Early Risers.

[Gwiwer]

5 hours ago, PupCam said:

I think it safe to say that school was the lowlight of my school career.     

Promised myself that I would never say "School days, best days of your life!" to my children.   And I never did!

Same. 

 

Nature knows best and determined that (to the best of my knowledge) I am not responsible for any offspring.  Therefore I have never been in the position of making false claims about school days.  

 

5 hours ago, PeterBB said:

In my home area three schools operated on a Saturday, the only relif being at the end of term where house points were allocated 'minutes' to start pm on Friday, so the top performing house members went home at 1400 hours

Never come across that system.  Saturday mornings were for detention over and above what they could legally keep you in for after 4pm on Fridays, and for the "Third Year Sixth" namely those select few who were in line for an Open Exhibition at Cambridge (or Oxford if you must, but School preferred Cambridge) and who were required to undertake a little more study before "going up".  Otherwise it was strictly a Monday to Friday event.  

 

There were no pre-4pm pass-outs even for good work and you could be kept back on the slightest excuse - sometimes just because one of the staff arbitrarily didn't like the length or cut of your hair, your shoes weren't shiny enough or your tie was tied too low and your top button was visible.   

 

4 hours ago, The White Rabbit said:

A-Level Greek was offered - I think 3 out of around 150 choose it.

Likewise; a very few students - those who were clever at Latin - were offered it in the "General Studies" periods when others among us took a twice-weekly delve into other more popular areas which were limited to languages or advanced / applied maths which were not in the main curriculum.  Mine were Spanish and German.  I still speak a smattering of both.  Those who took Greek were also those in line to study Classics or Greats at Oxbridge.  

 

4 hours ago, New Haven Neil said:

Seconded!  Going on to higher education revealed a different world though.

Not least because I had come through an all-boys grammar school where it was a Cardinal Sin to be caught by any member of staff during the evenings or weekends (i.e. nominally your own time) out with a member of the opposite sex.   More than one of our number was formally disciplined in school for the "crime" of being caught canoodling under the pier when he "should have been at home preparing his work for the next day".  

 

And also because, having been freed from the yoke of that all-boys and very much Victorian school-masterly dictatorial environment suddenly I was in mixed company in lectures and socially.  That was a very different world to me.  

 

 

 

[polybear]

1 hour ago, PupCam said:

Anyway, you may recall how much Puppers loves HP printers.

 

Enjoy (and join me in my hatred) ........

 

 

 

Unbelievable.  Crooked Robbin' Barstewards 🤬

 

Bear here......

Wall filled; Wall sanded.  Big Tick.  There may be the odd titchy bit that'll need another splurge of filler, but nottalot.  Happy Bear.

 

In other news.....

Bear received two "Very good" used muddlin' books from "World of Books" via the 'bay.  Sadly the dumbf. sent them packaged in just a polythene bag - which of course doesn't add much protection to book corners when Postie Pat puts them thru' the letterbox 🤬  Fortunately the book were both softback so damage was very minor - fortunately.  A certain Bear won't be so gentle when it comes to adding Feedback.  T0ssers.  Yep, Rant.

[The Lurker]

Some similarities to my alma mater. We had Saturday detentions for particularly heinous demeanours (the cane largely being not used although still available for the Head). I never had one of those but did do a lot of school sports on Saturdays (and once, to the disgust of my parents, a school cricket tournament at Tonbridge School on a Sunday).

 

Interestingly, round here, the grammars that think themselves nearly public schools have compulsory Saturday morning sports; certainly Chis'n'Sid and Dartford Grammar do - but the schools the Lurker boys went to (Beths and Bexley Grammar) do not - although I guess representing the school might take place on a Saturday and Younger Lurker did have school sports day combined with a summer fete on a Saturday. he did however get the following Monday off in return.

 

On languages, the theory of my school was that I was quite adept at languages but this was not true; I was quite adept at exams, which is not the same thing. I dropped German at the last minute for Geography but did French and Latin to O level. At university my 1st year subsidiary subject was Chinese. But before you are all suitably impressed, it was largely Chinese history and culture - calligraphy, A Dream of Red Chambers,  Journey to the West (Monkey), Sun Tzu, Taoism, Confucius etc. The only actual Chinese I picked up was the phrase for the Great Wall of China!

