Early Essays! - Education system fails young pieman. Or did it?

Almost the end of the first month and I appear to be 4 posts up!

I am also realising that reading bloggs is something we like to do in work time.  Looking at statistics, reads or hits go right down on Saturday and only come back up a tad on a Sunday.  Monday and Tuesday are the best days so will work around this.

Anyway, whats sparked the bet and is now surprising a few folks back home is that I have never actually written anything longer than an IOU, Sick Notes at school, (Dear Teacher, Steven was sick yesterday... signed... his dad!)  short begging letters, legal aid declarations, or facebook posts in my life.  I felt I had at least as exciting a life as anybody I had met and wanted to get some notes, (these are rough notes and I'll try to do something with them next year) down and learn what to me is new technology.

I have been googling the English Qualification I failed miserably at school.  It was based on submitting 12 essays over a 2 year period, which was obviously too much for me at the time... or too boring.  So I was Ungraded and the few marks I got would not have given me a level 4 anyway.  

GCSE Grade	O Level Grade			CSE Grade
	Pre-1975 (numeric)	Pre-1975 (alphabetic)	1975 onwards
A*/A	1	A	A	1
	2	B
B	3	C	B
	4
C	5	D	C
	6	E
D	7	F	D	2
E	8	G	E	3
F			U (ungraded)	4
G	9	H		5
U (unclassified)				U (ungraded)

Graph highlighting the dismal failure of the School's ability to teach me anything. (I'm bottom right box)

So what happened?

Most essays we were given were on terminally boring subjects which probably warranted, at most, a sentence along the lines of  "Why are we writing about this Shit?:"  So we had 2 years to kill and a variety of methods of dodging it. 

In the unlikely event that I could be persuaded to write anything at all, I could turn any subject given into one about motorbikes.  The one I remember was "A Country Walk"  which elicited an opening sentence by me along the lines of... "As me and Mike were walking in the countryside, we found two motorbikes in the hedge....."  There then followed high speed tales based on our love of the Isle of Man TT, which his father took us to when we were younger.

Most got sent back failed or 4 - 5 grades.. not that I was worried. I was so bad that they didn't even try to beat English into me, which again was strange considering the times and some of the nut cases we had for teachers back then.   Leads me again to Fools and Horses where their old headmaster "Bend over Benson" is sent to Broadmore criminally insane prison.   They are worried he is behind a  mysterious school reunion.

Only found one clip, but if you get chance, watch the whole episode.

And so it was, failed, was allowed to fail and we were all happy.  There were so many of us I think they were happy that we bunked off to go working on farms, working on the Grouse Moors (where I got my love of walking from) and going fishing.  Looking back we were almost angelic compared to what you read now about youngsters bunking off, doing drugs, muggings etc.  We did our fare share of fighting and low level nuisance, but never muggings, stealing etc.

Quite the polite little petty criminals we were...  Oh and we owned small motorbikes from aged 12 onwards, stashed in various places to avoid parental disapproval... but that's for another day.

Happy Sunday to my depleted followers!