A Little Rant

I know I'm getting old.  You get the tell tale signs.  You can remember the first person that did a song, you recognise pictures of people that others have never heard of and you remember your childhood as being idyllic in comparison to the lives children seem to be living these days.

Today, I played a class Greg Patillo beatboxing with his flute. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59ZX5qdIEB0  I told them that there were 2 tunes; Inspector Gadget theme tune and another.  I was thinking Harold Faltermeyer Axel F but they were convinced it was Crazy Frog!!

Then, working with teenagers at orchestra they were all playing games on their smartphones in the break and when they were stuck they turned to me, "Who's that?" they asked.  "It looks like James Dean to me," I replied
They were very polite but as I walked away someone asked, "Who's James Dean?" and their friend replied, "I've no idea."

And finally, I'm home and reading newspaper articles online and wondering if Mr Gove is actually human.  This evening, several parents of children at the orchestra had a little rant about Michael Gove.  They think he's got the longer days and shorter holiday thing all wrong.  They actually like their children and want to spend time with them.  "It's not the hours you put in but what you put in your hours," one parent pointed out. They were worried that if they had to stay at school until 5.30 how would they be fit to then come out to orchestra at 6, "When will they eat?  Eating is important, you know."  

Even if enough parents jump up and down and make Gove change his mind for now I am convinced that these changes will gradually happen.  It may be a product of my advancing years but I don't remember the kind of pressure that these children face.  I'm sure I started school at 9 and finished at ten past three and had a whole hour for lunch.  There were clubs after school but fun things were also done in school time.  My son starts school at 8.30 finishes at 3.15 and has half an hour for lunch and almost anything fun he wants to do has to be at an after school club or sometimes on a Sunday.  I'm pretty sure holidays were longer and I don't think I'm looking at it in the same way as you remember the sun shining all summer long, but I used to get a bit bored in the Summer holiday and I remember counting down over 6 weeks. This year the holiday is 5 weeks and 3 days.  I don't ever remember going back to school in the new year until after the Christmas tree came down on the 6th January.  Holidays were holidays, as well.  That meant you didn't have to do anything.  We weren't given loads of homework and projects, we didn't have to go into school for extra revision study days, and we didn't get stressed about not having done eleven hundred practice papers.  A friend told me today that her daughter was getting cross about the holidays that were being booked for the Summer break.  She said that she needed to study and if she went away with mum for a fortnight and Dad for a week then she only had 17 days left to do all her work.  Am I idealising my youth or to they just have it harder than we had?

I was cross with Mr Gove for pinching Obama's speech about school holidays being a throwback to our old agricultural history.  He said, "I remember half-term in October when I was at school in Aberdeen was called the tattie holiday – the period when kids would go to the fields to pick potatoes."

I kept thinking, we still do pick our potatoes in the October half term.  We plant them at Easter, we harvest everything, freeze, bottle and give away our produce in the Summer holiday.  We dig the plot over and plant broad beans in the February half term and we weed like crazy in the May half term.  We don't need to go fruit picking to supplement our income, although I am sure some people would love the opportunity to earn a bit extra.    I don't expect Mr Gove was one of the children picking potatoes, I doubt his parents needed the money.  His school holidays were probably as carefree as mine were.  As a child, my summer holidays were spent at the park, helping Alex, the boatman on Lake Meadows lake, cycling to talk to the tramp under the railway bridge at Ingatestone and roaming through farmer's fields, climbing haystacks and making dens.

And while I'm getting cross about Mr Gove I also need to point out that he makes me smile.  I have never seen a man who is such a gift to the picture editor.

Memory

Memory is a funny thing.  Michael Gove thinks it's very important to remember lots of useless facts.  He, it would seem, is hoping to create a generation of quiz geniuses, which might be very useful, as TV quiz show competitor may be the only job going if we believe the doom and gloom prophecies.  It would be nice if you could open up someone's head and pour in a load of facts that just stay there for ever, but it doesn't work like that.  I've forgotten a lot more than I've learnt.  Now, I do know that can't be true but sometimes it feels that way.

For most of the weekend I have been trying to remember something.  It was a word, a concept, something that I thought I had learnt but it might have just been something I had read.  It might have been something real or something I had made up.  Last week, I told a colleague that I wanted to make a school CD to raise school funds and that I thought it would be a good idea to also use it to encourage Summer.  I said that we could call the CD, "Our School Sing for Summer."  She thought that was funny because she was doing a concert with a choir she sings with called Sing for Spring and wondered why both me and her choir leader had come up with the same idea.  There are loads of examples of this kind of thing happening on a much more important level.  The paperclip was simultaneously invented by three different people.  Elisha Gray and Graham Bell both claim to have invented the telephone.  In fact, Malcolm Gladwell writes in an article in the New Yorker magazine that there have been 148 major scientific discoveries that happened at the same time.

The history of science is full of ideas that several people had at the same time.
Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell#ixzz2PENUySBN

I thought that this idea had a name, but couldn't recall where I'd got such an idea from.  The other strange thing about memory is that you can never remember anything when you are trying to but at 3am ideas come flooding back and I can tell you that I didn't need to be checking out Carl Jung at 3am, to see if my lazy memory recall was right.  Jung was probably my favourite psychologist.  He was a bit bonkers, as they all are (every single one of my lecturers had some kind of speech impediment or twitch or was just plain crazy) but he seem to say things that I agreed with.  His concept of archytypes has always appealed to me, and I have always found it particularly when writing characters.

 

The concept that I was searching for was that of the Collective Conscience; the idea that we are connected to a kind of library of human knowledge.  I also remembered that Carl Jung is responsible for the best ever 

quote from Psychologist:

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you."

At a family party, people were discussing how trains had changed in their lifetime.  Now, you wouldn't think that trains had changed that much but single carriages, doors that have stupid catches that you can't open from the inside and itchy, woven, tapestry seats, leather straps to open windows and steam trains are never seen now.

The sad thing is that I might now be able to remember what I bought from the Supermarket to have for dinner tonight but I can remember all of those things.  Except that I couldn't remember steam train because the Liverpool Street to Southend Victoria line was electrified before I was born and no steam trains went into Liverpool Street.  I was confused because I have a very strong memory of a traumatic journey with my Mum when I was about 3 years old.  We walked to the station and picked 'Granny-jump-out-of beds' from the wall, where a teenage girl was trying to see how high she could get her leg up the wall.  We waited on the platform and I was very distressed when the train came in to find that there was smoke coming out of it.  I remember my mum telling me it was OK because that type of train was meant to have steam coming out of it. Then when we got to Romford we had to get a bus to visit my Nan and my mum, who was pregnant, fell and cut her big toe open.  She was really upset and we were surrounded by lots of  very well meaning old ladies who frightened me. 

My Dad said that it couldn't have been true, the Long Suffering Husband thought that no one could remember anything in such detail at three years old but my Mum said, "I'd forgotten that.  I was so upset.  It was a diesel train."

Granny-jump-outa-beds