My schoolwork

Golly gosh it's already a warm start to the day as I type up this blog early on Tuesday morning having just about cracked the failure to get to sleep thing by leaving all the electrics downstairs overnight often charging up.

Everybody learns differently some more chalk and talk, others by actually doing the task although as many of recall school seldom showed any inclination to adjust teaching methods to suit what is known about learning preferring to do things as its always been done.

Chalk and talk with copius note taking just never works with me really not least I can't remember more than a few words at time and am rubbish at spelling not least for being dyslexic.

The odd time I took part in any kind of a school recreation with actual lessons, having to dress in uniform and that just undelined to me what was wrong about the education I had as it just wasn't the case they took any consideration of my innate limitations and preferred to see as naughty inattentive boy who need a sharp reminder rather than saving anything like that to pure laziness or bad manners.

Sometimes you wonder if those who run things have really moved on some forty or so years in our understanding of peoples disabilities?

Skating away

Just a note before we begin, they may be a break in the other blogs as the phone line and internet is being changed over at the weekend as I'm not super human being capable of writing tons of blogs to cover the gaps and scheduling them.

School has now resumed after the Chrismas and New Year break although it was extended by a day on Monday as we had quite a bit of snow and so school buses and that were not working although my local combined infants and juniors, yes the one I went to myself, was actually open.

Then, the caretaker for that lives just around the corner and most of the staff are fairly nearby while sometimes high school staff may live ten miles or more than the schools location.

I did get out in the snow not least with bin duties and the like so I was well wrapped up and shod to tackle the snow and ice which helps given I'm not good on my feet generally never mind with this.

Classic grey turn over socks are a thing with me not least with maroon or blue stripes  so maybe I might look at finding a few more from various suppliers.

Co-ed schooling and uniform options

Following some discussion on forum, rather unexpectedly around the broader topic of school uniforms, presentations and co-ed schooling I do want to set out my thoughts as evolving as they can be around this.

The first and more important thing is that for me I never saw co-ed schools as being anything other than a school that admitted girls as well as boys.

For one thing they playgound was seldom really mixed with there being groups of children playing in single sex groups together not because teachers want that but because in practise that's what the children elected even if, like me you might of wanted to play the odd game with the girls (and at the time some girls wanted to play footy with us).

P.E. was co-ed but Games certainly wasn't even at the non competition level was us been taken out two year groups at a time for "boys games" and they'd be taken out for theirs so no chance for me to play netball and they never got to play football.

How sad.

People do confuse how you dress with your sex, something I find baffling, because simply the only difference is that fabrics are cut to different patterns that have at different times been associated with either sex.

Boys and men can wear kilts, a basically skirted item, and today not a few girls wear trousers both long and short.

Let's put it this way: I have no issue with any boy wearing a suitable possibly lined skirt to school if he feels more comfortable in himself as part of the uniform and on the odd time I had worn one too as baffling as it might of been to the "he man boys".

It's no different to allowing as we do girls to wear things other than pinafore dresses and skirts to school and I really don't see why we need to by having so much energy wasted on fighting it.

It's very much different than the vexed issue of social gender transformation and medical interventions as addressed recently in the Cass report as it applies to minors.

That is about presenting as another sex in settings such as schools with different gender identities such as a new name, use of pronouns and so on.

All I'd say is to make things easier for other children and for staff to adjust, I feel making a choice on a term by term basis for anything not requiring specialist clothing needs and keeping to that would go with that so if Robert wishes to wear a skirt and Roberta feels she wishes to wear short trousers then they can and their mates get used to it.

School dress from past decades

Children's clothes especially school wear from the past have  always fascinated me.

This is very much 1971, familiar to anyone who read the school based stories popular from that era whose illustrations would be like this such as pre 1970's Enid Blyton. and around six terms after joining the Infants myself

The simplicity of it is what strikes me with a jumper or cardigan over a top with tie even if it might of been elasticated for us with short short trousers for us and either a grey skirt or pinafore dress for girls.

I find it interesting two are wearing red  rather than grey.

What I normally wear is very much the modern version and targeted more toward Infant and Juniors reflecting the changed attitude that saw as we entered the seventies high school boys going straight to long trousers which I did and still loath with a passion

Families

Some days things just come crashing to you,  a bit of the past that jolts you as if a meteor struck you as you were just walking along the pavement.

It was really about some thoughts that I had with my second best friend at high school at the time, she faced a lot of physical challenges in her life but she had hours of time to try to understand me and we were chatting would of been early 1982 about tv and what we saw mattered to us.

You know, the kind of totally random teen stuff that actually in hindsight was really pretty significant for how I saw and felt.

Let me explain. On commercial tv there was a long running American tv show about family life across the decades called The Waltons that featured this extended family sharing lifes ups and down together in rural Virginia, and the head of the family John Walton Snr, operated a lumber mill and supplemented their income with a small-scale farming. They took in people and shared a lot as a family united, attending church on Sundays.

That's probably was much as I need to say for the purposes of this entry as I'm not writing a essay on the series or anything as it's what's in more modern parlance a "Slice of life" series seeing the family grow and change over time in accordance with events such as the Great Depression, WW2, the Great Society and Civil Rights  era and so on.

The thing Linda and I were discussing was Family: what it means to be in a family, our involvement or interaction if you like with with Mum and Dad, your immediate siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles. The extent it is a 'unit' and all that.

We were also comparing and contrasting our own relationships  with our families to what we had been watching.

In a lot of ways she saw many parallels  between that of how she cared for them as much as they had to do quite a lot for her and the fictional family we saw.

I once said half joking to Denise one breaktime If it was like mine, then everybody would be off doing totally their own thing, with Mum trying to hold the thing together and me behind a chair on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

That may sound kinda melodramatic but there was and still is the lack of bonds between everybody, no real sense of feeling for one another, for me it wasn't a place of safety with one sibling who'd think nothing of verbally and financially abusing me which wasn't really helped by my being able to spot in seconds any outright lies he was telling to get more for himself as he felt hard done to and obliged to report it.

That's before you bring in Dad who'd explode at the slightest thing, throwing stuff across the room, propelling me in a chair into corners like trash, threatening to burn down the house.

You see, that's the big comparison  between what family was like for her and for me and to open about this really hurt.

This whole experience left a big legacy with me, not least a very strong feeling of longing, almost desperation to loved and cared for.

What I wanted so much was physical and emotional intimacy, a feeling beyond mere words of what it means to 'belong', to be bonded and have bonds that outlast their very beginnings, that provide emotional comfort promoting personal confidence and development.

A relationship that would teach me what I needed to know to get by with people, to be able contribute to it, helping me to stand on my own two feet as a grounded individual within the wider unit.

A wider unit that shared a common purpose, the raising of and looking after that family that was prepared discipline me in a loving, structured, affectionate way so fulfilled my role and expectations within it and our wider community.

I wanted to be...in the Waltons family.

School and boys

 

Around the early 1970's you tended to see a higher proportion of women teachers in school particulary Primary although when it came to Headship, Headmasters and deputies still were mainly male perhaps because of the assumption women couldn't "own" the same respect as men.

I first had a female Headmistress in my last years in high school which it had to be said felt very much a different experience not that I'm suggesting in any respect she wasn't up to it as on reflection she was excellent.

I think the problem area is when a high proportion of teaching staff are female boys feel their is no one who knows and understands what being a boy is like, what makes them "tick" and so acting up and the like increases apart from those boys who don't have good male role models at home being at risk of going down the wrong path.