 

Younger Lurker on the hand does seem to have a genuine affinity for the Latin, Spanish and French he is doing. Who would have thought the ASD mind would have flourished in that field? Not us, for sure!

[southern42]

' afternoon all from red dragon land. [Just after lunch]

 

Sunny day at the railway museum, yesterday. Very crowded for a few hours. I did my best to avoid those who were constantly coughing all over the place. <<Keep yer germs to yerself.>>

 

Getting home at sunset now. This is Tryfan taken from the A5 going towards Bangor.

 

Despite full moon, high cloud and vapour trails, Ray caught an image of the Comet last night using his telescope while I watched the Onedin Line. It is interesting to see the different layers of filming to capture sequences of life at sea pre digital age, etc, and the different traits of Captain Baines coming to life.

 

Sunny, again, today.  Temp only 6.8C though.

 

Toot on the flute done. Lotus flower transfers revarnished ready to go on. The colour ran after the first few coats. Just got to decide whether to go for the orange or yellow version...

 

Several hours later. [5.00 pm-ish]

I successfully mounted a couple of transfers in turn but they were disappointing mainly due to the different shades of the bands of bamboo underneath showing through.  So the transfers were whisked off, again, in turn. 

 

Some hard edges also became more apparent so I spent an hour or so fine sanding the hollowed area to give more of a slope than a step and blending it into the rest of it. One of my mini diamond files came in handy for this job, followed by fine sandpaper.

 

Next job - print the transfers onto white paper and ensure they are given plenty of varnish as I will have to cut right to the edge of the roundel.

 

Time to get cracking on dinner - cottage pie, sprouts and peas.  Pear and blackberry crumble for desert. 

 

Be good...

Polly

[jamie92208]

As mentioned previously  I was a Day Dog at a boarding school so we had to fit in with things arranged for the permanent detainees. Thus a full school morning of 4 lessons followed by lunch then home at 2pm unless one of the 1st teams were playing another pretentious school.  Detention known as PS or Punishment  School was 8pm to 9pm on a Saturday supervised by a prefect.  If we got a PS we had to attend the housemasters study after lunch on the Saturday to collect a piecei of blue lined A4 paper. The p1llock would write something on the top then make a note in his book.  At the end of term your score would be on your report. We got BP's or blue papers for poor work and other misdemeanours. The same process applied to them except that they could be completed at any time.  Supposedly character forming.  The only result for me was I still know quite a bit about the history of playings cards after being discovered playing a card game on the back row of a Physics lesson.  I got a BP for that and copied out the relevant entry from the Encyclopedia  Britannica in the library. 

 

Greek was available at A level but not to members of the Science 6th form.  We just had two extra exams of General Studies and Use of English to prove that we weren't illiterate.  They still went on my A level certificate so my employers thought that I had 5 A levels in 1973. 

 

Jamie

Edited February 6, 2023 by jamie92208

[Ian Abel]

Morning.. well, almost afternoon even here!

 

Busy weekend after all, who knew! Ya, right. 

 

Saturday Mrs invited some family over for a dinner/movie night ("The Martian", as she's reading the book with a great-niece, and they wanted to watch it.

That's me helping with cleaning the house and making it "presentable". Also, some light shopping for supplies, oh well.

 

Sunday, involved in clearing up after Saturday, then went down a "rabbit hole" looking through some very old photographs/negatives and starting to scan them into digital form.

That was interesting and also meant I relived the last almost 50 years as these were from the "old country" and I'd always meant to get to them.

 

Re: Schooling/languages:

The grammar I attended required us to take French from 1st - 4th year, mandatory. Worked OK for me as I did use it some, especially when I worked in Montreal for 18 months - passably useable even though they speak "Quebeqois".

From 2nd - 4th year we had to choose between Latin and German. Determining I wasn't going to be a doctor or chemist I opted for German. Also useful for 2 years when I worked at Shell at Waterloo and was seconded as the technical half or a linear programming team. The other half was a German who was on UK assignment for two years and planned on improving his English. We shared an office, and his requirement was for us to spend half the day conversing in English, the other half in German.  Was nice to better my German, and used it while skiing in Europe a few times.

Dropped BOTH moving to 6th form and  "A" levels as I wasn't interested enough to continue them.

Used NEITHER with a vengeance since, so given the Montral work was in the late-70s I probably have no expectation I'd manage with either now even if pressed!

 

Today, work ramping up as they're full-steam ahead into the yearly audit carp.

