What were you good - and bad - at in school?

[Mrs M]

Could you do it again?

Not in a million years

 

[slowmotion]

I was hopeless at Latin, even though I studied it reluctantly for six years. Hopeless at music too. I loathed team sports with a passion but loved squash, shooting and running. A fondness for woodwork, metalwork and electronics has stayed with me. Although I was patchy at maths, algebra, geometry and trigonometry have proved pretty useful in my career. My French has atrophied but I can still order beer. The physics, chemistry and biology that got me quite good A levels have proved to be of very little practical use.

Most of all, I was very good at avoiding detection.

 

[Bazzer]

Sadly for me it depended upon the teaching style. Challenge or engage me and I would absorb a subject like a sponge and would go way beyond what the curriculum required. Teach me by rote = not engaged and I could be a complete PITA.
The biology teacher who joined the school from my third year at secondary school was one who "got" me and I recall stinking out all of one wing of the school, both ground and first floors, as I boiled a decomposing rat one lunchtime in the biology room, because I wanted, as part of a project, to display the skeleton such as you might see in the natural history museum.

 

[pplpilot]

Absolutely hated every single waking moment of school and the abject misery of it. I was capable of most subjects but I really was the Danny Kendall of the school and just couldn't be arsed with it all. I dunno why. It was only after I left it went through college and part time uni for a mehanical engineering degree whilst holding down a job. Wouldn't be happy if any of mine took the same attitude though.

 

[Pro Tour Punditry]

I was hopeless at Latin.

I recall my Latin O Grade exam where I became very focused on why someone was putting gold into a wolf to hide it. I carried on translating as best I could and each time I encountered the "wolf" I became more and more puzzled, but put it down to the person who set the exam being p*ssed. Turns out it was a treasure chest, not a wolf - the latin word for chest is nothing like the latin for wolf. I still got an A. Bizarre.

 

[Julia9054]

Sadly for me it depended upon the teaching style. Challenge or engage me and I would absorb a subject like a sponge and would go way beyond what the curriculum required. Teach me by rote = not engaged and I could be a complete PITA.
The biology teacher who joined the school from my third year at secondary school was one who "got" me and I recall stinking out all of one wing of the school, both ground and first floors, as I boiled a decomposing rat one lunchtime in the biology room, because I wanted, as part of a project, to display the skeleton such as you might see in the natural history museum.

Your biology teacher sounds awesome. When I was 11, a friend and I found a skeleton and took it into our biology teacher. She managed to let us down very gently without destroying our enthusiasm as it turned out to be chicken carcass from somebody's bin! I still remember her words in my first week of secondary school as she said that, though it was unlikely, we might by studying science, one day discover something new.
As a middle aged biology teacher myself now, I tiny part of me thinks I still might!

 

[gbb]

Good at Technical Studies, O Level , can't remember what grade I got.
The rest were mediocre...I never really applied myself. Story of my life really, too easy going, go with the flow.

 

[Bryony]

I was good at english, geography, art, and the sciences, was completely rubbish at maths. Didn't help that I had a maths teacher that took an instant dislike to me for some reason, and she (in my opinion) deliberately made me fail my GCSE exam. She spoke to me some time before the exam and said she thought I'd struggle with the intermediate paper and was going to enter me in the foundation one, I agreed and when the time came I went into the foundation exam. Results day came and I noticed that I was ungraded for my maths exam and when I questioned it I was told I sat the wrong exam!!

Anyway my maths till isn't great but its improved a lot in my adult life and especially since working in pharmacy!

 

[screenman]

Drama, that is one I really enjoyed. Odd that the idle git I was at school did not carry through to my working or business life.

Also honours me that two of my kids are qualified teachers, whilst I ended up a school governor.

I did honestly, and this is not something I write with pride, get expelled from Feltham Comprehensive in February 1972 before sitting any exams.

 

[mark st1]

Good at not turning up.
Bad at turning up.

 

[tyred]

I probably could have done a whole lot better if I'd actually tried. I hated school with a passion, I was shy and socially awkward and a prime target for bullies. Despite not really trying I passed every exam I ever did.

I was good at history, physics, maths, mechanical drawing, woodwork and metalwork in particular.

The only thing I really struggled with was languages. Like everyone here I had to learn the Irish language and hated it which is odd as I would like to know it today. I also did French for a while which I struggled with but still passed my exams just about. About seven years ago I briefly had a relationship with a French girl who tried to teach me the French language and I found it just as head-wrecking as I did at school! I even struggled with English despite being an avid reader in my teens and a lover of English literature and sometimes poet and short story writer. When English teachers asked me questions like "What was the poet's mood when he wrote the poem?" my one line answers - "he was sad/happy or whatever were never the detailed one page answers they looked for!

