Stage-Struck

Today

In my last blog I said that my education seemed to offer the best teaching to the best pupils, creating a greater divide as time went on.

In My Day

I can think of one glaring example of this. At Selhurst there was a class banding system in place and then streaming for specific subjects (French, Sciences, Maths, if I remember correctly). English was not streamed.

Thus it was that I found myself in an average class band  but in the A stream for French. My far and away best subject was English. Grammar held no terrors for me and I was an avid reader and fluent writer. I also loved drama.

Our class teacher for the first couple of years was a Miss Hutchcroft (I think that was her name). She was also an English teacher so, by default, took our class for English. She was a dumpy, cheerful and voluble soul whose greatest love was the theatre. She always produced our school plays, often with great skill.

She pretty well never taught us any English; the lessons were almost entirely taken up with anecdotes about the theatre, plays and stage personalities she had known. 

Now, as I have said, I had a natural flair for the subject, so managed all the grammar and language exams with ease. Not so my colleagues. With the unerring snobbery of schoolchildren, we'd noticed that on red-letter days, Miss Hutchcroft wore no cap and gown, so that meant we had been saddled with a teacher of inferior status. For the most part, we were good grammar school material and preferred to pass exams if at all possible. During revision time my classmates looked around for someone with good grammatical knowledge and their eyes soon lighted on me.

"Julia, what is  the subjunctive?" "What's the difference between subject and object?" "Should I put an apostrophe here or not"? and so on. I was only too happy to help; pleased, possibly, at my sudden and unusual popularity. 

Passing an English Exam under Miss Hutchcroft was done in spite of her, not because of her, and natural levels of ability weren't disturbed one jot by her influence.

I have no idea why the powers that were didn't pick up on this and shuffle her into a thespian corner, to give us all a chance. But education seems to me to be a bit chancy at the best of times.