If you were at primary school in the 80s

[isabellerossignol]

I've spent what seems like all morning printing off worksheets for my primary aged child. And I was suddenly struck by a vivid memory from primary school. Hand typed or handwritten worksheets that were printed on a machine, in the days before printers, with really poor quality paper and all the writing came out with a bluey/purple tinge.

I've had a Google and apparently it was called a Banda machine, and was used a lot in schools because it enabled relatively cheap printing. Does anyone else remember it?

The thing I remember most is that the printed sheets had a really strong, distinctive smell. If I could smell that now, I'd feel like I was 8 all over again.

Ah, the treat of "clean on both sides" paper. Our standard was dot matrix printer paper used on one side. You'd spend most of a Wet Play pulling off the perforated bits with the holes off the side.

I don't know why but the clock face stamps have brought back such a memory! They were lovely, all clean and unsullied. And the click of a trundle wheel around a playground on a sunny day - we weren't supervised or anything, just sent out to do it, so you'd spend ages out there, feeling the heat burn off the tarmac. Not a speck of suncream, a hat or a drop of water between us!

There was a corner shop at the end of our street and in third year juniors you could see it from the classroom. Sometimes on hot days the teacher would give two sensible children a couple of pounds and send them down there for a class' worth of TipTops (bonus points if you know what I mean!)

SMP was 'schools maths project', nothing to do with Scotland.

I can still smell the Banda purple ink.

I wonder if teachers used to give out the sheets to copy when they had hangover. We knew in Secondary which pub some of the teachers went to at lunch.

I remember one of my most hated teachers having a fit because we were, 'playing with your cubes and not paying attention' because he had brought in from home a record that he'd had to have imported, from Ireland and got the school record player.

It was a record of the Irish radio's coverage of the Pope's visit.
So not even anything said by the pope but just some random bloke talking about how the Holy Father was just walking down the steps of the plane.

It had already been on TV.
I can't imagine why a bunch of 14/15 year old girls wouldn't be listening in awe at the recording.

Did anyone go to a) an open plan school or b) a school with the 'temporary classrooms'?

Talking of break time tuck shops. Who remembers keeping coins in one of these?

They smelt lovely!! 🤣🤣

We worked out textbooks called " Scotish primary maths" which is why I asked @sashh in my town in the Northwest of England 😂no idea why they were called that.

Scottish *

Tip Tops! Yes! Horrible chemical taint, but it was fun pushing the straw through the plastic lid - pop!

Yes to temporary classrooms. We had a year in a portakabin. Mind you, dd is (or was!) in a portakabin this year too; so some things don’t change.

Those purses - so much fun picking off the beads...

I had one of those purses @OvaHere !!

The Tip Tops that I remember were frozen tubes of coloured sweet water, not drinks.

In my area those Portokabins were called Terrapins. I have no idea why!

Borris

I think almost every girl under 11 had one as far as I can remember.

I've been trying to remember other colours. I think they might have also come in green, blue, purple and yellow - all pastel shades.

Yes, I had one of those purses, which I used to keep in a mini raffia handbag which had a blue tit on the front. I remember being allowed to use my 10p pocket money to buy some carrots at the greengrocer's, and carry them home in my bag. Looking back, it was a cunning ploy on my mum's part to put my pocket money back into the household expenses.

Did everybody else do Richmond tests, looking back I think they might have been an 80,s version of sats ,but t hey were very low key multiple choice tests and no revising for them .

Oh I loved school. Such happy memories.

We had a teacher who smoked in class! And once fell asleep (I think lunchtime refreshments had been had) so the naughty boys climbed out the window and down the drainpipe.

Us good girls used to make the teachers’ tea and clean up the staffroom. I also got sent to the shops and down to mind the babies’ class.

I was having a maudlin moment yesterday and was yowling Bring Flowers of the Rarest to myself. Loved the May altar and the crowning.

Were Richmond tests the booklets with little ovals that you filled in with a pencil? I remember those. I don't think you ever found out how you'd done on them - at least I don't remember being told. Maybe just parents were.

