Handwriting - Don't Lose the Basics

 

I used to take pride in my handwriting, though these days it is limited to a shopping list or a quick note. I’ve received many compliments for my ‘beautiful handwriting’ which may have started with my interest in calligraphy.  I’ve enjoyed the privilege of doing the place cards for weddings and formal functions as my reputation grew. Over the years my style has changed and become a bit scruffy, to say the least and it’s probably down to lack of use. I can’t blame it on the lymphoedema.

Handwriting was an important lesson at school. My childhood was spent learning how to correctly form individual letters, how they sat on the line, which were tall and which were not.  We practised on specially lined paper, using a fountain pen or a dipped ink pen, after a pencil had been mastered sufficiently for the approval of the teacher. How the letters linked together into what we called ‘real writing’ followed the specific rule of the pen not leaving the paper mid-word, so a character ending below the line would need to be looped back to the line to form the next one. This was the way we were taught and we had to adhere to it. Individual style came later.

My secondary school exercise books, which I still have, show my various experiments in handwriting with some comments from teachers – ‘Do this again in blue or black ink’ (my preferred turquoise Quink was an individual step too far)  ‘This is not an art lesson. No more unnecessary flourishes’.  Eventually I settled into something like a Chancery script and quite far removed from the cursive handwriting I’d grown up with. I think I still write like that.  I used my calligraphy skills to copy a couple of my favourite sonnets which I hung on the wall in matching frames. They need re-doing with ink fit for purpose; another little job on my lockdown ‘to do’ list.

I’m helping out with some home-schooling for my eldest grandson. He’s only five and missing school, which he loves. I really feel for him. He needs his teacher, his peers and the dynamics of his classroom activities. For now he’s got Nanna’s old-fashioned teaching skills coupled with bags of patience, I hope. He is a whizz kid at maths and number work. He needs some encouragement with handwriting. Yesterday was handwriting day, just when he wanted to play. I have lessons emailed to me by my daughter for him to work on with my help. It wasn’t long before I thought I was reciting a Joyce Grenfell sketch.

‘Sit still, dear.’

‘Move to where you can see, then.’

‘Try to keep hold of your pen.’

In an effort to keep things fun, I got the easel out, chalk-board facing, plenty of chalk and words for him to sound out and write on the board. That went well, he was focused and I took a photo to send to his mum. Not much actual handwriting done, never mind. After a play-break, I found him something about dinosaurs on BBC Bitesize KS1. I think it was a science lesson. He enjoyed the interaction with that so much that he had to do it twice. He already knew how to ‘scroll and click’. Of course he did, silly me, he is Year One. We’ll return to his proper school work and do some handwriting another day. There’s no substitute for basic skills.

I wrote this poem a few years ago. Forgive me if you've heard it before. 

An Alternative Education

 

The 3Rs soon to be redundant

Computer-led kids will be abundant

With all information mega-quick

It only takes a scroll and click.

No need for any conversation

Included in their education.

 

Last year’s reception class have all gone

And taken a leap up to Year One

To drag sticky fingers on IPad screens

And work out what technology means.

Will this be their basic foundation

Instead of formal education?

 

Numeracy, or let’s call it Maths

Has rules to follow specific paths,

Beginning with learning how to count

Then adding up and sharing out.

One click away from calculation

Takes away their education.

 

When did this digital preference start?

Oh why no poetry learnt by heart?

‘Spell check’ becomes their favourite teacher

With ‘grammar check’ and added feature.

The only future expectation,

A self-taught on-line education.

 

The infants are learning to use a pen.

It’s not a skill they’ll need again

For a future spent staring on-line,

Social activity in decline

With hardly any interaction,

So they won’t need our education.

 

PMW  2015

Thanks for reading, take care and keep well. 

If you're home-schooling or trying to occupy infants, keep smiling. They love you.  Pam x

 

 

 

 

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In The Spotlight - Let Me Hide

I prefer to watch the drama unfold, rather than have a part in it. Some things are impossible to avoid but as far as possible I keep out of the spotlight. I’m not comfortable being the centre of attention, even at my own birthday parties.

I remember having a gathering of school friends for my eighth birthday. It was games and a tea party upstairs in whatever pub we lived in at the time. Everything was fine until the cake arrived and my friends sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to me. I burst into tears and clung on to my mother’s skirt. What a softie. Birthday parties were best avoided, that is, until the more senior adult years.

My fiftieth birthday was a milestone worth celebrating as I had pulled through serious illness the year before. It was good to gather the clan and all the friends who had been helping, supporting the family and generally gunning for me. It seems mean to confess that I couldn’t wait to go home to my knitting and clock watched all evening, yet at the same time it was lovely to be amongst the people I care for the most, all together in one place. I’m a strange one.

