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mrissa's post , as pointed to by yhlee.
My secondary (age 11-18) school was small even by British standards, tiny by American ones, with an intake of 60-80 girls per year. Yes, girls. It was also both mostly fee-paying and academically selective; I got there by taking a competitive examination at age not-quite-11, which gained me a local-authority funded scholarship. 1975, the year I entered, was the last year of that scheme, and I was one of the youngest in my class; if I'd been born even three months later, I'd have been stuck with the local comprehensive and my life would have been rather different. I was very much happier there than I had been at primary school, mostly because it was possible to get a certain amount of respect for academic ability even while having neither looks nor social skills.
One advantage of going to an 'independent' school was that we got slightly longer vacations than the other schools, and Friday afternoons free. I suspect this was what most of us thought of when we were repeatedly told how 'privileged' we were to be attending that school!
It was a deeply old-fashioned place, steeped in hundred-year-old tradition. The headmistress -- a delightfully dotty woman -- presided over morning Assembly in her academic gown. We sat in columns of individual desks facing the front -- alphabetically assigned to seats, the first year -- and a lot of lessons consisted of writing to dictation with a fountain pen. Everyone studied Latin for at least their first year, learning declensions and conjugations by chanting aloud around the classroom. There was one male teacher, who led a lonely existence on the top floor of the Science block and endeared himself to the pupils by goofy humour that included sending returned exercise books flying across the Chemistry lab. The facilities were old-fashioned, too; audio-visual aids consisted of filmstrips, reel-to-reel tape, and an epidiascope, while the state school where my father taught had film projectors and VCRs. The Physics lab had an amazing array of broken cathode-ray demonstration tubes and other bits of equipment: 'If this worked, this is what would happen'. On the other hand, there were plenty of books -- so many that it was hard to carry the necessary quantity around or fit them all into the allotted storage space. In my last year, I was able to spend one of my free periods every week using The Computer.
There was a uniform -- all the secondary schools had uniforms in those days. Ours was of a rather peculiar nature; it consisted of very specific items to be purchased from specific stores, but we were far too small a market for the stores to keep the things in stock year after year, so the specifications kept changing. Any previously-valid uniform item was allowed, even if it was handed down from a several-years-older sister, and there were usually two blouse patterns and two summer-frock fabrics in each set of prescriptions. It was therefore quite unusual to see two girls wearing exactly the same outfit. I don't remember much in the way of competitive dressing, though -- certainly nothing like the stress my younger sister suffered when the state schools abolished uniform and all the girls wanted to wear their best fashions to school all the time. Skirts were de rigeur, of course; long hair was to be tied back at all times; and makeup, long nails, and jewellery were strictly forbidden. (The jewellery rule was slightly relaxed by the time I was fifteen or so, but it proved impossible to convince the school secretary of this, so we had to hide our slender necklaces before venturing into her lair. The secretary had been there in my mother's time, and ought to have retired years before; the entire student body and half the staff were terrified of her.) I can't have found these restrictions very onerous; in fact, they've become choices I mostly stick to even now.
Twice a year, the curriculum stopped for two weeks of formal written examinations, the percentage marks for which were afterwards announced in class and posted on the classroom bulletin board in ranked lists. Everyone would then become obsessed with calculating and recalculating their 'average' as the results trickled out over the following week. Blessed with a flypaper memory and a mathematical turn of mind, I consistently scored near or at the top of the class in everything except art and music, and thrived on it, though I was nearly always sick the weekend after the exams finished; it must have been brutal for the girls who scored in the low thirties time after time. If I hadn't been inclined to measure my self-worth by my academic success when I started, I certainly was by the time I finished. It was very, very intense, particularly in the high-school-equivalent years when I was taking external exams every summer. School was my life; homework took up nearly all the time between five-o'clock dinner and bed-time, as well as the bus-journeys home. Living an hour away by bus, I couldn't take part in such extra-curricular activities as there were, but I don't remember being much bothered by that.
I had some battles with my English teacher, but I think that was my fault rather than hers. I was touchy about my writing, disinclined to take criticism, and passionately wedded to opinions that she dismissed as prejudices. My mind spontaneously generated stories, in those days, and because I could always take the fiction option for the essay part of the English exam, I never learned to write proper non-fiction essays at any higher level than the organized regurgitation of learned facts.
