Archers thread #166: Choppy waters in Ambridge! Look out for the red flags and discuss The Archers here.

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

Thank you, @PseudoBadger, for kicking off this long, long series of Archers threads.

All views on The Archers welcome here! New blood welcomed, and of course we are always delighted to welcome back former or occasional listeners/posters. We don't all agree on all points, although we do mostly try to be civil about it. Most of us are posting tongue in cheek a lot of the time, so don't worry about revealing that you'd love to be married to Harrison, or other unusual views.

Spoilers: not on this thread, please! We don't wait for the omnibus to discuss the weeknight episodes, but we do try our best to avoid cross-contamination from www.mumsnet.com/talk/radio_addicts/4636789-the-archers-spoilers-thread-7-cant-wait-for-702pm-join-us-here, where spoilers are positively welcomed!

For newer listeners, lurkers or those who just have no idea what we're talking about, @DadDadDad has created this useful thread: www.mumsnet.com/Talk/radio_addicts/3557323-For-Archers-fans-a-guide-to-acronyms-on-the-long-running-discussion-threads-and-any-other-meta-thread-questions-you-may-have - BOOP point for him! (See thread for explanation.)

Another thread started in great haste, mid-packing! Over to you.

Brad being good at mental arithmetic.

A year ahead, I expect. I was at a direct grant girls' school. Independent, but a lot of us were there on scholarships or heavily subsidised places, so not a very wealthy intake.

I did my maths ‘o’ level in (cough) 1979 and it was the first year the exam board let people use calculators (and I took advantage of this) but there were still log books provided.

I guess the scriptwriters all studied English & Drama and wouldn’t know what a differential equation or an imaginary number was if it bit them in the arse.

Interesting! We had the reverse - a lawyer taught us law for accountants. The main thing I remember from those lectures was that he would say 'What's the correct legal answer?' to which we would reply, in unison, 'It all depends ...'. A useful lesson for life, actually.

I did probably the same accountancy for lawyers course in the early 90s. Bearing in mind my previous mathematical failures (to the extent that in the early 80s Cambridge and Oxford were pretty much the only universities I had any hope of getting into) it was never going to go well. I was supposed to be staying in someone’s flat in London for the duration of the course but after weeping down the phone to my then partner at the end of the first couple of days, I gave up the London digs and commuted from Somerset so he could help me go over the work every night.

One was supposed to take a calculator to court in those days. Once, late in the afternoon, a somewhat testy judge sent me and my two clients out to consider our figures. As we traipsed into a little side room I prayed for a thunderbolt to strike the building. We closed the door, sat down and honestly just looked blankly at each other. Not A Clue about how to do the necessary calculation between the three of us.

(Actually, I definitely didn’t have to take an exam in accountancy, just acquire a certificate stating that I’d taken the horrible course.)

Chelsea Ben is being signposted quite a bit!

d-day still feeling a bit bleurgh

harrison still exaggerating his accent

But isn’t “being creative and good at spotting patterns” what a statistician is?

Data science I gather is the future.

In those days, you weren’t allowed a slide rule for maths, but you could use one in physics. I hated log tables with a passion. On the part of the paper where you had a choice of questions, the phrases “to two significant figures” or “to three decimal places” had me running away to another question.

Because there were no calculators, logs were taught as an aid to calculation, and you weren’t told what a logarithm actually was, or its relation to other parts of maths, or its utility in data analysis

If you compress numbers, so that instead of being equally spaced, they get closer as they get larger, so that 1 to 10 takes the same space as 10 to 100, and 100 to 1000, then multiplication turns into addition. This is exactly what a slide rule does and is the principle behind log tables.

They're going to fall in luurve via the script.

At the risk of sounding like the Monty Python Yorkshire men, you are lucky if you were taught maths at school. I did the experimental Southampton Maths Project (SMP) back in the 1960s. As a result the only 'maths' I can do is Venn diagrams and tesselation. I have never met anyone else who did this abomination (which featured a cartoon creature called Fred the Mathematical Fly who was supposed to explain the concepts to us).

