of the Windrush?
Ah, 1066 – when William of Orange won the World Cup, and Alfred Nobel got hit in the eye with a stick of dynamite.
Random school facts:
Terminal moraines.
Ox bow lakes.
Bari-Brindisi-Tatanto triangle.
The Spinning Jenny.
Crop rotation.
Turnip Townsend.
Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit. (this was genuinely useful.)
This all adds to my theory that you remember everything that happens to you at age 14 and it influences the rest of your life. 🙂
I live in the Bari-Brindisi-Taranto triangle! I never knew it was a ‘thing’ though. In fact I suspect you dreamt that.
I also don’t buy the OP either, KFD. The only completely interchangeable synonyms in English? Pah! I’m sure I could think of loads, if I wasn’t so heavily sedated.
Crop rotation I do know something about though. Thanks to these young chaps, I know that in the 14th century it was considerably more widespread after John.
I’m also dubious about those being the only true synonyms. But it’s a lovely sunny and it’s
Half term for the kids so it will have to stay unchallenged for now.
Hmpf! Should you be of a teutonic disposition you might find some schadenfreude in the fact that here in the so-called Bari-Brindisi-Taranto triangle it’s a cold, wet, grey and miserable day. Hmpf!
Every Good Boy Deserves Fruit?
Does that include me?
*rubs thighs*
Every Good Boy.
Alright, I’ll have another go.
What about this triangle?
Much like any other triangle (hypotenuse, Bermuda, Count Basie Orchestra) but less well organised and with better food.
But does it have Kate O’Mara?
*rubs thighs again*
You’re supposed to rub your own thighs. Not mine. I’ve got chafing now.
Sorry old bean, couldn’t resist
Stavanger. The fjords. I could go on.
Slartibartfast won a design award for the Fjords
when this “fact” was offered to my Geography Teacher, he sent me out of the class (humourless b**tard!).
In fairness, I had been winding him up and generally annoying him for the past hour.
Same thing happened when I suggested in Home Economics that the richest source of Vitamin C was Corn Flakes
I am sure that all Geography teachers are weird; both ones that taught me and as colleagues. I have little evidence for this but it is still a fact. 🙂
Ours was repeatedly in the local magistrates court being fined for taking girly photos. We used to pass the press clippings around the class while humming Girls on Film.
It must have been hell for him, but he was a bit crap anyway.
one of my old geography teachers was a leading light in the Cornish Separatists
You’ve forgotten Jethro Tull! Ian Anderson didn’t!
Just imagine if he’d called his band Turnip Townsend!
The whole history of pop music would be different.
Ah, this is significant. I never remember much about Jethro Tull, thereby influencing my musical preferences. 🙂
And my Geography teacher’s choice of O Level syllabus option forever influenced my interest in Scandanavian pop. 🙂
The Fjords made some nifty tunes in the mid-90s. Collected on the 2CD compo “Lovely Crinkly Edges”.
Roy G Biv
That would be a rather…specific dream!
Standing atop Esk Fell in the Lake District recently, I noticed a small hillock in the middle of the valley below us. A dusty memory stirred from Mrs Tully’s geography class 37 years ago. “That’s called a drumlin,” I said. No one cared.
We used to go on geography field trips to Oswestry Hill Fort to study glacial formations.
The most useful thing I learned was whether Samantha Hentall would sneak off with me and let me put my hand up her blouse again. She probably did; she was a very obliging girl, Samantha (name changed, just in case anyone here married a girl called Samantha Hentall who probably knows nothing about glaciers or hill forts, or hands for that matter).
And were her drumlins glacial formations?
Sizzling stuff! It sounds as “Samantha”‘s formations were anything but glacial!
‘Drumlin’ was a pointless answer on Pointless earlier today (photographs of geographical features, and the letters d_ _ _ _ _ _n). Just think of the glory that could have been yours for the taking.
I had an English teacher in my third year who in one lesson was teaching us about verse. He was asked a question and excitedly went off on a tangent mentioning, ‘iambic pentameter’. Suddenly, Mr Scott realised that he had jumped too far ahead and that this term would be rather sophisticated for us thirteen year olds to grasp. He told us to completely disregard ‘iambic pentameter’ and to forget he ever brought it up, going as far as telling us to never to discuss the past five minutes ever again.
Naturally, it’s the only thing I remember Mr Scott teaching us.