I didn't hate most of the books we studied in 'Literature', with some memorable exceptions (like Lord of the Flies and Sons and Lovers) that I think, as a timid, sheltered, and religious teenager, I just wasn't ready to deal with. The ones I didn't hate, I mostly would have read (or already had read) of my own accord anyway: Dickens; Bronte; Austen; Shakespeare. What I did grow to hate was the process of writing critically about them. My mind just didn't work that way; either a thing was objective, reducible to bullet-point facts and rules and equations, or there was nothing there I could grasp at all in any way I could put into words. To this day, I look at writing about literary criticism or sociology and completely fail to see the point, though I assume there must be one or smart people wouldn't devote so much energy to it. Perhaps better teaching would have found some way to get around that mental block; I don't know, and to be honest I never even considered the possibility before. I was very glad that I was in the stream that wasn't required to take the English Literature O-level, but instead took the Language exam a year early and then spent a year on a non-examined survey course that swept us from Chaucer to Arthur Miller. That was when I collided hard with D. H. Lawrence, but at least there was nothing important at stake, and my refusal to even try to write the assigned essay had no real consequences. (As far as I remember, that was the only time ever that I didn't turn in assigned work.) At the same time, I was reading Dickens and Dostoevsky and Dumas (sometimes in the original French) for fun, as much as my schedule allowed, as well as Tolkien and Heyer and Trollope and Eliot and H. G. Wells and the Asimov my father brought home from the library. We were provided, one or two years, with a list of suggested reading, and I dutifylly tracked some of those down, but most of them didn't appeal much. Apart from Tolkien and Lewis, I didn't get seriously into reading SF and fantasy until I was away at University.
I didn't really pick up my love of Physics from the two gentle ladies who presided over the endless experiments on heat capacity and the boxes of broken apparatus, but from my listening to my father as we rambled over the Derbyshire hills. I could just barely sense that there was something interesting beyond the endless tedium of the O-level syllabus, but without the encouragement on the home front that might not have been enough.
One good thing about the school was the willingness to teach esoteric subjects to tiny classes; I studied ancient Greek in a class of two, geology in a class of five, and actually got individual tuition for the last year or so of Further Maths A-level. Being a girls' school, they had no qualms about letting girls study the hard sciences, either; about a third of my year took Physics A-level, for example, so I was rather surprised when I went for my first University interview and found myself outnumbered ten-to-one by boys.
Sixth-formers (grades 11-12, more or less) were given certain extra privileges and reponsibilities: a more relaxed uniform code; a common-room where we could prepare hot drinks and snacks; supervisory duties at break and lunch and in the library; the freedom to wander off-campus at lunchtime. Somehow, that made the times when we were treated as children even more infuriating, but it really didn't happen that often.
In the sixth form, the competitive academic aspect was a little less intense because we were taught in such small groups, so the environment was a lot less toxic than it might have been. Because it was a girls' school, boyfriend trouble and its attendant drama stayed out of hours and outside the grounds. I was vaguely aware that some of my classmates were going out drinking and getting entangled with men, but managed to ignore most of that as being none of my business; I was much too busy struggling with Impulse in my maths lessons. Crime hardly touched us, apart from the time a nationally-notorious serial murderer was arrested in the lovers' lane behind the grounds; the worst disciplinary problem I remember involved a piece of graffiti half an inch high doodled on the window frame of the dining room.
I certainly learned self-discipline, time-management, study skills, and examination skills from this regimen. I also learned that When an element exists in more than one form in the same physical state, the forms are known as allotropes, and how to use log tables and do a proof-by-induction, and the Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant mantra that soothed my nerves before dozens of exams and a few interviews, and a lot of things that didn't stick, like Russian vocabulary and the details of umpteen treaties that ended nineteenth-century European wars, and about twenty pages of the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the imports and exports of Hull.
It might not have been a bad thing if the school had devoted a bit more time to preparing us for real life. The assumption that everyone was aiming for University, and the best for Oxbridge, was very strong; as such, we weren't supposed to need to be taught to cook or sew or much about our own biology.
I don't remember any one year as being particularly good or bad. Every year had its challenges and excitements; even now, I feel a faint atavistic thrill of new possibilities in early September and get stressed-out in the May exam season. Algebra was a delightful discovery that more or less coincided with the miseries of puberty; I tend to say that I was discovering algebra when my contemporaries were discovering boys, and in my undergraduate years I was deeply in love with quantum mechanics. I distinctly remember that I consciously channeled some of my pubescent frustration into a certain History project. There were times in the last couple of years when I was on the edge of despair, just from being perpetually tired and stretched and not having time to enjoy life, but I survived, and emerged with the grades I wanted, and I remember the school with fondness. It was definitely 'my school', but British idiom doesn't permit thinking of my University in those terms. I ended up spending more than twelve years in my University department, and still feel a sense of homecoming when I go back, but that's a different kind of thing, and another story.
