Relevant Lessons Of Life

I watched School Of Rock on Sunday night, and i thought it was a great movie! While I'm not a great rock fan, I have been known to play the odd Air-Guitar from time to time (isn't it just embarassing when someone catches you doing that!!)

Just got me thinking about my time in school and how I wished I had a teacher like that, who tried to share a passion of something (music) to their students. I personally think that I learnt nothing relevant to life from school - everything I know is self taught.

• Lets use Maths as a starter. There are some people who want to measure the strength of a geometric triangle, but what use is that? I'd rather know how many litres there are in a pint so when we switch over to Euro measurements, I won't be ripped off. In my day, Maths was such a general subject that embraced all the disciplines - geometry, algebra, statistics, etc etc. Why couldn't they have given us a choice instead? For example, split the subject into different disciplines - all those who want to learn the geeky stuff can study it as a standalone subject. While those who want to learn Maths relevant to life (how to calculate APR so you won't get ripped off while working out your credit card statement) could study it as another subject.
• I learnt to play the violin at school. It was either that or learn to play the piano. Thats it. And you didn't have a choice either in what you had to play. I think its such a shame because if I was given some input in what kind of music I wanted to play, I would have chosen more modern pieces, such as The Beatles or maybe The Who. Probably this is one thing that may have changed in recent times, I don't know.
• Oh ok, this one is a bit silly, but it still bugs me even know! I'm quite a fast reader, and I was probably one of the fastest readers in the school. Everyone I was a book work who loved reading. In English, we had to review a book, and because there weren't enough books to go round, we had to share with the guy next to you. And who do I get stuck with? A guy who reads a page per hour! It took him forever to read the book (The Hobbit by the way) and by the end of it, I was ready to eat the book to kill myself. I mentioned this to the teacher and that maybe we should swap partners, as it wasn't doing either of us any good. Teacher looked up at me and just said no. Grrrrrrr!!
• We had the worst library in the world. I'm sure that the local prison had a better library system than us. Yet for some reason, my school could afford to own a playing field! It wasn't just books that we were short off - there was a lack of computers (its a miracle I even passed my GCSE Computing, I barely saw one at the time!), a lack of teachers (loads of substitues all the time), and the furniture was purchased sometime during the reign of King Henry the Eigth! But hey, at least we had the prestige of owning a soggy playing field!!

Conclusion of all this? My kids are going private.