There’s a case for saying that honing the specific skill of getting-your-teacher-to-go-off-on-one-and-talk-out-the-lesson is one of the most important aspects of education.
I didn’t spend as much time in school as my teachers would have liked…and my teachers didn’t spend much time trying to teach us much of anything in class, so I have very few memories of this kind.
But I do know the names of four Soviet (as it was back then) rivers, because our fifth grade geography teacher would make us chant them in a particular order over and over again, and it stuck. No idea where exactly they are situated, why those four in particular were deemed important enough to remember (Ob, Jeniseij, Lena – apparently pronouneced Jena – Amur were the four rivers, Swedish spelling).
Then there was the famous “Vi ska laga, ni ska äta” (“We shall cook, you shall eat”), to remember four Swedish rivers in the right order (Viskan, Lagan, Nissan, Ätran), except every time you say or write that down you immediately think; “Hang on, is it Vi ska or Ni ska in the beginning? And is it Laga before Äta or the other way around?” so it doesn’t really work.
So what happened in 1066 then??
England won the World Cup (I think)
1066? That was Norman the Conqueror, wasn’t it?
No, that was Richard III, who hid in a tree, only to emerge when an apple fell on his head, into which Robin Hood fired an arrow.
Strictly speaking I never learned this at school, but during my basic training in the Royal Navy at the seamanship school at HMS Ganges.
The distance line between 2 ships carrying out a replenishment at sea has flags at spaced out on a line set up between the 2 ships.
The colours of the sequence of the flags are Red, Yellow, Blue, White, & Green.
Forever remembered as “Rub your bollocks with grease”.
When I left primary school, I asked Mrs. Thompson to sign my autograph book. She wrote “procrastination is the thief of time.” I’d never heard the word “procrastination” before. That still sticks in my mind for some reason.
Oh, that and another teacher who lived above an ice cream shop (the soft serve type) on Chiswick High Road who told me never EVER find out how that ice cream is made otherwise it would put you off for life. I wondered for ages what on earth were they putting in it? Pigs trotters? Snails and worms?
I learned how to wire a plug in Physics. Seriously. I wouldn’t have learned that at home – the sort of thing my Dad would claim to know but would actually get wrong and burn the house down.
I learned about centres of gravity from my CDT teacher. I mean the actual concept. It kind of blew my mind.
I learned that the funniest thing in the world is an adult trying not to be embarrassed when saying the word “penis”.
We had that very same lesson, Moose. Our (firm but fair) Physics teacher marked everyone out of 10. Very few of us got more than a few marks on our first attempt.
The lesson went down into folklore as in another class one of the lads plugged his (poorly) wired plug into one of the sockets in the lab and switched it on. I wasn’t there, but I understand there was a big flash and some shouting.
Are we talking about the plug lesson or the penis lesson? 😉
Ha ha! Should’ve written that more carefully considering the previous post. It was, of course, the plug wiring lesson.
I remember the Geography teacher who taught me all these dull topographical facts that are indelibly etched on my brain. He was a temperamental bastard who ranted at us one day:
‘Why can you remember the lyrics to pop music yet not remember basic Geography?’ Even at 14 I knew the answer to this idiotic question.
Yet ironically I still remember the stuff about ox bow lakes. And how to read an OS map. Contours. And so on. And about the Italian car industry, and Norwegian ferries.
/rambles on…
My geography teacher gave me the eternally memorable mechanism for safe driving at sea: “Port is red and best left alone”. Obviously, I ignored the implied abstinence advisory, but to this day I can tell you which side of the ship we are on when riding the waves.
I learned that liberating bottles of mercury from the chemistry lab was a very lucrative pastime.
I learned that I bloody hate climbing ropes.
I learned about the benefits of crop rotation and how pig iron is integral to the production of steel.
I learned that much of what they were determined to fill my young malleable mind with was of very little practical use.
Pencil was a teenage mercury dealer?
Can’t say I’m surprised.
I remember thinking that climbing ropes were stupid, although if the teach’ was out of the room you could swing on them and make Tarzan noises. Outside of training for the armed forces, there is no situation in e the real world where you’d have to climb a f***ing rope. They should have put a tree in the gym instead.
