Wyn Drabble says he didn't 'get' maths, which for him was like a foreign language. Photo / Tetra Images
Wyn Drabble says he didn't 'get' maths, which for him was like a foreign language. Photo / Tetra Images
Parent: “What did you learn at school today?”
Child: “Apparently not enough. We have to go back tomorrow.”
The stimulus for today’s thoughts about school subjects comes mainly from children’s quotes in a little book I have just been reading. Titled Blackboard Blunders, it is a collection of spelling slip-upsand homework howlers schoolkids have uttered or written in response to their education.
The first concerns geography, about which a young pupil wrote, “The North Pole is so cold that the people who live there have to live somewhere else”.
This made me wish I had taken that subject, given that it could prompt people to make comments like that.
I was never able to take geography at school because, for my class, it was compulsory to take Latin. Of course, I am eternally grateful for learning Latin, but I’m sure there still would have been time to fit in some geography as well.
I’ve always had a good understanding of where countries and cities are, and I’m good with maps. A few years ago, I drove from Memphis to Nashville and pulled up right outside our hotel – all from memorising the online maps I studied at home in New Zealand before departure. I was very proud!
Oh, I know there is so much more to geography than maps and locating countries and cities – there’s urban growth, topography, land use, crop rotation, cultural environments and foggage, for example – but I never got to learn about any of these things because I was busy learning my declensions and conjugations in Latin classes.
I think in geography they also made relief maps using flour and water paste, forming papier-mâché ravines, plains and mountains and smearing paste over other pupils. This sounds like more fun than learning amo, amas, amat, but I have to admit I still enjoyed the intellectual rigours of learning a dead language.
I ‘got’ Latin (and I ‘got’ French), but I didn’t ‘get’ maths, which was to me more of a foreign language than both of those. I remember a maths teacher asking me once to multiply a fraction by a fraction, and my immediate response was, “Is that even legal?” At the time, I just wished maths would grow up and solve its own problems.
There were three main things I didn’t like about maths:
1. It was too hard.
2. It didn’t involve enough words.
I was clearly more of an arts kid because I didn’t really ‘get’ science either, though I might have understood more than this kid: “One of the most important forces is the force that pulls things to the ground. This force is called gravy.”
Learning Latin and French kept me out of cooking classes too, so I never learned how to make gravy (“Whisk packet contents into a cup of water and heat”) until I was in a university flat and we had to fend for ourselves. Served over simple mashed potatoes, gravy was indeed an important force.
As you would probably expect, my favourite school subject was English, so here is an anonymous kid’s quote (not from the blunders book) which thanks English teachers: “I appreciate my teachers for teaching me words that help me argue with my parents.”
And, as an English teacher, I once wrote on the board, “William Shakespeare 1564 – 1616″. A smart kid came to class the next day and announced that he’d given him a call but all he got was a ‘no such number’ signal. Perhaps you forgot to include the area code, I suggested.
So, young people, I hope you will enjoy a school year that is less truncated than the previous few. You certainly deserve it.
Wyn Drabble is a teacher of English, a writer, musician and public speaker.