 

Weather vastly improving (it's ALL relative mind you) with a morning of -8c under sunny skies, high of 2c expected with tonight only down to -4c! Yay!!

 

Tally ho.

[polybear]

1 hour ago, The Lurker said:

On languages, the theory of my school was that I was quite adept at languages but this was not true; I was quite adept at exams, which is not the same thing.

 

Bear asked a retired Chemistry Teacher how those currently at school can manage so many exams; when a certain Bear was at school it was around five subjects.  He said that when Bear was at school they taught the subject, but now the emphasis seems to be teaching them to pass the exam. 

 

Insofar as History is concerned, we had a teacher that was totally obsessed with Ancient Egypt - like we actually gave a sh...

I would've been far more interested (and I suspect the rest of the class would've been as well) if we'd done the 1st & 2nd World Wars.

[New Haven Neil]

I did 'modern history', so WW2/dictators featured large.  The teacher was Head of History, and constantly rude about Italians, having fought in the desert.  Nowadays one reads that they fought well and it wasn't true about the tanks with 10 reverse gears, but not to listen to him!  Hated it at the time, it would have been about O level time when I suddenly found such subjects interesting, maybe a bit late in maturing there! 

 

Sciences were always my thing, Physics in particular.  I had read and absorbed the texts each year by the second week of term.  Didn't need to revise....this carried on into college, having in our finals achieved the highest mark of the year in Electrotechnology.  No prizes then though!

[TheQ]

No school I was at operated detention, I think the teachers wanted to go home.. They operated the cane in England and the Tawse in Scotland. Plus being dropped from sports teams and or banned from clubs.

 

History was as per required for exams, so we did European history from Waterloo to... 1970.. the exams were in 1973-75.. it was very heavy on Metternich and Bismarck.

 

Italian tanks didn't have 10 reverse gears.. But they didn't have any real armour either. I'd be heading the other way if issued with one of them against a Matida 2.

 

At my school in the Hebrides they changed the qualification from best to most improved otherwise I would have won all prizes except Gaidhlig. A teacher apologised to me....    I wasn't that good , it was just a bad school  it was to only school I went to that gave out prizes.

Edited February 6, 2023 by TheQ

[PhilJ W]

Afternoon all from Estuary-Land. No more news on my brother, still undergoing tests at the moment. I'll have to ask my sister later if there is any more news. Apart from a bit of shopping I haven't done anything today. Not helped by Arthur Itis making some noise but Nurofen has been deployed.

[The Johnster]

My all-boys Grammar School had an all-girls counterpart at the other end of the same building, and separation was enforced to the point of separate break times and staggered dinner hours.  For many years I thought girls were just boys with lumpy chests.  There were ways around this within school rules and culture though, in the form of the orchestra and the choir, both of which were joint with the girls' school.  We encountered the strange creatures at lunch time outside the buildings of course.

 

There was also a 6th-form debating society you could join, called 61 Club after the year of it's foundation.  This met monthly on Friday evenings between 7 and 9, was joint with the girls, and led weekly Friday sessions of minor debauchery and homework distraction in the pub across the road.  This was in turn the cause of various parties, pairings-up, and one baby, who we all considered a joint effort and were all very proud of.  The girls' headmistress, very old school, tweedy, and prone to calling her charges 'gels' ('Gels, always keep in mind that boys are animals and that an hour of pleasure results in a lifetime of shame', 'Please, miss, how do you make it last an hour') was, unexpectedly and to her very great credit in those less enlightened days, an absolute rock for the pregnant girl and did everything she could to support her emotionally, practically, and educationally.  No doubt she'd seen it all before, and would again.

 

Things were better in 6th form, but by and large I regard my schooldays as hell on earth, a culture in which bullying was encouraged as 'manly' and I was a victim.  I failed to get to university, not the school's fault I just couldn't cut the mustard, and they taught me little that was of any practical use to me at the time or in my later life, and not nearly enough of what would  have been culturally useful.  The emphasis on sports, related to an aspiration to emulate Public School culture and breed officers for the next wars' cannon fodder, seemed irrelevant and was anathematic to me anyway; surely anyone who wanted to play sports could arrange it themselves and amongst themselves, why do I need to be forced into it against my will.  This of course made me unpopular with both the jocks and the teachers.

