Educational instruments

Posted on 30th August 2022 by 192.168.1.1

My nephews return to school next week. The all too short English summer holidays are drawing to a close.

Having attempted on various occasions to borrow from them things like a rubber or a pencil sharpener, I realise that teenage boys have not changed. The only difference is the selection of equipment that might be lost or put to other uses seems to have multiplied.

Supermarkets have had an abundant array of pens and pencils, assorted accessories, sophisticated calculators, highlighter pens and erasers. When did buying things for school  become a matter of deciding between so many and varied options?  One could spend the best part of a good deal of money and still go away feeling there was more that could have been bought.

One thing always brings a giggle – a Helix Oxford Folding Ruler.

There was a plentiful supply of folding rulers in schooldays, their chief drawback was that they did not fold back.

Plastic rulers were appearing, but the standard classroom ruler was wooden. On one side, there were twelve inches marked in whole and quarter-inches, on the reverse, thirty centimetres marked in centimetres and millimetres.

Rulers were not much used for mathematical purposes: they were for drawing lines, if such were necessary. They were for flicking screwed- up balls of paper across the classroom. Or they were for or enacting battle scenes from Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers.

The soft wood from which they were manufactured allowed one to easily engrave them with the point of a pair of compasses, or to write the names of miscellaneous football clubs, pop groups, or girlfriends, in different coloured ink.

It was a rare ruler that resembled the condition in which it was purchased. The folding of one’s own ruler could be a mark of frustration; the folding of someone else’s ruler was generally a mark of annoyance. Having a ruler reduced to half of its former size was rarely a problem; lines in exercise books could still be drawn with what remained.

The shop shelf space required to supply an average schoolboy of the 1970s with the necessary equipment for his education would have been fairly limited. Along with the ruler there would have been a Platignum cartridge pen, the nib of which would have been bent and much of the contents of the cartridges would have appeared as blots on the page. Pencils would have been chewed and sharpened to stubs. A tin of mathematical instruments would have included a pair of compasses, a set square and a protractor. If the ruler was in too bad a state for drawing lines, the set square would suffice, and, in its absence, the straight edge of the protractor might have been used. Erasers were invariably in short supply, probably because they had been employed as missiles in classroom battles while the teacher was writing on the board. Of course, there were the options of having felt tip pens and coloured pencils, but colour and beauty were considered too ‘feminine’ to be the product of a boy’s pencil case.

Judging from my own classrooms, things have not changed.

 

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Cold borrowers?

Posted on 28th August 2022 by 192.168.1.1

I like scarves.

At school, I wear a shirt, tie, sports jacket, and trousers. In summer, the sports jacket is linen, in winter it is tweed. In autumn and winter, I wear a scarf.

I like scarves. I like long scarves. I like the sort of scarves that I can fold in half and then put the two ends through the loop and pull snugly around my neck. Or the sort of scarf that I can loop around my neck and have the two ends still at waist length.

It was such a preference that caused me disappointment in the spring – one of my favourite scarves was lost.

One of the students in school noticed it was no longer among the half a dozen that I wear. ‘Where’s the stripey scarf you used to wear, sir?’

‘I don’t know,’ I replied. ‘I must have left it in one of those classrooms.’

Normally, going into a warm room, I would take off my scarf and hang it over the back of the chair at the teacher’s desk. I rarely sit down during a lesson, so it is not in the way.

There had been three or four times previously when I had returned to rooms to recover scarves, (a small fraction of the times that I had returned to recover my external hard drive which contains my life’s work and without which I would be lost).

The loss of the scarf was annoying. I checked each of the rooms in which I had taught, I checked every corner of the staff room, I checked rooms into which I had not been, lest someone had picked it up to return it and had then put it down again.

The scarf was nowhere to be found. I concluded that either someone had taken it, or, more likely, it had been thrown away.

There were thoughts about buying a replacement. The cost of energy might mean scarves become indoor as well as outdoor wear.

Returning from a summer in England on Tuesday evening, I began unpacking my bags.

At the bottom of the chest of drawers, there is a drawer into which I put stuff that is rarely, if ever, worn. I opened it to throw in a couple of pairs of shorts not worn in years that had been lying in a wardrobe in Somerset. There was a moment of delight – there, neatly folded, was my scarf.