At school I learned about:
– the music scene of the time (from the other boys in my class), specifically the crucial dividing lines between different genres (“Adam and the Ants aren’t really punk”, that sort of thing)
– glacial landscaping features, made more relevant by the fact that we lived on an alluvial plain and so could do field trips and see the actual glacial features the teacher was talking about
– how irredeemably dull Thomas Hardy and all poetry is
– how pointless it is to read Shakespeare unless you have a Tudor Thesaurus to hand (and even then, it’s not worth the effort)
– the advantage of having a watch with a continuously gliding second hand (rather than the one which jumps second by second), because as my chemistry explained, time actually moves continuously and so should your watch
– how hockey is much more violent than rugby.
But the main thing I learned was the hypocrisy of teachers. Two examples:
(a) having a major hang-up about children smoking, but whenever you went to the staff common room it reeked of tobacco
(b) our maths teacher told us that all the teachers brought in the Glasgow Herald (broadsheet paper), except one who resolutely bought the Daily Record (aka Scottish Mirror, strictly tabloid). Whereupon all the teachers would ask to borrow his Record, and leave their Heralds unread.
Hypocrisy of adults in general: whenever we watched TV at school we had to have the blinds drawn and the lights off.
Put the telly on at home and you can’t have the lights off, oh no, because it hurts your eyes.
The other thing about the TV/Video interlude at school was the realisation that ALL teachers were technological dullards (why does it take 3 of them 20 minutes to get a Betamax machine to appear on a TV screen?)
I meant to say “as my chemistry teacher explained”, not “as my chemistry explained”, of course.
As a 15 year old boy my chemistry was more a hindrance than a help, to be honest, and seemed to confuse matters instead of explaining anything.
From “geog” I remember that Calgary is big on pig iron. Basically nothing else.
Useful stuff (beyond reading, writing and arithmetic) came from Engineering/Technology.
* Righty Tighty / Lefty Loosey
* 1st and 3rd Angle Projection (Technical Drawing)
* Welding
* Why it is a bloody stupid idea to stop a lathe with your hand
etc
Useful because it gave a grounding before starting Apprenticeship.
School just tended to be “something that happened” and I just sort of drifted through it, never really achieving anything.
In retrospect, it is surprising the amount of seemingly pointless stuff that went in.
One thing that is hard-wired, but I have never had a need to use is the formula for solving quadratic equations
http://i1062.photobucket.com/albums/t490/Rigid_Digit/Quadratic2BFormula_zpsrhabwoom.gif
“Righty Tighty / Lefty Loosey” is a rather cynical summary of political positions on public spending.
I remember a word I had never heard before in my O Level English exam.
Antediluvian.
I went home and looked it up. The shit Grammar School education had clearly let me down!
I got a B.
I have used it since whenever I can.
I would probably still not have heard of it if not for Donovan.
I don’t think anyone in the US would have heard of a Hurdy Gurdy Man if it wasn’t for Donovan. Similarly, the Beatles and Helter Skelter (hence Manson’s, er, misunderstanding)
BODMAS maths mnemonic
And today I learned that if your trouser fly is at half mast, then the Dutch for it is potlood verkoper,( pencil seller).
Lifelong education eh? I’ll try to remember that one for my next trip to the Netherlands.
As a spotty 14 year old for whom girls were creatures from another planet, I was a bit confused when our charismatic Latin teacher told us that the ancients had always said: “Women for children, boys for pleasure and goats for an emergency.”
Some years later I was told that he’d had little interest in either goats or women.
I just googled that sentiment to discover whether it was actually a famous quotation from Catullus or Cicero and stumbled across this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Melon_for_Ecstasy
A melon for ecstasy? Harrow greengrocers would have been delighted if teenage schoolboys had believed that.
You have to warm them up in the microwave first.
Apparently.
What? Women?
That explains a lot.
They really didn’t explain much about this sort of thing at my school.
Never heard of Pop Tarts?
(….oh god, I’ve gone too far now)
Two sheets of hot cardboard, with molten lava in between?
Unlike Douglas, thanks to some very inspiring English teachers, I left school with a great love of Shakespeare. As a grammar school with pretensions, we did an Elizabethan play once a year. This was a co-production with the local girls school, so learnt about a lot more than iambic pentameters.
I was a crap actor and only got a few walk on roles. My towering moment of glory was as Third Madman in The Duchess of Malfi. All we had to do to was jump around and gibber bawdily under a strobe light.
Typecast for life!