Notes for American readers:
'O'-levels were usually taken at age 16, in a fairly broad range of subjects, mostly based on a two-year syllabus that built on the first three years of secondary school; 'A'-levels, taken at eighteen usually in three subjects, are the main criterion for University admission. Both are examined by regional boards administered by consortia of Universities, and the results from exams sat in May and June arrive some time in August.
mrissa's post , as pointed to by yhlee.My secondary (age 11-18) school was small even by British standards, tiny by American ones, with an intake of 60-80 girls per year. Yes, girls. It was also both mostly fee-paying and academically selective; I got there by taking a competitive examination at age not-quite-11, which gained me a local-authority funded scholarship. 1975, the year I entered, was the last year of that scheme, and I was one of the youngest in my class; if I'd been born even three months later, I'd have been stuck with the local comprehensive and my life would have been rather different. I was very much happier there than I had been at primary school, mostly because it was possible to get a certain amount of respect for academic ability even while having neither looks nor social skills.
One advantage of going to an 'independent' school was that we got slightly longer vacations than the other schools, and Friday afternoons free. I suspect this was what most of us thought of when we were repeatedly told how 'privileged' we were to be attending that school!
It was a deeply old-fashioned place, steeped in hundred-year-old tradition. The headmistress -- a delightfully dotty woman -- presided over morning Assembly in her academic gown. We sat in columns of individual desks facing the front -- alphabetically assigned to seats, the first year -- and a lot of lessons consisted of writing to dictation with a fountain pen. Everyone studied Latin for at least their first year, learning declensions and conjugations by chanting aloud around the classroom. There was one male teacher, who led a lonely existence on the top floor of the Science block and endeared himself to the pupils by goofy humour that included sending returned exercise books flying across the Chemistry lab. The facilities were old-fashioned, too; audio-visual aids consisted of filmstrips, reel-to-reel tape, and an epidiascope, while the state school where my father taught had film projectors and VCRs. The Physics lab had an amazing array of broken cathode-ray demonstration tubes and other bits of equipment: 'If this worked, this is what would happen'. On the other hand, there were plenty of books -- so many that it was hard to carry the necessary quantity around or fit them all into the allotted storage space. In my last year, I was able to spend one of my free periods every week using The Computer.
There was a uniform -- all the secondary schools had uniforms in those days. Ours was of a rather peculiar nature; it consisted of very specific items to be purchased from specific stores, but we were far too small a market for the stores to keep the things in stock year after year, so the specifications kept changing. Any previously-valid uniform item was allowed, even if it was handed down from a several-years-older sister, and there were usually two blouse patterns and two summer-frock fabrics in each set of prescriptions. It was therefore quite unusual to see two girls wearing exactly the same outfit. I don't remember much in the way of competitive dressing, though -- certainly nothing like the stress my younger sister suffered when the state schools abolished uniform and all the girls wanted to wear their best fashions to school all the time. Skirts were de rigeur, of course; long hair was to be tied back at all times; and makeup, long nails, and jewellery were strictly forbidden. (The jewellery rule was slightly relaxed by the time I was fifteen or so, but it proved impossible to convince the school secretary of this, so we had to hide our slender necklaces before venturing into her lair. The secretary had been there in my mother's time, and ought to have retired years before; the entire student body and half the staff were terrified of her.) I can't have found these restrictions very onerous; in fact, they've become choices I mostly stick to even now.
Twice a year, the curriculum stopped for two weeks of formal written examinations, the percentage marks for which were afterwards announced in class and posted on the classroom bulletin board in ranked lists. Everyone would then become obsessed with calculating and recalculating their 'average' as the results trickled out over the following week. Blessed with a flypaper memory and a mathematical turn of mind, I consistently scored near or at the top of the class in everything except art and music, and thrived on it, though I was nearly always sick the weekend after the exams finished; it must have been brutal for the girls who scored in the low thirties time after time. If I hadn't been inclined to measure my self-worth by my academic success when I started, I certainly was by the time I finished. It was very, very intense, particularly in the high-school-equivalent years when I was taking external exams every summer. School was my life; homework took up nearly all the time between five-o'clock dinner and bed-time, as well as the bus-journeys home. Living an hour away by bus, I couldn't take part in such extra-curricular activities as there were, but I don't remember being much bothered by that.
I had some battles with my English teacher, but I think that was my fault rather than hers. I was touchy about my writing, disinclined to take criticism, and passionately wedded to opinions that she dismissed as prejudices. My mind spontaneously generated stories, in those days, and because I could always take the fiction option for the essay part of the English exam, I never learned to write proper non-fiction essays at any higher level than the organized regurgitation of learned facts.
