OK, far too many posts for me to catch up on when I'm supposed to be revising diligently for important subejcts like Mechanics, Physics and General Studies...

OK, so maybe not Gen. Studies then. But the others.

So did anyone say anything aimed at me? I haven't got time to trawl.

If not... um, never mind.

Meanwhile, a joke or six...

Fun Things To Do in an Elevator (or lift, if you're British)

1. Wear a puppet on your hand and make it talk to the other passengers
2. Start a sing-along.
3. When the elevator is silent, look around and ask, "Is that your beeper?"
4. Play the harmonica.
5. Shadow box.
6. Say, "Ding!" at each floor.
7. Lean against the button panel.
8. Say, "I wonder what all these do," and push the red buttons.
9. Listen to the elevator walls with a stethoscope.
10. Draw a little square on the floor with chalk and announce to the other passengers that this is your "personal space".

Heheh...



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

You wanna knuckle down and get on with your education, or you'll end up like me, working in a job that lets me write silly poetry all day, happily married, living in a beautiful little village .... er .... hang on ....



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

And I'm revising why?



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There's a hole in my creativity bucket and it's all leaked out.

Hey Sarah, thought I hadn't seen you on the Ffforum for a bit.

Good luck with the exams . . . it'll all be over soon. If you knuckle down hard a do really well you could land a boring job, work really hard for 15 years, then decide you rather be self-employed and work enough to keep you fed, watered and happy. Or erm, you could just do that anyway.

Regrets, me?

Break a leg ;)>



Jesus saves; Buddha does incremental backup.

Good luck with the exams.

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."

Ah, General Studies - the delights of a whole three hours of exams in what is essentially Trivial Pursuit... THe best bit of it was the school allocating two hours a week to it as a subject - leaving teachers free to offer courses such as 'History of the Blues'. This was a poor excuse to listen to music in a darkened room during school time, and an even poorer excuse to adjourn to various blues clubs and pubs for in depth study of the symbiosis of live music and alcohol.

Unfortunately after I left the new(ish) headmaster realised what was going on and ended the subject. A great shame for those who believe education should produce rounded people. As is his decision to end free periods for sixth formers. I learnt far more by hanging around in the common room playing cards than I did in most of my biology lessons (admittedly I was normally reading a book or two at the same time). We realised we were leaving school at the right time when he announced that the common room was now to be known as 'The Sixth Form Centre' in an effort to encourage some work. What we were supposed to read into the new 'Staff Lounge' was unclear...

Anyways, after those nostalgic ramblings - best of luck with the exams, and if you get really pissed off then relax in the knowledge that there are science books out there with reassuring lines such as the one that gave an equation and explained it as something like 'Where n is the population size, t is time and dx/dt is the proof that life is too short to bother with calculus'.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Yes indeed - good luck! Will you be allowed to bring Mildred in to provide moral support and the occasional very quiet plock of encouragement?

I got out of General Studies by going round to the deputy head (who was in charge of timetabling) and explaining to him politely but rather fiercely that I was already doing four "proper" A-levels in maths and science subjects, with an O-level in computer studies on top of that, and I didn't see why I should have to attend General Studies lessons when I had no intention of taking the exam. I got out of games the same way. After all, it wasn't as though I didn't have plenty of general interests that I was happily developing on my own, without being obliged to listen to one of the spare music teachers rambling vaguely about whatever came into his head (this being what passed for our General Studies lessons).

As for games... some people are designed for efficient running. I am not one of them. Even in the days when I was a skinny teenager (and how glad I am that those days are past!), I was just sheer pottery in motion when I took to the track. I can't throw, can't catch, can't even swim. Much as I love watching other people playing sports, I decided very early in life that it was best to stick to what I was good at!



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That which does not kill us makes us stranger.
(Llewelyn the dragon, Ozy and Millie)

Sarah

I can run, but am not very good at throwing things or (partly due to one eye being a "lazy" one that lacks adjustable focus) catching them, and also can't swim. I mostly did "cross-country" running during games lessons, because I could jog along at a confortable speed while thinking about other topics without having to worry about what other people were doing around me. The 'general studies' options available at my school included a useful two-term course in 'Computing & Statistics' (not that the school had any computers of its own, this being around 1976-77: We used to go down to the local Technical College, for a couple of hours on one evening each week, to use a roomful of terminals attached to its mainframe... and could look across the corridor there into a room where great reels of tape were busy rotating.)

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."

I can't swim, which makes my love of rowing and surfing something of a mystery...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

I got the highest mark ever recorded at my school in my General Studies A-Level ... my multiple choice score would have been 100%, but I couldn't remember who shot Robert Kennedy (Sirhan Sirhan, since you ask).

This is admittedly a feeble achievement given the crappy school I went to, and put into perspective still more when I tell you I got the lowest mark ever recorded in my school in my Maths (mock) O-Level. I am strangely proud of this.



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

I failed Art GCSE, if that counts?

I got 100% in thwo or three (I forget) of my Biology modules for A-Level, which caused some raised eyebrows. I was also the first person to ever reduce his average mark through doing coursework. In the final exam I needed to get 3% to secure an A - if I'd not done coursework it would have been a serious negative number of marks required... It drove my teacher scatty -

Him: 'You need to take revision more seriously!'
Me: 'Why, precisely?'

