School stuff that has stubbornly stuck in your head

[SlayingDragons]

Just that really - what has stuck in your head since you were at school?

• I remember a poem I had to learn in P5 for a Christmas concert. It was 30 years ago now but I can still recite it word for word. (It wasn’t short either!)

• I can recount every county in Ireland in alphabetical order.

• I can direct you to the train station in German just so long as it is straight ahead, take the first street on the right, second on the left and the station is on the right hand side.

(Useful stuff like how to work out the angles in a triangle so I can help my first year with her homework - not so much!)

Huge tracts of The Merchant of Venice and Hamlet that I had to learn for exams.

The square on the hypotenuse etc

Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
Acts and Romans follow on.

@GuppytheCat we had a mnemonic for that, which you have reminded me of: AHA UNU VIZ, strangely memorable.

Osmosis is the movement of water molecules from an area of their low concentration to an area of high concentration through a selectively permeable membrane.

Oxbow lakes

I recently flew over an area with a lot of rivers and took great pleasure in pointing out the oxbow lakes to DH

English

"Et tu, Brute"

The first verse and a half of 'Daffodils'

Random quotes from Yeats and Kavanagh

History

Diet of Worms (reformation)
How to spell Tenochtitlan (explorers and conquest)

Music

Every Good Boy Deserves Food
FACE

French

From the audio tapes:-

"Comment tu t'appelle?"

"Je m'appelle AnneMarie. Et toi?"

"Je m'appelle Jacques"

AnneMarie had a very high pitched voice and Jacques had a very deep voice.

Irish

"An bhfuil cead agam dul go dtí an leithreas?"
(Can I go to the toilet)

Peig was a mass murderer and should never have been inflicted on Leaving Cert students

Geography

Rivers of South America and main products of each SA country. I have yet to find a use for this knowledge - it never comes up in pub quizzes.

Not a lot to show for 13 years of education!

Also "now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party".

Indeed, but our teacher was fixated on lazy dogs. I think she was just an incredibly lazy teacher. Still is was better than the hours we spent typing asdf ;lkj during the first few lessons! I remember the excitement of moving onto sad, fad and then couldn;t contain myself when we did had and lad. We must have spent the entire first term on those 8 letters. God, it was boring!

To solve quadratic equations you sing, to the tune of the last 5 lines of the 12 days of Christmas:

Mi-in-us b... (5 golden rings)
Plus or minus square root (4 calling birds)
Of b squared (3 French hens)
Minus 4 a c (2 turtle doves)
And the whole thing is over 2 a! (And a partridge I a pear tree)

I think osmosis had something to do with potatoes in water and photosynthesis was leaves.....🤔

At the school cookery lessons, I still start sauces off with a roux made the way we were taught!

I'm delighted too, to point out terminal moraine landscape!

Lobster -- and finally the ones that take accusative (those took me longer to recall, possibly because I always muddled bei and bis):

bis, durch, für, gegen, ohne, um, entlang

To be rattled off with the emphasis on the final syllable!

We too could parrot the whole of

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies
It made one gaahhhhsp and stretch one's eyes.

Long aaahh compulsory according to our English teacher, despite the heavy Lancs accent of all but one of her pupils.

@AndNoneForGretchenWieners "does it end in A-or-E"? She was scary but a very efficient Latin teacher, which is more than can be said for Mr Mees. All I can remember of him is the armpits...

For those quoting Catullus, it's all available online these days.

@GuppytheCat goodness, I think that was our "every good boy deserves under/over football".

At primary school:
In ten hundred and sixty six
William the Conqueror to England came
He killed King Harold and seized the throne
To which he said he had a claim.

Can't remember any more of that one.

Contour lines are imaginary lines joining places of equal height above sea level

I really want to learn about oxbow lakes now

I didn't learn about oxbow lakes from school, but from our Usborne Book of the Earth. :-)

Nobody really wants to learn about oxbow lakes, even the teacher looked like they were about to expire from a boredom related affliction.

Ox bow lakes. How could I have forgotten them? I can still remember how they were formed too! And corries and drumlins.

Nearly all of the 'to be or not be' soliloquy from Hamlet.

The Russian for 'that's a blackboard' which is really handy if you're lost on Moscow 😃

All the words to "I Need a Boat" from Jonah and the Whale

And how to spell necessary - one collar, two sleeves

Joris - is it the same musical as this?
Whe-e-e-e-e-ennnnnnn
Jonahfellintotheseaheclosedhiseyesan'praaayyyyed
OhLordI'mverysorrythatyourwordIdisobeyed
Ifyouwillonlycomean'savemeIwilldoasyoucommand
Insteadoftreadingwaterletmetreaduponthe[...sand?land? Darn!]

To be sung at breakneck speed?

emwithme it was the pissy smell I associate most with Mr Mees. And the tins of deodorant at Christmas that at least one boy put on his desk. Man, he must have hated us.

@GuppytheCat yes!! The fella who lived in a whale. I played the triangle.