Stuff that didn’t seem weird at the time but when you tell someone younger they think it’s nuts

[MildGreenDairyLiquid]

Just that really.

The other day I explained to my 11 year old niece that when I was at junior school we used to have a small bottle of milk with a straw every morning, and she looked at me like I’d lost my mind.

Oh I forgot Bunty! Do you remember the Four Marys?

A PP mentioned having Letts revision guides for GCSEs- was this in the 90s?
My school was spectacularly crap and my parents were not involved at all in my studies so it’s possible they did exist but I just didn’t know!
I do remember having to sit and take notes from ancient Physics books for hours!

I admit Stephanie's experiences might not exactly replicate real life, but still. @DeanElderberry how could you suggest such a thing!

LOVED the four Marys!

Yep, similar experience to me. My parents didn't show any interest in my school education and there wasn't a library close to home that I could take myself to. So I was reliant on what the school provided. No internet back then. I had to do all my homework and exam revision based on whatever notes were provided by the teachers, classroom work and whatever old/scrappy dog eared text books were provided. I remember plenty of times when I'd studiously read and remembered virtually every bit of my exercise book and text book, and still befuddled by exam questions on topics I just didn't recognise. Then despair when classmates had managed to answer those questions because they'd been able to read up from library books or "extra" books bought by parents etc.

It's what really annoys me about some of today's generation who don't value education. They've massive amounts of free material readily available on the internet, free factsheets, free worksheets, podcasts, Youtube tutorial videos, etc., even entire textbooks etc., yet far too many still kick back against learning and end up wasting years of taxpayer funded education simply because they can't be bothered. It makes my blood boil when I think back to how much I suffered due to lack of resources - I'd have killed for access to the internet back in my school days and certainly not wasted the opportunity on watching moronic tik tok videos or cute cats doing silly things etc.

Rex is unusually old for a hamster.

My 44 year old daughter was horrified to learn that in the 1980s working with the military in Germany we would check under the car every morning and never put her or her sister into their seats until one of us had turned on the ignition with fingers crossed. I once taught in an open plan school with armed guards carrying loaded weapons patrolling the school, in and out of the teaching areas.

😁

If you were 15 before the end of December then you could leave at the end of the Spring term, teachers detested teaching the 'Easter Leavers' who were just marking time for two terms.

Yet now almost everything is considered to be a degree with all the debt that incurs. Companies used to train their own staff, hospitals trained nurses which meant they were still qualified in their field without the debt. A degree is now totally devalued, I've quoted it before but I recall my Headteacher going wild because his son wanted to do a degree in Golf Course design!

Trainee teachers got the same financial support that other students got, I think that trainee nurses were paid, however little, because their training involved being on the wards of hospitals.

Here to blow your mind 🤯 but it still happens. Actually I’m not sure there are any fewer boarding schools, relatively speaking, than there ever were are there?

@taxguru I have thought for a while that the big academy chains like Harris and Oasis could do worse than invest in accommodation for teachers.

It would help enormously with recruitment. And definitely with retention!

Getting a memo to all female staff in 1989 to say that we were now permitted to wear a trouser suit for work - had previously been skirt suits only. (and the memo was printed out one for each department, had a circulation list written on it and the post boy delivered it to your desk in a brown reuseable circulation envelope, you read it, crossed your name off the list, put it back in the envelope and addressed it to the next person on the list. Then the post boy would collect it and take it to the next recipient's intray. Emails are much more efficient).

Preparing schedules for tax computations in pencil on six column analysis paper, getting a specialist comptometer operator to check the arithmetic and then getting my secretary to type it up - excel spreadsheets are a lot faster.

Friends children working in law/banking etc cant believe that when I wanted to send a trust deed to the Cayman Islands I had to print it out, put it through the fax machine page by page and then the trustees would sign it and then print out a copy of the signed deed and send it back to me in the post....

Having said that I have an older friend who still has the copy of the letter she received from HR at the Foreign Office telling her that she would no longer have to resign if she got married.

In 1992. Serious men in dark suits, carrying folded newspapers under their arms and a briefcase in one hand. They were on the train to London offices while I was making my escape to the California and afterwards the Far East.

There was an earthquake there and then a few days later, the Watts riots began. I had no way to contact home other than a fax machine at LA airport, where I sent a letter on lined yellow paper to tell my family that all was well.

Explaining how floppy disks work is always hilarious

Yes! My mum taught me and my siblings to recite these details at a very young age. I can remember my youngest brother at age 2 not really being able to speak all that many full sentences but being able to ramble off our address and his name (albeit with toddler pronunciation of the Rs and Ls and other letters 🤣). We also knew our home phone number from a similarish age... And were tasked with answering the phone from about 4 or 5. I recall friends' much younger siblings doing similar into the late nineties.

I'm sure some parents still do this, but when did people stop routinely teaching small children these important skills?!

I wouldn't condemn a very specific course like that unless I had evidence that all the graduates ended up working in unrelated low-paid, low-responsibility jobs. If by contrast it was extremely difficult to get onto the course,they got lots of practical experience and field trips, and on graduating they form a small, select group with excellent connections and end up travelling all over the world designing golf courses for wealthy countries/clubs, then it would probably be a very good investment.

Having said that, I could never see the logic of forcing polytechnics and specialist training colleges to become universities. Square pegs forced into round holes, all too often. They were doing a great job on the whole providing good teaching and vocational training with excellent connections to local employers, including providing day release courses. We should have worked harder at getting people to value vocational training.

My mum worked for McDonald's in the late 80s/early 90s and specialised in running the birthday parties!

There were set games including who had the longest fry, they did their own birthday cakes with the absolute nicest frosting, and it was always in a special party area! Nottingham had a pirate ship room.

Doesn't make it weird. It's just unrelatable for the listener.

Having said that, I could never see the logic of forcing polytechnics and specialist training colleges to become universities. Square pegs forced into round holes, all too often. They were doing a great job on the whole providing good teaching and vocational training with excellent connections to local employers, including providing day release courses. We should have worked harder at getting people to value vocational training.

Polytechnics were delivering undergraduate and postgraduate degrees alongside vocational qualifications for a very long time before they became universities. The difference was that the degrees were awarded by a national body called the Council for National Academic Awards (CNAA) rather than by the institutions themselves. The definition of a university is an educational institution that has degree-awarding powers, so the conferring of university status in/after 1992 only changed who awarded the degrees, not whether degrees were being studied in polytechnics.

Explaining how floppy disks work is always hilarious

It's no different from how hard discs work.

OK, but they were often delivering degrees in a different way, weren't they? Evening classes, part-time courses, accepting different qualifications or access courses.

OK, but they were often delivering degrees in a different way, weren't they? Evening classes, part-time courses, accepting different qualifications or access courses.

Not uniformly. I have worked with lots of people who did full-time bachelor's degrees at polytechnics and then went onto do PhDs.

😂 gosh I remember those days.. as they said in a monty python sketch ' just try telling young folk today they just wouldn't believe you"