 

We were shown the film version of 'Lord of the Flies', and given an essay on if for English homework.  The idea was that we would all relate how the film showed that unsupervised children would inevitably revert to savagery, but mine, child of the 60s as I was, pointed out that they were on the island in the first place because of the boundless adult savagery of a nuclear war and were rescued at the end by a warship, that had been built to sink other warships or be sunk; it was the adults that were the savages, so you could hardly blame the lads.  I rather identified with Pigsy.  This got me an interview with the head, but I stood my ground (arrogant self-righteous little CND hippie that I was), and hoist him by his own petard with the argument that it was his own brand of liberal education, inquistive critical examination of issues, and chivalric moral values that had led me to this dangerously off-curriculum opinion.  He had no argument for that, and shook his head sadly with the words 'you are probably right, but you'll never get anywhere with that attitude, boy'. 

 

And he was right, I never did, I'll die a broken rebel.

[PeterBB]

1 hour ago, polybear said:

 

Bear asked a retired Chemistry Teacher how those currently at school can manage so many exams; when a certain Bear was at school it was around five subjects.  He said that when Bear was at school they taught the subject, but now the emphasis seems to be teaching them to pass the exam. 

 

Insofar as History is concerned, we had a teacher that was totally obsessed with Ancient Egypt - like we actually gave a sh...

I would've been far more interested (and I suspect the rest of the class would've been as well) if we'd done the 1st & 2nd World Wars.

These days there are those who think too much emphasis is placed on the fisrt and particulrly the second WW rather than history of other nations and their heroes.

 

Also tend to agree with the chemistry teacher the 'teaching subject rather than to pass exams' seems to be the current method plus of course ''everybody can do their own research'.That is as maybe but difficult if they are not taught properly to read and write first so that they can research and record appropriately.

 

Began to sound a bit like a rant but when you have to teach 16 plus year olds how to read and write how on earth do they progress.

 

Wider family wise there is a member with a pension who, for other reasons, can still not read or write nd for whom I'm told the initial school did basically very little.  As they were not sporty either ...

Edited February 6, 2023 by PeterBB

[The Johnster]

My geography, and later geology (I've maintained a lifelong passing interest in this) teacher had done National Service in Aden, so when we were taught how dunes form initially around objects in the way of the wind-blown sand, the object was a dead ay rab.  He'd apparently actually witnessed this.  I got on rather well with him though some of the other teachers were snooty about his red-brick (Keele) degree, and when I failed the Geology A level (which he was surprised at, though I was a cinch for it) he offered to use various contacts to get me 2 years as a lab assistant with the British Antarctic Survey. 

 

I should have taken him up on it; I wouldn't have had much more to do than clean up the test tubes, prepare penguins for dissection and such, and catalogue things, and not have to go out in the cold and Captain Scott it.  The terms were about 3 times the salary I could reasonably manage at home, flights home once a year for 2 weeks leave, twice a year to Cape Town for r & r, and your bar tab deducted from salary, paid in lump sum at the end of the tour. I'd have come home with enough cash to buy a house to live in and another to let out to pay the bills for the first, set up for life at 20, unless I'd become an alcoholic which was not apparently uncommon with bar tabs and long winters hunkered down with nowt to do on the Survey.  Of course, I wanted to drink beer and go dancing with girls, but my life might have been different if I'd gone down there!  Regretted it within a very few years afterwards.  I should have done more drinking beer and dancing with girls at least...

[monkeysarefun]

School was brilliant! Girls were everywhere, once you got to year 10 study came second place  to  getting a car with a V8 in it, so you could lure one to the drive-in for experimental purposes,  it was a golden age of Mad Max and Midnight Oil.  I didnt do any languages except French (the only language option)  in year 7 because the teacher was Miss Mckenzie who everyone had a crush on, her being exotic because she drove a foreign car (a veedub). If you got in trouble you just got the cane and got it over and done with, history was learning about the League Of Nations for no apparent reason, and bushrangers and explorers which if nothing else, at least  taught us why everything was named the Hume This  or the Macquarie That. Sport was contact - Rugby League or Aussie Rules so you could get your aggression out on your enemies, soccer for the feeble and the "New Australians" as immigrants were called then. If you formed a grudge you wanted to settle in the summer cricket season, it was a long wait until Autumn though unfortunately. 