This thread has made me so happy! So many memories. I loved Primary school. I remember everything listed. Does anyone remember the big reel to reel tapes that had stories and songs on? Ive always remembered the story about the Montgolfier brothers and their 'electric smoke' hot air balloon?

We're amazed
We're surprised
We don't know what to say
But congratulations are the order of the day
We didn't think you could
We didn't think you would
But with electric smoke man has flown today!

Was a Richmond test like a non verbal reasoning test, I remember doing one of those with no warning in what would have been Y6? Never got the results back. We also used to have to go in the HT’s office every so often to read a long list of words, getting progressively harder. I think we used to stop as soon as we got one wrong.

Yes you had to colour the little oval in with what you thought was the right answer in Richmond tests ,I remember doing a few so possibly maths ,English etc?

Another memory -
In year 2 of Juniors we were all housed in The Annexe which was a Victorian schoolhouse, set miles away, up a lane and across the road from the main (modern) school. Of course we all walked there on our own. No school runs in the car in those days.
My teacher in that year was Mrs Bright. She was ancient and very strict. Other pupils were sorry for you if you were in Mrs Bright's class! Kids used to chant a rhyme about her,

Mrs Bright had a fright
In the middle of the night
Saw a ghost eating toast
Halfway up a lamppost.

Actually she was a good teacher; I learnt all of my times tables that year.

We seemed to spend the entirety of our second year of junior school doing singing and sewing, because that’s what the teacher liked doing.

Sounds fun, but it was awful - she was a horrible woman; very strict and she had favourites. The naughty boys (looking back, they were clearly suffering neglect at home and at least one of them had learning difficulties) used to get smacked with a plimsoll - Percy Plimsoll she called it. “Fetch Percy from the cupboard!” She would screech. She had a squash monitor who had to make her a glass of orange juice upon the command “Squash please!”, and she’d sit there drinking it in front of us, sometimes even with a slice of cake.

We were terrified of her, and I can remember the sheer joy when she was off school for a few weeks and we had a lovely, kind supply teacher in her place. We continued to sew our ‘mats’, which were little embroidery sampler things, and the lovely supply teacher let us get a bit creative with them. When horrid teacher came back she was furious to find we’d been allowed to use knots instead of oversewing, and we had to sit in silence and unpick our sewing and start again.

At that point my parents removed me and sent me to a different school. Amazing what a difference a teacher makes - our first year teacher was fabulous and I can still remember sitting enraptured while he read us The Iron Man, and James and the Giant Peach. He really inspired a love of reading. It was so demotivating time move up to that second year!

And no national curriculum to stick to, teachers could teach what they liked!

Our Year 5 (3rd year juniors) teacher used to teach us a weekly topic on anything he fancied. I remember learning about the Sargasso Sea, Tristan da Cuhna and smoking and what it did to the body. He would talk about the topic, write notes on the board and we had to write it up.

@VenusClapTrap , sounds like Matilda!

Gosh yes, it was a bit!

Those story time cassettes, I remember one with a song where the chorus goes "it's easy as falling off a log, when you order from the giant, ginormous catalogue!" No idea why that sticks in my mind, or even what the story was about!

I know this thread is about the 80s but is anyone old like me and went to Primary in the 70s and remember the experiment where children were allowed to pick their own timetable? So a bit like the independent learning that DS did when he was in YR but this also included English and Maths . I would have been in last year of Primary and we were basically given a blank timetable each, and told we had to do 30 minutes of maths and reading everyday and we could then fill the rest of the timetable how we liked. We had a maths book we worked through independently, so the teacher wasn't actually teaching us! I loved maths and reading so just did that everyday all day. My mum had to buy me the next maths book in the series as I finished the one at school. I have no idea what the teacher was doing during the day as no actual teaching was being done

Funnily enough it was an absolute disaster and didn't last very long. I have always wondered whether it was our particular school (or very lazy teacher) or whether it was a national school policy.