School in the 1970s

[Malie]

Was chatting to a friend who also went to school in the 1970s. We agree they were quite different to now. Anyone else go to school then?

Sunny Smiles!

Can you imagine that happening now I have described it to my own DC and they couldn't believe it - each child getting a little booklet of photos of children and selling each photo for 10p
The photos were of orphaned / disabled children
The 'cute' ones would be sold first

mumofspud
glad someone else remembers sunny smiles was beginning to think I had dreamt it
loved that book of babies but agree ot would be unthinkable now !!!

Dublin convent school, all girls, started in 1970.
We had to stand up and stay standing if a teacher or other adult entered the room, until told to sit down. The girl sitting closest to the door was the designated door opener and she had to hold the door open until the visitor left.
We ate our packed lunches in our classrooms (no hot/school lunches in Irish schools) supervised by our teacher, and then went out to play in the huge school grounds, unsupervised.
We played skipping, German jumps, red rover, Simon Says, What's the Time Mr Fox? and a game involving clues and guessing TV shows and running back and forth. We also ate beech nuts and the bitter-tasting little red leaves from prickly, red-leafed bushes.
On rainy lunchtimes the oldest nun used to play polka records and we danced polkas in the assembly area.
We had several years of Wide Range Readers which had excellent stories and poems, class libraries, the woefully dweeby Siamsa educational magazine in Irish, and my sister's class learned songs from a BBC school singing programme on the radio.
One of the nuns taught singing and we learned a lot of music hall songs from the early 1900s - My Sweet Little Alice Blue Gown, etc. There was a singing exam every year in which each girl had to stand up in her place and sing a chosen song or hymn. 99.9 % chose a hymn, from the Veritas Hymnal. In 6th grade one girl sang Yesterday (really well) and was told that singing pop songs would give her bad vocal habits.
We did LAMDA speech exams every year as part of Elocution and Deportment and had to learn one poem and one piece of prose from an approved list to recite at the exam.
We had to wear our full school uniform on school trips.

Yes, I remember those photos we had to sell. I think it may have been to raise money for the Children's society. I remember visiting aunts and uncles with my little book selling them.

YYY - 'Singing Together' was the BBC singing programme. Thank you PP.

Worst thing that happened to me was being hauled to the front of the hall in front of the whole school for talking, being screamed at then shaken by my shoulders until my teeth hurt.
It has stayed with me.

We had Peter and Jane Ladybird books for learning to read, and bought our own school textbooks (still the case in Ireland) and handed them down to younger siblings. We bought copybooks, jitters, maths copies, and blotting paper at school.
We had to use fountain pens from 2nd grade on, and in fact work handed in in biro would be returned. We always had inky fingers. Teachers used red ink to mark work, and spellings, punctuation, and grammar were always corrected.

Jitters = jotters

Awful! My friend and I were sent out for misbehaving to wait outside the head’s office. It was agony waiting. Then told off and smacked. In private but all classmates wanted to know what happened! Very red faces!

I think these days teachers are discouraged from using red ink because it might upset the kids!

I was appalled when I saw my granddaughter's schoolbooks at the beginning of the summer holidays. She is good at English, but there were spelling mistakes, just left and not corrected.
At my junior school if you made a spelling mistake you had to write the correct spelling 3 times. How do children learn if they're not corrected?

Hated school with a passion from the start to the finish. Loved school dinners though!

Sunny smiles! I remember having to walk around the neighbourhood having to sell the things! Not great if you are extremely shy! I had to explain to my brother's piano teacher's mum that we did not expect her to adopt the children!

Told I was thick so I stopped trying, brutal teachers, given the belt so hard my hands were bruised and couldn't hold a pen. It still rankles me that I was written off at 13yrs old.

secondary school - being told i was ugly by the french teacher.

How on earth can a kid learn if not corrected. Mind you, maybe the teacher couldn’t spell!

I started primary in the late 70s. I went to a Catholic school.