 

I don't remember studying much, the major organisations that offered  cadetships or apprenticeships were offering positions left right and centre, they  would recruit mid July,  before the final exams so if you got one of them you could just do  the final  exams for the sake of  completeness without any pressure .  If you were smart you could go to uni, though that was a bit looked down upon compared to going to tech and  getting a trade,  however the  Uni lifestyle was good -  you could rent a big house in the beachside suburbs for a song back then, share the costs  with 8 mates and spend all the  non-lecture time surfing. 

Edited February 6, 2023 by monkeysarefun

[pH]

1 hour ago, New Haven Neil said:

The teacher was Head of History, and constantly rude about Italians, having fought in the desert.  Nowadays one reads that they fought well and it wasn't true about the tanks with 10 reverse gears, but not to listen to him! 

The British Army’s Austin Champ had as many reverse gears as forward gears, and could travel equally fast in either direction:

 

https://heritage4x4.nl/en/car/austin-champ-from-1954-2/

Edited February 6, 2023 by pH

[Gwiwer]

27 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

Friday sessions of minor debauchery and homework distraction in the pub across the road.  This was in turn the cause of various parties, pairings-up, and one baby,

All of the above, of course, did occur. Although not connected with any school activity as such. 
 

The firmer the attempt at discipline aimed at enforcing separation the more determined sone of us became to associate freely with others. 
 

The Secondary Modern schools were mixed. Even the Catholic school was mixed. But not the grammar schools. So there was peer pressure in some circles, and indeed within some families, to - shall we say - mix and mingle. 
 

There were parties. There were pairings. There was one baby resulting in a very short-notice wedding as well. 
 

But what we shall colloquially call “Human Biology” remained farther off-limits than might have been preferred by some. “Human Geography” was almost as equally mysterious to the High School generations. 
 

School was aimed solely at getting the boys into Cambridge (or Oxford if you had to) and the girls wouldn’t need academic qualifications because they would (mysteriously) meet an marry a chap who would earn squillions through being clever and keep them and the family they would have in love and comfort for ever. 
 

Life, as many of us already knew, is seldom like that. School prepared me for very little. It was the unofficial “homework sessions”,  at which no homework was ever done but other things definitely were, with a school-friend of my sister’s that taught me far more. We are still friends over 50 years later. 
 

20 minutes ago, The Johnster said:

geology (I've maintained a lifelong passing interest in this) teacher

I am on record here and elsewhere as a geologist by enthusiasm and degree. Among all the negatives, bullying, violence and borderline-unlawful acts meted out by staff and fellow schoolboys it was our geology teacher who stood head and shoulders, quietly and assuredly, as a beacon. 
 

It was he who I have always cited as my most profound influence and greatest mentor. Not that we always saw eye to eye but I passed A-level and eventually gained BSc (Hons) thanks largely to this one man. Who sadly succumbed to the Big C during my “gap year” having been forced by illness to abandon his teaching career just before we - his last class - sat our A-levels. We all passed. A tribute to a good man and a great teacher. 

[pH]

1 hour ago, jamie92208 said:

The only result for me was I still know quite a bit about the history of playings cards after being discovered playing a card game on the back row of a Physics lesson.  I got a BP for that and copied out the relevant entry from the Encyclopedia  Britannica in the library. 

 

The punishment of ‘lines’ was the same as shown in the introduction to ‘The Simpsons”, where Bart is shown copying out “I must not …” multiple times. People were known to tape several pens together to produce several lines in one pass across the page.

 

One teacher thought the punishment should be more useful than that, and specified that text from a book should be copied. This resulted in lines being written containing three words per line.

 

So it was specified that the requisite number of lines, as printed in the book, should be copied. Cue copying of a table of contents multiple times - it hadn’t been stated that text couldn’t be duplicated. That was forbidden.

 

That started a search in the specified book for short lines - last ones in paragraphs for example - which were copied individually. So ‘continuous lines of text in the book’ was then required.

 

Etc.

Edited February 6, 2023 by pH

[The White Rabbit]

One punishment at school was colouring... yes, that's secondary school. However, it was colouring in squares on graph paper, with no adjacent squares being permitted to have the same colour. I never received this myself but saw the results a few times. I always wondered if it was a cunning plan to produce wallpaper, either for resale or use in the teachers' common room. 

[Tony_S]

2 hours ago, southern42 said:

Getting home at sunset now. This is Tryfan taken from the A5 going towards Bangor.