How the scarf came to be in a drawer of rarely worn garments, I have no idea. I have no recall of putting it there. All of my scarves are together in a cupboard, there is no reason why I would have opened the drawer and put the scarf in it.

Recalling the children’s story,  my father would have said it was the borrowers.

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Encountering Bombadil

Posted on 22nd August 2022 by 192.168.1.1

Miss Tucker was recalled in conversation with an old school friend yesterday. I used to hold Miss Tucker indirectly responsible for the loss of my first copy of The Lord of the Rings.

It was at Christmas 1974 that I was given a copy of The Lord of the Rings, my aunt sent it from Canada to be given me as a Christmas present.

A thick paperback, it caught the eye of Miss Tucker, one of the teachers at our school as I sat reading it one evening in January 1975.

“You need to get that book bound, otherwise the pages will fall out.”

Miss Tucker was was not someone with whom one argued, book binding was one of the after school activities that took place in her classroom. Apart from removing the cover, the binding did not proceed very far, the book lay in the storeroom of her classroom for two years. Its absence did not cause undue upset, I had not understood the pages I had read.

When the storeroom was engulfed in a fire in January 1977, there was simply the thought that Miss Tucker’s book binding meant that I would never now read The Lord of the Rings. 

Twenty years would pass before the story made a reappearance, I took our son, then six years old to see a puppet performance of the story at Belfast’s Grand Opera House. The story was not much better comprehended by a thirty-six year old than it had been by his fourteen year old predecessor.

Four years later, the six year old had become a ten year old and the story had become one of his passions, it became an important part of the marking of each Christmas to go to the cinema and to see each of the trilogy of films as they were released.

During the summer holiday of 2002, twenty-eight years after being sent my first copy, I borrowed our son’s copy and read it for myself. The story seemed straightforward, the asides and the details remained baffling, I vowed to re-read it when the opportunity presented itself.

Seven years later, preparing for a trip to Africa, I decided that the journey would allow for a re-reading of Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong and of The Lord of the Rings. Birdsong was left on the airliner that transported us from London to Nairobi. Our son had wisely suggested I buy my own copy of The Lord of the Rings, fearing it too might be left somewhere. Laid low with food poisoning, I had started to re-read it, but had not got beyond the first forty or so pages.

It would be another seven years before I completed my second reading of the trilogy. Elements of it remained hard to understand. The most enigmatic element of all is the character of Tom Bombadil, a man unmoved by the malevolent power of the ring:

‘Show me the precious Ring!’ he said suddenly in the midst of the story: and Frodo, to his own astonishment, drew out the chain from his pocket, and unfastening the Ring handed it at once to Tom.

It seemed to grow larger as it lay for a moment on his big brown-skinned hand. Then suddenly he put it to his eye and laughed. For a second the hobbits had a vision, both comical and alarming, of his bright blue eye gleaming through a circle of gold. Then Tom put the Ring round the end of his little finger and held it up to the candlelight. For a moment the hobbits noticed nothing strange about this. Then they gasped. There was no sign of Tom disappearing!

Tom laughed again, and then he spun the Ring in the air – and it vanished with a flash. Frodo gave a cry – and Tom leaned forward and handed it back to him with a smile.

Tom Bombadil defines himself as a timeless one:

Eldest, that’s what I am. Mark my words, my friends: Tom was here before the river and the trees; Tom remembers the first raindrop and the first acorn. He made paths before the Big People, and saw the Little People arriving. He was here before the Kings and the graves and the Barrow-wights. When the Elves passed westward, Tom was here already, before the seas were bent. He knew the dark under the stars when it was fearless – before the Dark Lord came from Outside.

In his correspondence, Tolkien suggests that Bombadil is a personification of the countryside, the English shires with which he was familiar; a countryside unmoved by the evil of the world around. Bombadil is generous, hospitable, protective, joyous, delighting in beauty.

An evangelical Christian opposed to evolutionary science, I suspect Miss Tucker would have recoiled at the idea of Tom Bombadil.

 

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Digital discombobulation

Posted on 20th August 2022 by 192.168.1.1

Scrolling through the Freeview television guide, I tried to select a channel. The wrong button must have been pressed or the wrong box selected. Something told me I had set a reminder, it was not clear of what I was to be reminded.

