A student memoir from the early part of the last century makes fascinating reading…
The Headmaster…was over six feet tall with a black undulating moustache similar to that which adorned Lord Kitchener on the 1914 enlistment posters. Like the poster, his hand pointing in your direction meant trouble.
He sent for me one day. ‘You’re not paying attention to your maths, Mitchell,’ he said. ‘You’re not trying. Here are six simple mathematical problems. I will sit at my desk to do my work. Each time you finish a problem, bring the result to me. If it is correct, – all well and good. If it is not, you get three of the best!’ … By sheer concentration I was able to work out that three strokes of the cane and six wrong results would add up to eighteen strokes. Most boys only got six strokes for something really bad and I had not done anything yet.
Ten minutes later I got up and approached him fearfully with the fruits of my labour… The rest of the afternoon I spent trying to sit down between errors. It seemed a long session. Fortunately he too became exhausted. For my part mathematics in general remained unsolved for life.
And to think that Haron complained every time I gave her one whack per wrong answer in her etiquette tests…
Your readers may have a chuckle upon reading this post and think, ‘they really were mean in the bad old day’. But recent research reveals that we continue to torture our students. It is now clear that the adolescent brain is not ready to begin to learn until 10 am. A leading psychologist has managed to convince 2 schools here to run trials of new school times – 10 am to 4 pm with outstanding improvement in test scores. Not to mention, that if Haron had read her etiquette book out loud to herself you may not have been able to wack her at all…..