School Daze
Posted on November 29, 2007
Filed Under Education, Rant, School, The Past, chancers, children, family | Leave a Comment
The Irish Times (sub required) published it’s Feeder Schools report today. My old Secondary (High) School performed very badly and I can’t say I’m too surprised. The report said that 30-odd people did the Leaving Cert (final school exam) in my alma mater last year and only an incredibly low 15% went to University. The report doesn’t count other 3rd level institutions in it’s calculations.
The most damning thing I can say about my old school is that the teachers simply didn’t care about the pupils they were teaching. Obstensibly, it should have been a good school; it was in a middle-class area and the student body was probably 66% middle-class and 33% working class. My friends hate me using the word ‘class’ but sometimes it’s a good shorthand. In this situation, one would expect the expectation/entitlement of one class to interact with the hunger of the other class. It should have been ripe for everyone to feed off each other and encourage the students towards higher education and/or entrenpeneurship.
Here’s some examples. Only the first one is likely to have changed.
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The students were graded into A1, A2, B1, B2 classes. Imagine being in the B2 class! I was in the A1 class and therefore was taught latin. There was a computer room but only the B1 and B2 classes were allowed to use them…
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I was a cheeky sod (still am)and I always questioned everything (still do). Being ‘disruptive‘, my parents were called in by the Geography teacher. My mother takes no prisoners and, soon enough, herself and the teacher got into it. Her final position was that I only had to do Geography for 40 mins a day whereas he had to do it for 8 hours a day. Whose commitment was likely to be wanting? He had no answer to that!
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We were trained to be office drones. The CAO forms (University application forms) were never handed out, never discussed, even though I think our civics teacher wrote a mass-market book on the subject. As well as the computer rooms, there was also an art room but again only the B1/B2 classes got to use them.
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It’s sorta funny now but, on a Friday, both the teachers and the students used to take off their ties, go to the local pub, and drink beer!!
I could go on but I’d only get twisted and bitter!!
Thanks to my parent’s support, I did go on to higher education in the end and have travelled halfway around the world using my qualifications. In a strange quirk of fate, I’ve ended up back in my old neighbourhood. But there’s no way I’d send my children (t.b.a.) to my old school.
If I did have children, I’d definitely send them to a Northside school. But I’d want it to have a good mix of Irish and foreign* children with an emphasis on mixing the academic and the creative. *Not sure what the PC term is for ‘foreign’ but I think a cultural mix can only be good.
So ends the rant lesson.
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