h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I was never cut out for school. And school most certainly was not cut out for me. Not the schools I knew anyway. Mind you, I did very well for some months. Maybe a year. Maybe even a year and a half. But then I got bored with the whole idea and cheated from there till it was impossible to cheat any further without actually studying and doing homework. Left school - and started to learn a lot after that

*Are* you still sane, Sho?



I recently found a box of stuff I didn't know I had. Photos, schoolbooks, school reports ...

It took me back to a place I didn't want to visit. Which surprised me. I thought I'd enjoyed school, but I've discovered from my children that actually it left me a bit traumatised.

Anyway ... we were only allowed to do 8 'O' levels, and three of them were English Lang, Lit, and Maths. So we only got to pick 5, one from each option block (although this was still a far greater choice than my own kids have had). The option blocks were X, A, B, C and D and some combinations simply weren't possible - you couldn't, if I remember rightly, do physics *and* biology, only one or the other, in combination with chemistry.

Option X was the 'practical' option - home economics or needlework if you were a girl - but history was also in this block, so that academic pupils didn't have to waste an O level.

I had been forced to drop art and music in favour of German at the age of 13 so I ended up doing physics, chemistry, history, German and French. I did politics O level in a year in the sixth form.

A levels were even worse. You could only do maths A level if you'd done O level a year early and then the A/O level. You made the decision on this in the third year (again, in my case, at the age of 13). But, you couldn't do science A levels unless you also did maths. You could only do 4 A levels if two of them were maths (pure and applied as separate subjects).

So, all the sciences being ruled out for me (but that was OK, because as a girl I was expected to do arts anyway ) I took English, history and French.

For all people rant about the current set-up in English education, it is in many ways a vast improvement on the situation 30 years ago.

And don't get me started on PE ... I only started to enjoy it once I'd learnt how to do the cricket scorebook, in the sixth form. After that, PE was a joy: I got to sit quietly in the sun, watching boys running around getting sweaty. A very pleasant way to spend an hour or so.

Mol

we had to take english lang and maths in the 4th form, and then maths A/O in the fifth with the rest of our o-levels. What with the extra stats exam and so on, I ended up with 13. (I took art as an extra curricular subject and took the O-level in the LVIth)