I should also have recieved the Divinity Prize for the highest ever score in an RE exam, but I'd already blown my chances in term time by defining 'Karma' as prefix to 'Chameleon' and also saying that the last seven words of Christ (important, apparently) were 'I can see my house from here'. I never really understood why I took the exam seriously (although I didn't actually bother with revision, I just absorb useless crap quite easily - I'm not even religious. Yes, I was the annoying kid at school who always found it easy....)



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

<writes down "pottery in motion" to use later...fantastic!>

General Studies sounds great.

But my 6th year was lovely - in Scotland you do Highers in 5th year, and then in 6th year you kinda do more Highers if you need more to get into uni, or re-sit them, or do Sixth Year Studies which are kind of useless. (Assuming you've chosen one year highers in 5th year).

I had the marks I needed for uni from 5th year, as did most of my mates, so 6th year was a year of sitting around the common room playing cards, as PSD says. And taking advantage of the fact some people could now drive. Nicely relaxing before the "stress" of first year uni...er...



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Do something pretty while you can...

I was always crap at games, though I liked playing cricket and football, but we did cross-couintry running. Round the back of the chippie, usually, or sometimes round at Martin Byrne's house (he lived three blocks from the school and his mum went out to work). Some of us (not me) were very advanced cross-country runners, and on a good day could get up to nearly a whole pack of Player's No. 6.



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Ah, yes, people driving... Another General Studies trip took us to Bosworth Field, where we upset the teacher 'in charge' (Ironic chuckle) by playing Frisbee and remarking on Henry's remarkable tactical nous in grabbing control of the railway station early on in the battle. Grabbing a lift there with someone who drove allowed us time to stop at a pub on the way there and back without much suspicion from those on the coach.



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Re the RE exam ... I blew my chances by writing an essay that was a closely-reasoned argument in favour of contraception. They should have expelled me then (there was a body of opinion for stakes and firelighters) but saved it for later.

Just to tie threads together, 'I Can See Your House From Here' was an album by that great prog-rock band Camel; the cover showed an astronaut on a crucifix, looking down on the Earth ...



- - -
I am very interested in the Universe. I am specialising in the Universe and everything surrounding it. - E. L. Wisty

Re "pottery in motion" _ When somebody asked me how well I could dance I told them "you've heard of 'poetry in motion'? 'Blank verse'..."

Must admit, "cross-country running" usually meant a few of us nipping of to somebody's house to play cards.

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"This was willed where what is willed... can get rather silly."

I have a sneaking suspicion I also got my school's lowest mark in RE, I ballsed it up pretty well in any case. For cross country runs, we used to take advantage of the fact that the runs usually consisted of two laps, and that part of the course ran out of sight of the teacher in charge (who, obviously, was far to sensible to bother running). Run halfway round, wait for the front runners to catch you up, go around the second half.
I also got round the whole idea of games in the summer by joining the sailing team, we only had to do stuff twice a week, and it took at least half an hour to drive there. When we did get there, the entire thing consisted of pratting around in boats, in the sun.
Of course in the sixth form I discovered the loophole that 6th formers didn't require a note from their parents to be 'off-games', on my schools behalf, "oops".
When I went back a year later to get someone to sign something for my UCAS form, my teacher said, "I was asking around in the staff room to see if anyone else could think of anything else I ought to put down, and we came to the conclusion that you never went to games."
I didn't much enjoy the school type stuff, but I look back fondly on all the time I spent doing nothing. Then I came to uni....



.

Spookiness....having just read Night Watch, as I mentioned, I went looking on google groups for the annotations.

What did i find but somebody saying

"There's an old and rather tasteless joke about Christ on the cross ...

If I was to try to tell it effectively it'd be much longer, but ...
basically it involves Jesus calling out in anguish for St. Peter, who in
turn is battling his way through the crowds trying to get through the cross.
When he arrives, Jesus grins down at him and says, "Hey Peter, I can see
your house from up here."

And then Jon popped up with his Camel factette, too!

Get those entroposcopes out again...



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Do something pretty while you can...

Sport was a lot more fun once I started rowing - lazy summer days chatting up attractive tourists in rowing boats, with the opportunity to sneak off upstream (where there's no towpath) and doze away tucked into the reeds like a safety-conscious Ophelia. We were so keen we sneaked off lessons to go training. Mystifyingly this wasn't seen for the scam it was...

It also caused consternation when a new music teacher arrived who was a keen cox. As none of us took music and spent our weekends at regattas (or the beer tents thereof) we all knew her as Jeni, rather than Miss Narracott. This caused much consternation amongst older teachers.

Although not as much consternation as the confession a year or two after we left that she had fancied a couple of the crew like mad would have caused...

btw, does anyone here know anyone who'd 'done a Pink'? (Viz. - 'Teachers dated me...') I knew someone at uni who'd had extracurricular physical education in the gym at her school...



PSD

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This is the work of an Italian narco-anarchic collective. Don't bother insulting them, they can't read English anyway.

Everyone last year at my school got a good RE mark. Halfway through, the hall roof cracked and the place began to flood. We ended up finishing the exams in unsupervised rooms. A sign from above?