I did wonder about your school when you mentioned Harrow above. Was it the sort of place where you wer encouraged to say that you went to school ‘in Harrow’ in the hope that people would hear you saying that you were schooled ‘at Harrow’?
God no! We had no time for those toffs on the hill. It would never enter our minds to associate ourselves with them.
As mentioned, it was a boys only school, which I regret. No Samanthas to explore Iron Age fortifications with for us!
In the 6th form we were allowed, under very controlled conditions, to have rather dull joint activities with the girls school.
The most interesting “joint” activities were probably taking place behind the bicycle sheds.
Jeffrey Archer did this with Winchester. He went to a school in Winchester and… well, you probably know the rest.
Wellington, actually.
Archer apparently used to say that he’d “…been to Wellington”, allowing people to conclude that he’d been to the prestigious public school Wellington College, in Berkshire. In fact, he’d been to the private Wellington School in Somerset.
Oh! Got to get the facts right, lest someone be accused of being dishonest 😉
German prepositions aus, außer, bei, mit, nach, seit, von, zu, and gegenüber always take the dative. Marvellous.
gegenüber ? Isn’t that called a courgette now?
Anyway. Not at school, but I learned over the weekend that Robert Hardy (yes, the one from All Creatures Grunt and Smell, the fabulously named Siegfried) is a world renowned expert in longbows.
And my favourite line fo german?
Fritz die Fliege sitzt am rande des Tisches.
David Cameron is going to look like Robert Hardy one day. Mark my words.
bis durch fur gegen ohne um entlang and wider
I remember the list but not why. Do they all take the accusative?
They do indeed. You’ve still got it, Baron!
Well I never! There is a band called Fords.
http://youtu.be/2XitEPTWttA
Several in fact! There’s also one from Romania!
There must surely be a Norwegian tribute band called Pink Fjord.
That sounds extremely rude.
“That Norwegian woman let me park my love-tanker in her pink fjord”
I once had a teacher who refused to ever award full marks because “only God’s perfect”. Might as well give up trying then.
The Almighty was always a pretty awful swot!
Only because Satan did his homework
must have gone to the same school as me. i had a teacher who did exactly the same. C of E school it was so that might explain it.
A recital of the monarchs of England that took ages, beginning “Willy 1, 1066 – 1087, Willy 2….”
German clauses: verb comma verb
I can still decline declensions 1 – 5 in Latin and all forms of German “der-die-das-die”
More of Voltaire’s Candide has stuck in my head than I am proud to say.
Mr Brown was the cool Art teacher. Having been a perennial C/C with Mr Whitworth (achievement/effort) I became a C/A. Only because I was the only kid in the class who had heard Born To Run before and could recite the lyrics to him. (Thanks Dad)
I have a bit of retentive memory, which has gotten me out of a few jams. When it starts to go, I am up shit creek.
Sadly I remember the bad lessons as vividly as the good ones.
We had a Combined Cadets Corps at our school and several of the teachers were to be addressed by their military rank. Theere was Lieutenant Colonel who was a biology “teacher.” Even a humble supply teacher, brought in at the last minute in the case of illness, would make more effort than he did.
We all had to buy a large book, MacLean’s Basics of Biology, for the course. Lessons consisted of either copying chunks of into our exercise books or reading bits aloud in the classroom.
When he retired, they had a collection after assembly with prefects holding buckets for our contributions. I was delighted to see that the buckets remained conspicuously empty.
One lesson school taught me was how perfidious, lazy and hypocritical adults can be. Didn’t trust them then. Don’t trust them now either!
We used to call our English teacher Obergruppenfuehrer Thorley, but that was a comment on her teaching style. Let me put it like this: in a comprehensive school with maybe a hundred classrooms, hers was the only one with no graffiti on the desks.
There was a lesson – scaring the hell out of people works.
Doric, Ionic and Corinthian columns supporting temples? I’m your man.
Bored the kids senseless on a day trip to Athens from our Aegina island holiday base reciting the temples, gods, goddesses, agoras and architecture gained in O Level and A Level Classical studies.
One eyed Oedipal complexes? Come talk to me…..
Oh – and Immingham.
Immingham, according to our Geography text books, must have been the import/export capital of the world in the 1980’s. So much grain, coal and cars came through Immingham. For 14 years, I’d been completely oblivious to the place and I was proud of my geographic recall of the UK, primarily due to Bartholomew’s Historic Football Maps (one of which still hangs in my office today).
