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| Same exam board, eight years later. Note the minatory bit in bold letters |
Back in 1951, after I’d started work, I got my GCE O-levels: English Language (pass), English Literature (pass), Maths (pass), Art (pass), German Oral (pass). As to History, Geography, Divinity, etc, zilch.
Pretty bad news. Granted I was already earning money but prospects for a secondary career – as a cyberspace intellectual – looked thin. Thank God cyberspace hadn’t been invented then.
The results were worse than they seem. Forget Eng. Lang/Lit, I never regarded them as legitimate subjects. I spoke the lingo and read books so what’s to know? I could have spelled “accommodation” if asked. I wrote a 600-word essay on journalism and finished it before half time. Re-wrote it more legibly.
In the Art exam I was asked to illustrate this: It has just gone dark. A bonfire has been lit in the grounds of a country house. Fireworks are going off.
Cunningly I devised a layout viewed from behind the country house. Thus 75% of the space was occupied by the house’s black silhouette. The action was squeezed into what was left. Motto: don’t work harder, work smarter. Bingo. An O-level.
In German Oral I merely gave the examiner my whole German vocabulary, albeit as a list, not joined up in sentences.
Which leaves Maths. Which I dreaded. One question occupied a full page in the four-page set of questions. It concerned a copper ball to which obscure things happened. Certain aids (The coefficient of expansion of X, the ratio of Y to Z, Avogadro’s Number, though I can’t be sure) were provided. Proof, surely, that the question was so hard that lame-brains like me would need help.
Where to start? Did I finish in time? No one else in my class even attempted it. Perhaps the Gods intervened.
My elevation to intellectual arrived equally by chance.
I can imagine you were a "slightly" difficult student. Do you have memories of a favorite teacher or two? And if so, what did you like about them. What made them stand out? P.S., I was born in 1951.
ReplyDeleteColette: As to my school days "difficult" would have almost been a compliment; "hardly there" would have better described me. I had no favourite masters; many resorted to violent corporal punishment for comparatively minor infractions - eg, bad handwriting.
ReplyDeleteMy relevant education began the minute I left school and I had - and still have - some brilliant teachers.
The newspaper. On Sunday afternoons an intelligent and sympathetic sub-editor, Fred Page, taught us (the tea-boys) the basics of journalistic writing and copy correction. I once won a boiled sweet for 250 words on Fog.
National service with the RAF. Eight months intensive instruction on electronics in general and specific items of electronic equipment. A very hard subject (including maths) in which I started from ground zero, convinced I was incapable of learning the subject. Yet I did. Amazing since many of the instructors were doing two years' national service like me.
French language, conversation and literature. Private face-to-face weekly tuition from 1973 to 2018. All women, all bloody marvellous: Anne, Aida and Pat - bless them all.
Ski-ing (mainly in Switzerland). Deadly serious and conscientious, except for the final lesson on Fridays where we were encouraged to go wild and to enjoy a "piquenique en pleine air" (with booze) high up among trees.
Singing. Five years which have transformed my life and the way I think about music. The incomparable V. I need say no more