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!)

Pfffttt all of you remembering the helpful shit, this has been on a loop going round pushing out academic stuff since 1992

cauliflowers fluffy and cabages green
strawberries r sweeter than any ive seen
beetroots purple and onions white
all grow stadily day and night

the apples are ripe and the plums are red
the broadbeans are sleeping in their blankety bed

blackberries juicy and rubhabs sour
marrows are fattening hour by hour
gouseberries hairy and lettuces fat
Radishes round and runner beans flat

The apples are ripe and the plums are red
The broadbeans are sleeping in their blankety bed

Orangey carrots and turnips cream
Reddening tomatoes that used to be green
Brown potatoes in little heaps
Down in the darkness where the celery sleeps

The apples are ripe and the plums are red
The broadbeans are sleeping in their blankety bed

Oh god, we had to do a work sheet that said, stop copying my answers hissed Jean. And put the speech marks in the right place! (6 years old and I’m now 36!)

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori

The lord's prayer, recited every day during morning assembly

YY to photosynthesis and osmosis.

The principle of force multipliers.

The countries that make up the Commonwealth (a useful one for quizzes).

Kings and Queens of England.

And amo, amas, amat.......

adolf hitler organised his own armies

on old olympus towering tops a fat armed girl performed some hops
(actually that was from my mum, it's the cranial nerves I think)

every good boy deserves favour
battle ends and down goes charles farmer

never eat cheese, eat salmon sandwiches and remain young

gosh what a load of crap there is in my head

also,
if music be the food of love, play on
give me excess of it
that surfeiting, the appetite may sicken and so die
that phrase again ! it had a dying fall

I can sing a verse of Oh Come All Ye Faithful in Latin. Possibly not terribly accurate Latin at this stage

X =-b + or - the square root of b squared minus 4ac all over 2a.... Comes in incredibly useful... Not!
A few WW2 poems as well...

How to sing "O come all ye faithful" in Latin. I didn't take Latin but we always sang it in Latin at assembly.

Oh and 'silent night' in German.... Although I have no singing voice

@dementedma

i came here to boast about ‘entschuldigen sie bitte, wie komme ich am besten zum strassenbahnhaltestelle.’ only to find myself beaten to it!

and oxbow lakes, obvs.

Most of my Latin.
Various wars / treaties etc from History lessons.
Sohcahtoa.
1 - 100 in Spanish.

Also Dime un bocadillo de jamon, por favor.
(give me a ham sandwich please!)

Also various Shakespeare quotes from Macbeth and Lear, along with Keats' Ode to Autumn - Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness....

Cornelia est puella Romana....Ecce Romani

3.1415927

spectacularly useless bit of info when every calculator has a pi button.

@Runnerduck34, you beat me to it! I recited it to my children recently and they’d never even heard of it, just shows how things were different back then (80s and not a faith school either).

I can recite the alphabet backwards very fast

Pythagorus's theory. And algebra. I really got those. Thought it would serve me well in life and was chuffed to bits that I understood them so thoroughly. Sigh.

MCMLXXXIV the then current year in Roman numerals. It has been mainly useful in quizzes.

A seven-verse school song, in Latin.

(I don't speak a word of Latin, but that bloody song is engraved on my memory).

In German - "from time to time I looked out of the window"

In French - "I am soaked to the skin"

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed. And all went to be taxed, each to his own city. And Joseph came from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea and unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and line of David, with Mary his wife, being great with child.

And so it was, that while they were there, the day came that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

And I can sing this, word for word...gosh aren't I lucky :

danced in the morning
When the world was begun,
And I danced in the moon
And the stars and the sun,
And I came down from heaven
And I danced on the earth,
At Bethlehem
I had my birth.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he
I danced for the scribe
And the pharisee,
But they would not dance
And they wouldn't follow me.
I danced for the fishermen,
For James and John
They came with me
And the Dance went on.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he
I danced on the Sabbath
And I cured the lame;
The holy people
Said it was a shame.
They whipped and they stripped
And they hung me on high,
And they left me there
On a Cross to die.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he
I danced on a Friday
When the sky turned black
It's hard to dance
With the devil on your back.
They buried my body
And they thought I'd gone,
But I am the Dance,
And I still go on.
Dance, then, wherever you may be,
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he,
And I'll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I'll lead you all in the Dance, said he
They cut me down
And I leapt up high;
I am the life
That'll never, never die;
I'll live in you
If you'll live in me -
I am the Lord
Of the Dance, said he.

Il pleuvait

I remember SohCahToa too but no idea what it means

The words to Autumn Days are engraved in my memory!

We had to produce a poem most weeks through juniors. You got extra marks for learning them.
I can recite a lot of poetry from ones like When I was One (A A Milne) through Stanley Holloway Monologues (The Lion and Albert) to Heaven (Rupert Brook) and can make my family groan by producing a poem for all occasions.
Strange I can't remember where I put my keys.

Other really odd one was after GCSEs we had a 2 day induction to 6th form. one of the things they talked about was memorising lists. They gave us a method to learn a list of ten random things. I can still do certainly 9 out of the 10, and am not totally sure on the last one.
I don't think I can remember much from the GCSEs