In this series I am simply going on a tour of my memory, mainly over my time at school. My schooling started really at Junior School (7-10 year), we learned to roughly read in Infant school (5-7 years) but that was literally it, I just remember playing with toys at Infants and then being made to read at home.
So we'll start there infants school, we painted things, made collages, I do not remember a single day of structured learning. Everything seemed to revolve around playing.
Highlights include anything with some structure, this included one day going from a classroom at the front of the school to a classroom at the back of the school, I'm guessing our teacher was suddenly ill so the class was divided between the five others. And going into that other classroom the kids had "grown up" toys, this was lego - and lego technik - they had a TV with a video recorder and a programme of watching structured learning tapes. There were actual projects on the various boards around the room, things the children had gone. They'd done tadpoles, with the kids drawing diagrams of each stage f the tadpole development and they were currently doing cress.
I drank all this in, it was like night and day.
When my little brother came into the school three years later, he was in one of those more complex classroom, not the very plane almost dumb class I was in.
That very much reflects my opinion of my time at infant school, I was put in the dumb class, we weren't encouraged to read, we didn't do math, there weren't any really interesting projects, yet I saw this going on elsewhere.
My mother made me read with her at home, when it became very clear I was not learning at school.
And my grandfather I remember him watching me write and coming over to correct me, I remember very distinctly his showing me how to make the "8" shape rather than just drawing two circles atop one another.
So yeah, not very good, this takes us to 1989.
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