An hour later, watching Midsomer Murders on ITV3+1, DCI Barnaby suddenly disappeared to be replaced by a programme set on an oil rig. Trying to recover the Midsomer Constabulary, I pressed Channel 10 for ITV 3 and was confused to find Barnaby investigating the death of someone who had not previously appeared. A few scenes passed before I realised that I was watching the wrong episode because I was watching the wrong channel

The vagaries of digital television are challenging at times.

One evening, the ITN news had ended and we had waited for the West Country news. It had seemed odd, the stories hadn’t related to anywhere we knew. Then came the weather forecast, would there be rain in Somerset in the morning? We were never to find out, instead the following day’s meteorological predictions for Birmingham were shared by a woman whose accent was definitely not Bristolian. Afterwards, a caption appeared on the screen, “ITV Central.”

“Oh dear,” said my sister said, “the storm must have been stronger than we thought, we seem to have been blown North.”

The idea of the picturesque town of Ilminster being blown three counties northward  by a strong gale had conjured visions of it landing on the Midland equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West. All it would have needed would have been for a young Dorothy to step out of the town into a Birmingham Land of Oz.

Rather than the sudden displacement of an entire community, the explanation that had seemed more likely was that the digital television set had switched from its default signal to one from a neighbouring region.

My mother’s Freeview box frequently decides she is in the south-west and plies her with stories of Devon and Cornwall instead of their own locality. It demands a search through the various control options to change the default channels; Bristol has to be recovered so that all is right with the world.

Digital broadcasting can bring an abundance of choice, but also a dislocation. Gone are the times when one’s choice was entirely determined by geography. Terrestrial digital television has some geographical reference, but satellite digital broadcasts allows the potential to listen to anything from anywhere. And if the television does not provide adequate choice, then online broadcasting adds innumerably more opportunities.

The extension of choice brings with it the loss of a community dimension. Like the local newspaper, the local television news brought one the news of one’s own place, it created a sense of shared stories, a sense of identification with a place, a sense of being part of somewhere. Digital dislocation breaks the ties of former times, it is as if one had been suddenly gathered up in the wind and set down in a distant city.

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Fishing gone

Posted on 17th August 2022 by 192.168.1.1

My oldest nephew is thirty-four this year. He has a wisdom beyond his years – his idea of a perfect weekend is to pitch his bivouac on a river bank and fish for carp or pike.

Once, I would have joined him, but it is now almost fifty years since I last sat on a river bank, the long distant summer of 1975.

Going fishing was one of the things the restrictive fundamentalist Christian regime of our school allowed, and one Saturday in June of that year three of us passed on the opportunity to go on the schoolbus to the seaside town of Paignton, and instead walked to a river that ran through a nearby Dartmoor valley.

The river was was known for its trout and it was an opportunity to use the fishing rod that had been a present the previous Christmas and which had received little use. There was no requirement to fly fish the river, which was a good thing because none of us had the equipment needed for such sport fishing, nor could we have afforded the price of the sort of permit generally required for trout waters.

The afternoon was unsuccessful, only one fish was landed, and it was foul-hooked by a boy called Kevin. There arose a good-natured disagreement between Kevin and the other boy about the fish having been thrown back into the river.

A boisterous exchange ensued in which Kevin received a push in the chest, stumbled backwards and fell over the edge of the bank and into the river. In the wintertime, the depth would have been much greater, but on a warm Saturday in June, it was no more than a couple of feet. Kevin sat on the riverbed calling every curse he knew down upon his assailant, who stood on the bank, speechless with laughter.

The fishing was abandoned as we sought to dry Kevin’s clothes. Each garment was wrung out and hung on the bushes. Kevin sat on the grass in a state of undress, muttering about not going fishing in such company again.

Kevin’s complaints were unnecessary, we did not go fishing again that term; we didn’t ever go fishing again. Back in Somerset for the summer holidays, I cycled down to the River Yeo at Pibsbury a couple of times, it seemed dull without the companionship of schoolmates.

When the new school year began in September, fishing seemed the activity for younger people and I have never picked up a fishing rod since.

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