Ladybird reading scheme - featuring Peter, Jane and Pat the Dog.
Another reading scheme was based on the rainbow - as in, there were red books, then yellow, then green etc.. (might not have been that order, apart from red books were definitely first and indigo or violet were among the last).
So, there was "Red book 1, Red book 2, Red book 3; Red running along book 1, Red running along book 2, Red running along book 3... and then onto the next colour)

We used "Target Maths" books... Although the teacher did teach topics to the whole class, we all worked through our Target Maths books at our own pace and the teacher just helped us with whatever we were stuck on.

There was no national curriculum, so we did whatever the teacher/school felt like teaching us.
We all got to secondary school having done vastly different things.
But secondary school also had no national curriculum (well, until GCSE, I suppose) so it didn't seem to matter.

We had school fetes featuring country dancing (which always seemed to feature a strange dance called "heel and toe"), school choir, Christmas plays, sports day with a three-legged race and an egg and spoon race.

We were dropped off at the school gate, not in the playground or classroom - and picked up from the same. From Juniors, we could just walk home by ourselves (younger if you had an older sibling)

People used to go home for lunch and just walk out unaccompanied.

There was corporal punishment (slipper and cane but at my school, only for the boys) and nobody really addressed bullying or racism and sexism was rife.

There were school assemblies every day with hymn singing.

The school years were called: reception/1st year infants, 2nd year infants, 1st year juniors - up to 4th year juniors. And in secondary school it was 1st year senior up to 5th year (and the lower and upper sixth if you stayed for sixth form)

PE in vest and knickers from reception to 2nd year infants.
Inexplicable "Music and Movement" thing.

Also, "singing together" which seemed to be a radio broadcast and we all had little books to go with it. Over the course of half a term(?), we'd learn a handful of songs.

There were blackboards that sort of rotated around - and the height of technology was when the school arranged for permanent lines and square grids to be drawn on two of the boards.
We watched school TV programmes in the "TV room" - classics such as "You and Me" and in our school we all counted along with the big clock face that was on the screen before each programme.

One computer in the entire school - which was so hallowed that nobody seemed to allowed to touch it, never mind use it.

Cooked school dinners for most, featuring the most hideous cabbage.
Tuck shop. Milk in little bottles.
Games of marbles. 7s (with a tennis ball against a wall), French skipping (with a length of elastic. In juniors, the girls would skip with a long rope and two "enders"
School uniform being anything approximately blue and/or grey. No logo T shirts or anything like that.

I was at secondary school in the 80s/90s

Rows of desks even in Primary school - it was traditional.
chanting times tables
school meals with chocolate pudding and source
assembly where we sang hymns or songs and the head read from children’s Bible
milk which tasted horrible in summer as it was warm
walking to school unaccompanied!
Skipping ropes and marbles
playing tag
corporal punishment with hand or slipper
school uniform navy skirt
chasingboys when they spoiled our game (rotters)

Did anyone learn to read with Dick and Dora ?
I know people talk about Peter and Jane and Janet and John
But my school had Dick and Dora with nip and fluff the dog and cat .

Australian born in 69. Sunny boys, Razz, musk sticks, whizz fizz and tepid milk at recess 🤮 2 sausage rolls and a prima in my lunch order on Friday. Got to school at. 8 and played until the 9 am bell.

I'm sorry to hear that Australian kids also got nasty milk ti drink too 🤮would it have killed them to have put it in a fridge?

I can remember learning with ‘The Radiant Way’ which I think was a bit old fashioned even then

Right????

Also, there were an awful lot of South East Asian immigrants at the time. Poor kids (many were lactose intolerant) were made to drink it!

Honestly it's given me a life long hatred of milk for some reason we had to drink it.in the afternoon after it being in a warm classroom all day, would have made far more sense to give it out in the morning🤷‍♀️

Watching that pencil with a torch on the end doing letters on a black board.

‘Top to bottom, left and right’

Anyone remember it 😁

Sorry could you enlighten us?