Still of the opinion if a town/city doesn’t have a professional football team, there’s nothing there I need to know.
Take THAT Ludlow!
I used to live in Immingham. It was a shithole then (1978), & remains a shithole to this day.
Just out of curiosity, did any of you have domestic science lessons.
In a 1960s Harrow boys school, the idea wasn’t even on the agenda. I don’t know what we lads thought. That there’d always be female relatives, wives (or perhaps even servants?) to do the cooking for us?
Did Home Economics for in the first & second year at “Big” School as part of the schools Arts & Crafts syllabus (I could never work out the link between Cooking, Pottery, Still Life drawing and Woodwork).
Learnt about food groups (see “Corn Flakes” comment above), how to boil an egg, make an omelette and make cheese on toast. Also remember being taught how to wash up and which cloths to use to dry up cutlery and pans (there is a difference apparently).
My daughter did Food Technology, which is sort of the same thing without the actual cooking. One of her tasks was to design a Pizza Box (and the point of that is ? If she had made the Pizza in the first place, then I could see the point. But no, this was to design a box (not make it, just draw it)
I’ve never understood the idea of using cloths to dry up. Leaving things upside down to dry of their own natural accord seems a) far more hygienic and b) considerably easier.
But please, do rinse of the soap suds, for goodness sake. I hate it when people don’t.
Home Economics was great fun. What a doss. Fruit salad – three tins of fruit emptied into a big bowl. Next! Rock buns – dead easy, and very tasty spoon-lickings. Next! Beef Wellington, slightly more complicated but offering superb double-entendre possibilities.
Generous portions?
“Seal your beef inside the delicate pastry parcel” etc…
When I meet the teachers at my children’s schools I realise how bad my own were.
Corporal punishment was rife – often dished out randomly. Kids that now would be identified as special needs were ridiculed by teachers for being thick or lazy. Our headmaster roamed the playground smacking (hard) the heads of boys who had hair over the collar. This was not a “clip around the ear” but assault by a grown man on children.
There were a few good teachers but the general mood was cold, tired and bitter.
Same here. Academically too, mine were pretty appalling. French? “Open your books at page 72 and translate the first passage”. P.E.? “Divide into two teams and play football”. My love of languages and of physical exercise is very much despite having been taught them at school.
I identify strongly with the scene in the film of The Wall where young Pink (ie. Roger Waters) is ridiculed by his teacher for writing a poem. (Said poem turns out to be the lyrics to multi-million selling hit ‘Money’. I don’t identify with that bit so much.)
I’m with the Headmaster. The lyrics to Money are bobbins. The riff swings a big one, tho’.
I remember Billy Bragg telling of how at school they were asked to write a poem themselves and submit it for a test. His own effort was actually the lyrics to a Simon & Garfunkel song. I recall he got 7/10, which you can read whichever way you want.
Wilfred Owen’s poems, photosynthesis, the main events of the French revolution, symbols for the main chemical elements, French verb conjugation. None of which has been any use to me whatsoever. I do like Owen’s poems though.
Whether what you learned about The French Revolution will be useful…
It’s too soon to say..
You never know Rocker. You may suddenly need to conjugate a French verb at short notice. Knowledge is an odd thing. One never knows when it will come in handy.
Pub trivia quizzes, usually.
I remember spending ages learning how to use a slide rule. I now carry one with me wherever I go in case the need to calculate a logarithm should arise.
What a wise chap you are, Gary! Your schooldays clearly prepared you well for adult life.
I can’t remember anything particularly out of the ordinary factually that has remained with me because of school.
I have , however, been nursing a vast chip on my shoulder for the past few years since realisation has dawned that the majority of my teachers were , to me, dismissive, uninterested and in some cases downright nasty. This has dawned as I have watched my daughter sail through school, so far, under the influence of warm, engaged and talented teachers at her recent schools.
I do not for one moment think my teachers attitudes held me back – I am what I am. I’ve had good luck and bad luck since just like everyone else.
But f**k you, Miss Richardson, Mrs Marriot, Mr McKay and Miss Wilkinson.
Glad to hear your daughter has such good teachers.
I’m also glad that the dismissive idiots that you had to put up with have now finally been named and shamed here on the AW.
Revenge is sweet!