But above all else I really hated PE. A sadistic teacher, changing room bullying, football lessons of being dragged and kicked and kicked through the muddy bits of the pitch whilst the teacher watched and laughed but me off any kind of sport or exercise for many years. Nearly all my hobbies today revolve around some form of physical activity but I do things like hillwalking or cycling. I still cannot stomach things like football.

 

[summerdays]

What was the poet's mood when he wrote the poem?" my one line answers - "he was sad/happy or whatever were never the detailed one page answers they looked for!

I really struggled with that, and even recently trying to help my children with their English Lit exams (thankfully all over but for the results). Luckily just before my O Levels I discovered that I was good at the inventing a story like question rather than the descriptive ones, and so managed to pass.

I still struggle ... I wanted to write bar the results rather than but for the results but I couldn't decide how to spell it so changed the sentence to one I think I can spell correctly!

 

[steverob]

Good at: Maths (up to GCSE)
Bad at: Maths (A-Level and onwards)

I was a reasonably good student in most subjects without really excelling at much - a B grade right across the board in most things, with the occasional A or C if I was lucky/unlucky in a particular exam - but Maths was the exception.

I'd always been a kid who loved numbers from a really young age and I just couldn't get enough of the subject; apparently I was doing tests meant for 12 year olds when I was just 6. Got up to GCSE level without really having to try and aced the exam in about an hour when it was scheduled to last three, and got the "A" I was expected to (they brought in A*'s the next year and my teacher said that I'd have easily got one of those). Because of this I was then encouraged to take Maths at A Level and it was at that point that I came a cropper.

I have two trains of thought as to why I struggled so much at A Level. One is because I'd been resting on my laurels for so long and had never really had to work at the subject and now it was harder, I couldn't get by on natural talent any more without the equivalent amount of hard work at the same time, which I'll admit is not my strong suit (I can be a lazy bugger at times!)

The other is because it suddenly stopped being a numbers game (e.g. what I loved) - everything was now letters and theory. Algebra is easy when at the end of the equation it boiled down to an answer that had meaning to me, e.g. x=2.72375, but now it was all differentiate this, and logarithms that and square rooting negative numbers (WTF?) and it just didn't make any sense to me any longer as I couldn't see what the end result was supposed to be, if there was one at all - we were just doing things for the sake of doing them. I found I spent more time in class asking Why?, when I was supposed to be asking How?

It probably didn't help that I'd been placed in the top stream because of my previous success and with hindsight I should have asked to be dropped down a level as going a tad slower might have helped me out a little. But the trouble was there were bits that I was still doing well at and those gave me just enough encouragement to stay where I was - my syllabus was Pure & Stats (the other option at our school being Pure & Applied) and as the Stats bit was still all number based, I was flying through those parts with good marks, especially compared to some other kids in the top stream who could crush the Pure Maths parts and yet were struggling with Stats. In the end, I got an E for my A Level Maths - while I don't know the exact grade breakdown, based on my mock exams taken about 3 months before where I got a B in Stats and a U in Pure which also averaged out to an E overall, so I've got to assume it was similar in the final exam.

 

[marinyork]

I have two trains of thought as to why I struggled so much at A Level. One is because I'd been resting on my laurels for so long and had never really had to work at the subject and now it was harder, I couldn't get by on natural talent any more without the equivalent amount of hard work at the same time, which I'll admit is not my strong suit (I can be a lazy bugger at times!)

If you were educated in England & Wales, it was until very recently a very unusual developed country in that the %s doing Maths after 16 or 'advanced' maths after 16 are some of the worst in the developed world. It was shockingly low. One of the consequences of this is there is an entire generation of teachers/academics that have already been through this academic system that also haven't done maths after 16 and don't have a rounded picture. There's nothing particularly difficult about some university or A-level ideas, it's just children in primary or secondary school on the whole aren't introduced to them. The lack of immersion in these wider ideas leads to circularity where it's only done at A-level or degree formally so people/media bang on about it being harder. A completely different way of looking at what you said is you had teachers who didn't have a good grounding in the subject and didn't expose you to wider areas. Imagine how different a world it would be if a third of people doing A-levels did A-level Maths or even 100% who wanted to go to university.

 

[ColinJ]

I recall my Latin O Grade exam where I became very focused on why someone was putting gold into a wolf to hide it. I carried on translating as best I could and each time I encountered the "wolf" I became more and more puzzled, but put it down to the person who set the exam being p*ssed. Turns out it was a treasure chest, not a wolf - the latin word for chest is nothing like the latin for wolf. I still got an A. Bizarre.

I remember having to translate a French passage to English. I managed to guess that 'fourmis' were ants because of the similarity to 'formic' (acid). I had never heard of a praying mantis though so I was not able to guess the meaning of 'la mante religieuse'. I guessed 'nun' so the story of a battle between a praying mantis and a swarm of ants became a tale of a nun who fell asleep and woke up covered in ants!