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!)

Error due to parralax

first page of latin primer
amo, amas, amat, amamus, amantus, amant
or some such stuff and was about as far as I ever got in 5 years !!!

also - British Standard Guage Railway track = four feet eight and a half inches

why race cars go neeeeeyowwwwww as they go past - Doppler effect...

Ooo another one, a song in Spanish
Uno d'enero
Dos de febrero
Tres de marzo
Quatro d'abril

There's loads more of it, can remember every word, it's about the Pamplona bull run.

Birds eat crumbs after uncle simon eats ..... how to spell because !

My 6 year old old is currently learning the Scottish classic 'three craws sat upon a wa' I can still sing it word for word in French from a p7 exchange where we sang it in France and Belgium. I also remember every single song from our rainforest school show in p5

My A2 English Lit comparative texts were Friel’s “Translations” & “The Tempest”. I love the former, & if it is true that “to remember everything is a form of madness” I must be a wee bit mad as I remember so much in such vivid detail. (Also, sod “after all this time?”; you want heartbreaking, try “that’s not a word to begin with”... )

Before the Tricolore books we had Avantage; & our Y7 one included a sweet wee poem about a perspicacious pachyderm:
“Ah oui dit l’elephant,
Je suis très intelligent:
Mon nez est très allonge
Et je vois bien plus loin de la bout de mon nez.”

@TryingToBeBold @exWifebeginsAgainat46 @KayakingOnDown
It’s called Captain Noah & His Floating Zoo - if you want to sing along to the bit you were quoting, Trying (& I mean, how could you not?), as is so often the case, YouTube is your friend...
I always quite liked personally

@JorisBonson
I learned necessary with “it is necessary for your blouse to have one collar & two sleeves” too! Somehow my brain now turns it into one collar & two socks. I assume that everyone’s insistence I am, in fact, Hermione Granger, got to me, & I’m working on making sure Crookshanks gets back to me if lost & always being prepared to try to sneakily free some House Elves. Or, er, something?

Our first French book was En Route.
Toto frappe sur la table. He was an absolute pain in the cul, that Toto.
Bonsoir Paul
Bonsoir Louise
Où est Maman?
Où est Papa?
Papa s'appelle Monsieur Dupont.
Oh lala Toto, veux-tu arrêter de frapper sur la sacrée table?

In the 1970s we used to have a singing lesson where we watched a programme on tv and we sang along from booklets. I distinctly remember Quinoro's pearl, and one about a wild rose " oh stay your hand you gypsy townsman who wanders the lane for all of a day, the wild white rose is summers glory, why, pray, take it away"

We had similar, but it was on the radio.

Linstead Market is my stand out memory.

Maybe it was the radio... I shall google!

OP, at last I have found you! My only remaing German is how ask for directions to the train station 😁

A play called the Emerald Crown .

The song at the end was quite moving . Some sixteen years later I found it on YouTube and then found myself sobbing ...

Also most of Burns popular stuff . Did a bloody supper every single year - even including a horrendous bbc live and kicking programme !

The radio (or the wireless as it was quaintly called back then!) with programmes from the BBC Schools Service featured frequently in the school week, giving the teachers a bit of a break I suppose.
Music and Movement, where we all gallumped around being trees swaying in the wind, sunflowers reaching up to the blue sky (this was a difficult one on a foggy November morning), or birds fluttering our wings.
Singing Together where we enthusiastically hollered out folk songs like Dashing Away with a Smoothing Iron or What Shall we do with the Drunken Sailor, with the chorus always sung at tremendous volume!
Then there was an introduction to classical music featuring Pictures at an Exhibition and Fingal's Cave amongst others. This might have been called Adventures in Music, or it might not have been! However, years later when I eventually got a record player, one of the first records I bought was Tchaikovsky's 1812th, so it must have done me some good.

Good grief, Wizzler! Something about 'When the fisher boats were leaving, Quinoro would be grieving, too young to dive for pearl'?

Things you didn't even know you'd remembered...

I'll add:

A very strange play about two people who had conceived their firstborn where, presumably, nuclear war raged around them, and found to their surprise that he was born with green hair, three eyes and a tail:

'Were our minds on what we were doing?'
'The rockets were distracting...'

It stuck in my mind so much that years later I announced a pregnancy to schoolfriends by saying 'Looks like those rockets were distracting again.'

@Guppythecat I remember "poor Quinoro scared and lonely regained his ready with only one oyster in his hand"

That ear worm will stay with me all day now

How to test if a flat iron (not an electric one) was hot enough:

You spit on it.

This was demonstrated by no less an authority than the fearsome headmistress, while using a flat iron which had to be heated on the stove. She was also wearing a Victorian maid's outfit while demonstrating this, and other Victorian household objects, such as a scrubbing board.

The vegetation of Savannah grasslands is tall tufted grasses with the occasional tree or shrub.

SOHCAHTOA

The formation of ox bow lakes.

The different types of tectonic plate boundary.

The quadratic equation.

An entire harvest festival poem my junior school class read out (in rap style) - I can't remember the name or author but it started with "Cabbages, cauliflowers, crisp crunchy swedes"

A lot of songs.

Metella est Mater. Caecilius est pater. Quintus est filius et canis est in via.
The first page of a Latin text book from a 70s school.

@exWifebeginsAgainat46 are you me? I was also a sheaf of corn in Joseph (bloody important role actually) and we also did captain Noah (and Jonah Man Jazz and Oliver and pretty much every musical that has been mentioned on the thread).

30 days hath September /
April, June and November /
All the rest have 31 /
Save February alone /
Which has 28 days clear /
And 29 in each leap year!

Carrying on the harvest theme, did anyone else sing the one that goes

Michaelmas daisies purple in the border /
Big fat leeks all standing up in order /
Giant marrows winning every prize /
Bubbling jars of elderberry wine (etc.)

?

i still quite like that one

Equilateral equations, which I use for my job

Turned out to be useful after all!

Also Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in French for some reason which I'm now singing to my LO!

This thread is great!