Our Children's Education

Agreed. You'll be receiving your Long Service Award very soon then

The one that opened in 1949/50 with Mrs Evans as Head. The one that was on the north side of Charter Avenue.

Sorry pixrobin, I wasn't aware there had been a "Charter Primary School" prior to the existing one. I can't for the life of me picture just where it would have been.

Pixrobin I have always advocated that history should. like every other subject, be taught from where children are to where you want them to be and that means teaching it in reverse. In the case of history, you are perfectly right that the oral sources available (parents, grandparents and, if possible great grandparents) should be their first port of call. If someone is, say, ninety years old and they remember their grandparents, they have connections back to the middle of the nineteenth century. Once this method has been exhausted, they can then start researching back beyond that to answer the 'Why?' question. The 'patch' system of teaching history, where we learn about 'The Normans', 'The Romans', 'The Tudors', 'World War 1' doesn't help children to understand the continuity of change and the reasons why things changed. It is better to do topics like 'Transport' or 'Schools' in history lessons because they, at least. afford the opportunity to appreciate progression. The most valuable lesson which history can teach us is 'cause and effect' - an understanding of the concept of consequences - and to enable us to learn how not to repeat the mistakes of the past.

The current Charter Primary (at he bottom of Mitchell Avenue) is the school's 3rd incarnation. The original site is highlighted in pic. It served children from the adjacent 'steel houses' estate and the main entrace was at the end of Preston Close. The second incarnation was on a site between Ten Shilling and Park woods.

Thanks for that info pixrobin. So it's "second incarnation" was where Alderman Harris School was built?

Hi Mike, My model railway is calculated as a scale 4ml to the foot! Both sides of my ruler have to be very sharp & visible. Just a thought too. Railway engineers still calculate a curve radius in chains. Twenty two yards in a chain.

.. and is the distance between wickets too. I was taught solely imperial measurements, and I have to say that they were confusing at best.. see here

http://gwydir.demon.co.uk/jo/units/length.htm

and this talk of a 'half divided by a quarter'? I didn't care then and I don't care now. Here in Canada, we are officially 'metric' unless buying lumber which is 'imperial', and as I remember, that is true for the UK to where one buys a windows frame in feet and inches and glass in millimetres. Madness. Everything should be metric even though it was the French who set the standard.

I have a good method which works wherever you are. For short distance/length, if somebody asks me how long a room is, I envisage an object for which I know the length, my BMW E30 which I had at the time for instance (roughly 14.5 feet), and then picture how many E30s would fit across the area. 'Hey, that's not a bedroom, its a broom cupboard. Bedroom furniture is not made that small'. Now, I use the Jeep Grand Cherokee, approximately 16 feet. Its handy if you don't have a tape measure and is indifferent to the official units of measurement.

Never learnt useful stuff like this in school, just a lot of junk about rods, poles and perches..

The school was built on the opposite side of Charter Avenue facing the end of Wolfe Road, which goes under the bridge to Torrington Avenue.

I must admit to a liking for measurement with names like chain, rods and and weights in avoirdupois units. Although I was taught the metric system in secondary school and it all my working life I still think in imperial units and convert from the metric, especially length and temperature which I learnt in primary school and have stuck with me. A few years ago my wife was given a pair of small aquaria and she had assumed the measurements were in cms so they would fit perfectly where we wanted them. Of course when I went to collect them they were measured in inches. We still had them though .

In my experience children are born with a natural thirst for knowledge, hence the constant questions why? Unfortunately this often seems to be discouraged by the education system. Like most others of my age I learnt my times table and spelling by rote and I made sure that my children could read and write and do basic things like tying shoe laces before they went to school. Unfortunately when they went to school there was nowhere for them to go but into classes teaching the basics which they found boring. Things gradually improved but initially they made no real progress while they (and others) waited or the rest to catch up. I also spent some time teaching basic maths to adults on a one-to-one basis and the problem I often came across was a fear of maths because they had been taught it was difficult. This was something that had to be overcome slowly at first by gradually building up confidence and showing that maths was really quite easy. Unfortunately schools do not have time for this approach and the damage is very easily done and can take a lifetime to repair.