Even stranger when, ten years later, I’m the one who wanted the party to end all parties, bells, whistles, balloons, a live band and a posh buffet in a posh venue. I got my wish and it was great. I threw myself into it and enjoyed every expensive minute, even the bit where I’ve got the microphone and I’m singing with the band. I cringe at the thought of it now. One of my friends filmed it. Up to now, and its been years, I haven’t seen it, which is just as well as I think I’d die of embarrassment and never go anywhere ever again. No, I hadn’t been drinking, I was simply having fun.

When I was at primary school, I used to feel physically sick with nerves at the thought of maths lessons with Mr Jackson. He would call us individually to the blackboard. I shudder to hear him now, ‘Miss --- to the board!’ I was a skinny, geeky looking girl, and would stand red-faced and trembling at the blackboard feeling everyone’s eyes burning into me and hearing muffled unkind comments. With shaky, clammy hands I would hold the chalk tight and write the sum that Mr Jackson bellowed from the back of the classroom.  I would then have to work it out and explain what I was doing, loud enough for everyone to hear. It gave me nightmares. Everyone got a turn, no one was spared, but the whole thing turned me inside out. I was fine with maths and got my sums right, unlike some who were ridiculed for messing up. I got laughed at for needing glasses and my general appearance.  Mr Jackson was a great teacher of his generation and in every subject, he liked the class to be interactive and learn through ‘doing’. He always told us there would be plenty of written work to do when we got to senior school, so we didn’t need to do it now. Primary teaching is different these days and children are not thrust into the spotlight quite the same, thank goodness.

We recently lost a great comedian who adored being in the spotlight, Sir Ken Dodd. He was a national treasure and part of my childhood. He was always there when I was a girl, either on television or playing one of Blackpool’s theatres.

I first saw him on stage when I was nine. We hadn’t been living in Blackpool very long. It was our first summer season and my parents received complimentary tickets to various shows and the Tower Circus. My mother took me to see the show Ken Dodd was in and I remember just constantly laughing and being in awe of seeing the Diddy Men in real life. In later years, I was a guest at a summer Midnight Matinee concert where Doddy was topping the bill. I’m not exaggerating when I say daylight was breaking when we left the theatre. He loved to be in the spotlight and the spotlight loved him. Thank you for the memories, Sir Ken Dodd. You left me suitably tickled.

One of my poems today, 

 

Don’t put me in the spotlight,

I’m really quiet and shy

Away from all attention,

Any fuss might make me cry.

Don’t put me in the spotlight,

I never know what to say

And to be a nervous wreck

Would simply ruin my day.

Don’t put me in the spotlight

I’m not going near the stage

Nobody needs to see me

Read my poems from the page.

Don’t put me in the spotlight,

Just leave me alone to hide

My feelings, thought and talents

Wrapped safely, tightly, inside.

 

PMW 2018

 

 

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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The Answer is Clear - What Was the Question?

For a long time, it seemed obvious that I had no aptitude for maths.

 

It was a reasonable inference for a seven-year-old. No matter how strenuously I tried to grapple with the mysteries of addition, subtraction and long division, the squared pages of my exercise book would always come back to me decorated with enthusiastic red crosses. Evidently, these number problems were only deceptively simple; their solutions lay frustratingly beyond my grasp.

 

However, when the new school year brought with it a new teacher, a new explanation shimmied into focus.

 

“Young lady, I would have been able to give you full marks for your work… had the problems you answered on this page been the ones I’d written on the board.”

 

In that moment, the clouds parted and I saw the world in a new light. I could say goodbye to being a maths dummy forever. However, the price of doing so was a lifetime of wearing that '70s badge of shame: a pair of NHS glasses. Being seven or thereabouts, I didn’t think in terms of Faustian bargains—but how much more of a bargain can you get than “free”, am I right?

 

 

Shortly thereafter, I began attending school wearing a pair of hideous glasses. At the same time, my ability in maths improved dramatically. Thus, I played a small part in reinforcing the stereotype that glasses are not merely a marker of intelligence, but somehow, magically, have the power to confer it.

 

Years later, of course, those NHS glasses would become the last word in style. Remember, guys, I was rocking those hideous frames before they were cool and, occasionally, getting punched for it. Such is the lot of the fashion trailblazer; I may have been getting my maths problems right, but I was getting '70s preteen style tragically wrong.

 

Had I been metaphorically less short-sighted, I might have taken comfort in the fact that, any time-travelling hipsters from the twenty-first century who had arrived at my junior school would have judged me the most fashion-forward kid in the class. Just another instance of coming up with the right answer to the wrong problem…

 

Alison Raouf

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