“One does not simply walk into Mordor”

Fortunately the A5 can be used…

[Ozexpatriate]

Dr. Strangelove was worried about a "mine" gap.

 

Apparently NORAD has a "domain awareness gap".

 

CNN: Pentagon says it had ‘an awareness gap’ that led to failure to detect 3 Chinese balloons under Trump

 

Makes me wonder if all the fuss over transferring USAF Space Command to the US Space Force led to some tribal communications issues in what would have been purely a USAF issue - now a detection gap <100km in altitude. (>100km is unified US Space Command.)

 

I won't go into the inane politics already going on but this one is going to be very popcorn-worthy.

 

MIND THE GAP 😉

 

Edited February 6, 2023 by Ozexpatriate

[polybear]

2 hours ago, The Johnster said:

This was in turn the cause of various parties, pairings-up, and one baby, who we all considered a joint effort and were all very proud of. 

 

Er......you might want to re-word that one.  Or not.....😲

 

1 hour ago, PeterBB said:

Began to sound a bit like a rant but when you have to teach 16 plus year olds how to read and write how on earth do they progress.

 

 

Bear recalls an article several years ago reporting that it's not uncommon for Primary School (not pre-School) Teachers to receive kids that aren't even toilet trained...

 

1 hour ago, The Johnster said:

.........he offered to use various contacts to get me 2 years as a lab assistant with the British Antarctic Survey. 

 

I should have taken him up on it; I wouldn't have had much more to do than clean up the test tubes, prepare penguins for dissection and such, and catalogue things, and not have to go out in the cold and Captain Scott it.  The terms were about 3 times the salary I could reasonably manage at home, flights home once a year for 2 weeks leave, twice a year to Cape Town for r & r, and your bar tab deducted from salary, paid in lump sum at the end of the tour. I'd have come home with enough cash to buy a house to live in and another to let out to pay the bills for the first, set up for life at 20, unless I'd become an alcoholic which was not apparently uncommon with bar tabs and long winters hunkered down with nowt to do on the Survey.  Of course, I wanted to drink beer and go dancing with girls, but my life might have been different if I'd gone down there!  Regretted it within a very few years afterwards.  

 

At 16 a certain Bear was offered an Engineering Apprenticeship with BA, ultimately resulting in being an Aircraft Maintenance Engineer.  And I turned it down - instead going to The Great(?) Empire.  Big, Big, Humongously Big mistake - and I knew it then.  It was the aggro (and very much the fear) of living away from home that did it; BA provided accommodation for the first (and second?) year, but after that there was a real risk of having to go looking for somewhere to rent etc.  Turdyturdyturdycurses.

[petethemole]

I was a scholarship boy and 'day boarder', a day boy who had lunch in school, at a public school that took 11+ passes. The pupils were about half boarders.   There was Saturday school, classes in the morning and games after lunch.  It was a Rugby Union playing school and if the First XV were playing at home we had to show up and watch.  Rolls were called to ensure attedance.  I was useless at rugby being small, light and not very strong.  The games for such people were often taken by senior boys who were happy as long as you ran after the ball and got exercise.  The masters who supervised rugby  were mostly keen rather than sadistic, apart from one who had a whistle cord with a police whistle at one end, an Acme Thunderer at the other and knots all along the cord.  He taught English and was a firm disciplinarian in class, but a very good English teacher.  If pitches were too wet or frozen we had runs, not cross country, just round the streets near the school, in a circuit so you couldn't drop out and rest until the pack came back.  The academic ability range was wide, six streams in all.  The top two were hothouse streams and took O levels a year early, four in December, when many of us were still 14, and four in summer as I turned 15.  A levels were then taken at 17.  Along with some of my peers I only did moderately well and we were effectively too young for Uni we stayed on to do resits as a Senior Sixth, along with the academic whizkids preparing for Oxbridge.  Languages were Latin, French and German to O level.  Those choosing to specialise in languages at A level could do Spanish or English.  The Classical Sixth did Latin, Greek and either English or History.  I chose History, Geography and English.  One of the history masters, David Baker, was a local amateur archaeologist and arranged for some of the Rugby haters to dig on his site nearby on games afternoons.  He later became County Archaeologist for Bedfordshire and after two years of office work I went to Uni and became an archaeologist.  So school certainly influenced my later life.