Fred failed completely in my case. When I did the Civil Service fast stream exam I got 19% in the maths paper. My result was so unusually bad I was asked to explain it at my final interview. They appear to have accepted that it was Fred's fault because they passed me anyway (no doubt they were swayed by the fact that I was good at Latin). I wouldn't stand a chance today.

All the maths I know today is self taught. (Can you feel the bitterness even after all these years?)

Really can't stand the D Day storyline but I agree it will be the means of Chelsea and Ben getting together.
I am pro a Chelsea/Ben SL. I can see Chelsea as the new Jill presiding over Brookfield in years to come. Of course, they would have get rid of Pip first but it's probably only a matter of time before Stella murders her, so that's easily solved.

More filler piffle. I fast forwarded that in about 2 minutes.

Stella’s a capable woman; she could manage Home Farm from her cell …

That's true but I think Chelsea would see her off if she tried.

I did that too when I started Grammar school in 1966 but I think we only did it for the first year.

That's a relief. I sometimes think it was all just a terrible dream because no one has ever heard of it. I assume it was dropped as a failed experiment. I know they dropped it for the years below me at my school and I think I may be the only year that took SMP maths at O Level.

I had a schoolfriend who went to a primary school that used the Initial Teaching Alphabet. She considered herself very fortunate to have learned to read before she started school, so could ignore the ITA stuff. I think I was very lucky to have attended a very traditional primary school where we were drilled in various ways that suited me down to the ground. Every single week we had mental arithmetic tests, spelling tests, a dictation test (very helpful with punctuation), a composition task (i.e. writing an essay or story), and so on. Every single piece of work was marked in detail, every error corrected - no small task for a class of over 40 children. There were no teaching assistants in this school at that time. I don't imagine it suited everybody but I learned a lot.

My primary school was very similar, although to this day I can't spell despite those weekly spelling tests (and a subsequent degree in English Lit)! We were were in a class of 42.

I'm watching the Antiques Roadshow special about D Day and it's fascinating. There have been a few people who must be close to 100 years old recounting their experiences with razor sharp recollection. I'm actually in awe of them and think it's right that while such people still exist they can tell their stories and we listen to them. Not necessarily demonstrations of victory rolls and Woolton pie though.

We had some novel, expensive, way of maths teaching brought from Canada, called SMA, at Junior school. We children taught ourselves by working through different coloured project cards, in pairs. I was teamed with a girl who hated school. To start with we chose the projects that involved counting stuff such as the number of red cars passing in 10 minutes or the distance between lampposts, accompanied by a teaching assistant, just to get out of the classroom, or even off school premises. We were supposed to “mark” our own work in workbooks but no one bothered.
The rest of the class caught on you could spend the whole maths lesson mucking about outside drawing chalk shapes on the playground. By the summer we were all outside throwing chalk around having a laugh. Eventually, the headmaster, whose pet project it was, came to check our workbooks, and lo and behold no one had achieved anything much.

The 70s were such a f**k-up!

@Godestobe They appear to have accepted that it was Fred's fault because they passed me anyway (no doubt they were swayed by the fact that I was good at Latin).
😄 It's remarkable how many employers see A Level Latin on a CV and are "impressed" enough to hire on the strength of it. Honestly, we could have been Prime Ministers if we could have been bothered to apply.

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g - I went to army primary schools abroad, which had their pick of teachers. We were also tested regularly, and given a lot of help and encouragement. We also had a lot of fun. The academic result was that at my school in Singapore, about two-thirds of the 100-or-so children in my year (4 classes) passed the 11+.

You don't see A Level or even GCSE Latin on many CVs today.

I have a Classics degree. A levels in both Latin and Greek! I should be ruling the world. (Fortunately, few people agree with me.)

Boris? Is that you?