I didn't hate most of the books we studied in 'Literature', with some memorable exceptions (like Lord of the Flies and Sons and Lovers) that I think, as a timid, sheltered, and religious teenager, I just wasn't ready to deal with. The ones I didn't hate, I mostly would have read (or already had read) of my own accord anyway: Dickens; Bronte; Austen; Shakespeare. What I did grow to hate was the process of writing critically about them. My mind just didn't work that way; either a thing was objective, reducible to bullet-point facts and rules and equations, or there was nothing there I could grasp at all in any way I could put into words. To this day, I look at writing about literary criticism or sociology and completely fail to see the point, though I assume there must be one or smart people wouldn't devote so much energy to it. Perhaps better teaching would have found some way to get around that mental block; I don't know, and to be honest I never even considered the possibility before. I was very glad that I was in the stream that wasn't required to take the English Literature O-level, but instead took the Language exam a year early and then spent a year on a non-examined survey course that swept us from Chaucer to Arthur Miller. That was when I collided hard with D. H. Lawrence, but at least there was nothing important at stake, and my refusal to even try to write the assigned essay had no real consequences. (As far as I remember, that was the only time ever that I didn't turn in assigned work.) At the same time, I was reading Dickens and Dostoevsky and Dumas (sometimes in the original French) for fun, as much as my schedule allowed, as well as Tolkien and Heyer and Trollope and Eliot and H. G. Wells and the Asimov my father brought home from the library. We were provided, one or two years, with a list of suggested reading, and I dutifylly tracked some of those down, but most of them didn't appeal much. Apart from Tolkien and Lewis, I didn't get seriously into reading SF and fantasy until I was away at University.
I didn't really pick up my love of Physics from the two gentle ladies who presided over the endless experiments on heat capacity and the boxes of broken apparatus, but from my listening to my father as we rambled over the Derbyshire hills. I could just barely sense that there was something interesting beyond the endless tedium of the O-level syllabus, but without the encouragement on the home front that might not have been enough.
One good thing about the school was the willingness to teach esoteric subjects to tiny classes; I studied ancient Greek in a class of two, geology in a class of five, and actually got individual tuition for the last year or so of Further Maths A-level. Being a girls' school, they had no qualms about letting girls study the hard sciences, either; about a third of my year took Physics A-level, for example, so I was rather surprised when I went for my first University interview and found myself outnumbered ten-to-one by boys.
Sixth-formers (grades 11-12, more or less) were given certain extra privileges and reponsibilities: a more relaxed uniform code; a common-room where we could prepare hot drinks and snacks; supervisory duties at break and lunch and in the library; the freedom to wander off-campus at lunchtime. Somehow, that made the times when we were treated as children even more infuriating, but it really didn't happen that often.
In the sixth form, the competitive academic aspect was a little less intense because we were taught in such small groups, so the environment was a lot less toxic than it might have been. Because it was a girls' school, boyfriend trouble and its attendant drama stayed out of hours and outside the grounds. I was vaguely aware that some of my classmates were going out drinking and getting entangled with men, but managed to ignore most of that as being none of my business; I was much too busy struggling with Impulse in my maths lessons. Crime hardly touched us, apart from the time a nationally-notorious serial murderer was arrested in the lovers' lane behind the grounds; the worst disciplinary problem I remember involved a piece of graffiti half an inch high doodled on the window frame of the dining room.
I certainly learned self-discipline, time-management, study skills, and examination skills from this regimen. I also learned that When an element exists in more than one form in the same physical state, the forms are known as allotropes, and how to use log tables and do a proof-by-induction, and the Amo, amas, amat, amamus, amatis, amant mantra that soothed my nerves before dozens of exams and a few interviews, and a lot of things that didn't stick, like Russian vocabulary and the details of umpteen treaties that ended nineteenth-century European wars, and about twenty pages of the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the imports and exports of Hull.
It might not have been a bad thing if the school had devoted a bit more time to preparing us for real life. The assumption that everyone was aiming for University, and the best for Oxbridge, was very strong; as such, we weren't supposed to need to be taught to cook or sew or much about our own biology.
I don't remember any one year as being particularly good or bad. Every year had its challenges and excitements; even now, I feel a faint atavistic thrill of new possibilities in early September and get stressed-out in the May exam season. Algebra was a delightful discovery that more or less coincided with the miseries of puberty; I tend to say that I was discovering algebra when my contemporaries were discovering boys, and in my undergraduate years I was deeply in love with quantum mechanics. I distinctly remember that I consciously channeled some of my pubescent frustration into a certain History project. There were times in the last couple of years when I was on the edge of despair, just from being perpetually tired and stretched and not having time to enjoy life, but I survived, and emerged with the grades I wanted, and I remember the school with fondness. It was definitely 'my school', but British idiom doesn't permit thinking of my University in those terms. I ended up spending more than twelve years in my University department, and still feel a sense of homecoming when I go back, but that's a different kind of thing, and another story.
Notes for American readers:
'O'-levels were usually taken at age 16, in a fairly broad range of subjects, mostly based on a two-year syllabus that built on the first three years of secondary school; 'A'-levels, taken at eighteen usually in three subjects, are the main criterion for University admission. Both are examined by regional boards administered by consortia of Universities, and the results from exams sat in May and June arrive some time in August.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-11 07:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-01-12 01:24 am (UTC)