 

In other news Mrs mole has initiated a personal injury claim against the Leisure centre but is still feeling very down about her future mobility.  She needs to change her Motabiliy car for one higher off the ground, which requires an extra deposit, and we need to ake out the bath and install a proper shower.

[monkeysarefun]

47 minutes ago, Ozexpatriate said:

Dr. Strangelove was worried about a "mine" gap.

 

Apparently NORAD has a "domain awareness gap".

 

CNN: Pentagon says it had ‘an awareness gap’ that led to failure to detect 3 Chinese balloons under Trump

 

Makes me wonder if all the fuss over transferring USAF Space Command to the US Space Force led to some tribal communications issues in what would have been purely a USAF issue - now a detection gap <100km in altitude. (>100km is unified US Space Command.)

 

I won't go into the inane politics already going on but this one is going to be very popcorn-worthy.

 

MIND THE GAP 😉

 

I'm a bit dumbfounded that despite all the recent hoo-hah when NASA knocked that asteroid off-course to show we could be protected from them, so many only get discovered by some amateur bloke, rather than some massive early-warning system we all seem to assume is in place. The recent one from last week that passed close by was discovered by an amateur Brazillian(?)  guy, and there was another recent close-miss one discovered by a Chinese backyard astronomer, unknown prior to him seeing it. 

 

Could all mean  that @PupCamis out last line of defence. 

Edited February 6, 2023 by monkeysarefun

[DaveF]

Until I was 16 I went to a boys grammar school, it was like a curate's egg.  A number of teachers were excellent.  I remember a Biology teacher whose hobby was making violins, the geography teacher who  very good hockey player - he taught sport as well, the maths teacher who taught us (as mentioned some weeks ago) the A level syllabus  before we did 0 levels, the Geordie English teacher who used to arrange for us to go to classical music concerts and so on. 

 

There were no really bad ones or at least I avoided being taught by them.  Even then I was quite independent and several times suggested I would be better in a different teaching group - for example those doing O level Biology were not usually "allowed" to be in the top maths set.  I think I won every time.  I remember the Headmaster once telling me that I had no respect for anyone in authority and treated all staff the same.

 

In the 6th form I went to a mixed grammar school.  As I did Biology boys were in a minority so there were plenty of girls to get to know.  The Biology teacher was young, as was her technician.  She used to provide coffee for us all at break and lunchtimes and they were both always ready to chat about anything and everything.  The Physics teacher never seemed to teach us much, but we all did well - and I learnt a lot about stocks and shares which was his hobby.

 

Above all at both schools I (and everyone else) was made to think for myself and question everything. Also to realise that what we were taught was only the tip of the iceberg and that to really learn and undersatnd you had to go and find things out for yourself.  Fortunately this was also the attitude of my lecturers at University.  They didn't mind if I went to lectures or not, as long as I wrote good essays, passed exams and did the practical work - quite old fashioned I suppose.  But then we had no exams at all in the second year of the Biology degree course.

 

Lastly in my first job in a research laboratory during my gap year my boss taught me to  formulate a hypothesis and devise a way of testing it.  I also had to summarise scientific papers each week from journals and discuss them with him and form my own conclusions about the validity of the work.  I was given a relevant topic to read about and then set up a research programme - actually looking at the early stages of skin cancer for which I had to produce a set of results before I left for University.

 

Of course school was not all good, I came across a very few unpleasant teachers and rather more unpleasant fellow pupils - but I learnt to stand up for myself very quickly.  Perhaps that fact that one of P E teachers taught some of us to box helped in that.

 

David

[Ozexpatriate]

Just now, monkeysarefun said:

some early-warning system we all seem to assume is in place ...

There is no such thing really. They're largely black against a black background - unless you get lucky and the sun lights them up a bit.

 

Reminds me of Hotblack Desiato's stuntship:

Quote

... the interior of the ship was completely black. There were black controls labelled in black, on a black background, with a little light that lit up black, which made it difficult to control the ship. The ceiling and walls of the swaying cabin were also black, as well as the seats, control panel, the instruments and the little screws that held them in place. The thin tufted nylon floor covering was black, and when a corner of the foam underlay was lifted up that was also discovered to be was black.

...

the ship was a stunt ship for the band Disaster Area, which was owned by Hotblack Desiato and was set on a collision course with a sun. The decor had been chosen in honour of its owner's sad, lamented, and tax-deductible condition.

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