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write a composition today or do some
English?’ – again the answer (probably rather exasperated)
‘Of course we did’. But as these subjects are everyday
occurrences, they are taken for granted as understood and
therefore amount to nothing much. If something out of the
ordinary happens then that is news indeed and worth reporting to
the full.
I remember a child who came to me at the end of the
day and said, ‘Mrs Muller I did not read to you today’.
‘Yes you did I replied’. ‘No’, said the child. ‘Yes’
I said again, ‘This morning you bought me your English book
and asked me to explain something to you. I was busy at the time
so asked you to tell me what it was all about. You read out the
passage from your English book and we sorted out the difficulty.
Later you did the same thing with an arithmetic problem. In both
cases you read to me and I heard you read.’ Reading is not
just repetition of words from book three, page ten, paragraph
two, but the application of that skill in any other
subject. |
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On with our memories. In these
early days the playground surface was still rough, washing
facilities consisted of three or four basins in the little
cloakroom and the toilet block (no flush system in those days)
stood in the middle of the playground. Here I would like to play
tribute to the hard working efforts of Mr and Mrs Sharp in their
work as school caretakers and cleaners. Often a thankless job
but cheerfully they kept us in as clean a state as it was
possible to be. Later the toilet block was improved, but this
meant hanging hurricane lamps in each cubical through the winter
to keep the pipes from freezing. Finally the powers that be were
persuaded to install washing and toilet facilities and new
cloakrooms in the old air-raid shelter. A vast improvement. The
old open fires in the school rooms which roasted the front row
of desks while the back row froze were done away with. New
closed stoves spread even warmth |