I don’t remember much from my school days. One very useful piece of advice, however, that stuck for some reason, was when our teacher told us never to put anything smaller than our elbows in our ears.
Anyone else remember daft stuff adults told you in your childhood?
Was that a biology/sex education lesson? 
“Come heeere! while I smack y` bottom!” 
To stay away from Catholic priests.
Paul
That PEMDAS means to do each item referenced individually across a problem.
It wasn’t until the next year that another teacher corrected that to:
Parentheses
Exponents
Multiplication & Division
Addition & Subtraction
That teacher who incorrectly taught me PEMDAS also messed up a lemon-as-a-battery experiment, which I got functioning despite her diagram. I seem to recall her saying that a seven-sided shape was a septagon… (This was 5th grade.)
My problem is that I don’t think I learnt anything at school. My mother once said to me, not long before she died, that it couldn’t have been that bad as it had got me into Cambridge. My answer was that my impression had been that I had got into Cambridge in spite of the school!
The only things that remain clearly in my mind are that: my home having been in French-speaking countries from the age of 12, my French was better than that of most of the French teachers; that the Latin teacher thought that the best way to teach boys was to get them to hate you — I have always believed that it was that that got me into Cambridge, the question about my somewhat imperfect knowledge of Latin having come up in my interview, the questioner being the Regius Professor of Latin, it turned out; and the disillusionment of later finding — I made the mistake of being blandished into attending an Old Boys Day — the head of Modern Languages, whom I had at least thought of as a competent linguist, to be totally floored by the fact that I was reading Chinese at Cambridge.
I sink it vos clear zat I vos, 'ow you say, ze totale meesfeet!
:mrgreen:
Mark
Mere d`Lucifer!
Vous aussi, mon ami?
Le D 
I’m doubting the accuracy of these memories. Of course, we all learned a great deal in school. It’s just hard to remember now what it was like NOT to be able to read, to add and subtract, to name the colors and learn that “sky” in a picture is not a blue band across the top, but something that goes down to a horizon.
And folks, have a heart. Remember, our fearless leader KB was for a long while a school teacher. Think he likes to hear that he wasted his time on a bunch of amnesiacs who believe they acquired all knowledge by themselves?
As an editor, I have saved many writers from incoherence–and they always think they did it themselves. Perhaps students are like that about their teachers as well. 
something pertinent that I learned was learnt at home, and learnt by ozmosis through my brother. In fact, this is something I would never have learnt at all if I didn’t have my particular brand of brother.
I learnt that wrapping two D cell batteries up in a sheet of foil in order to complete the circuit works great. And if you’re stupid enough to be holding that wrapped up package in your hand when you fold the top part over…
you burn your hand.
…be able to do all that before you enter kindergarten. My mother taught me those things. I could do multiplication and division, too–I even remember having a theory about how negative numbers worked.
Of course, I never used those things in school until later, so I forgot them by the time school got to them. So I never did find out if my ideas about negative numbers were correct, since I forgot them between first and sixth grade.
In my defence, I don’t mean that I never learnt anything … I learnt lots, but it always seems that most of what I learnt came from my father and my environment and other people. I ploughed through O-levels and A-levels yes … but what came through that (a) wasn’t significant later, (b) the ones I did well in came through sitting and reading the books on my own … I got an A in O-level chemistry, and that definitely didn’t come through the teaching, but I read the coursebook intensely from cover to cover because I got fascinated by it, in the parts that didn’t come into our syllabus.
It seemed to me that all the inspirational teachers, and they had been there, all moved on just as I was about to enter the level that they taught …
I’m sure KB is an inspirational teacher, but sadly he didn’t teach me! 
Mark
PS … I guess that my Latin, grade D at A level, did come from the teaching at the school.
I don’t know. Most of my time was spent alone at the refectory, with a nun waiting for me to finish the ‘maccheroni al pomodoro’. I still hate maccheroni al pomodoro.
Paolo
Here we go again!! Another one after a free 2.0 upgrade
Along similar lines…
… I learnt that when making a hole in a conker with a pair of compasses (do American or European children enjoy playing with conkers?), it is better not to hold said conker in the palm of one’s hand…
H
My aunt once learnt a similar lesson to that. Hers was “never cut a sandwich in half when the sandwicher eater is holding the sandwich on the palm of his hand.”
Eeeeewwwwwwweeeeeeekkkkkk!!! That hurts just thinking about it! I found a lovely shiny conker, fresh out of its shell, on my walk home from work today, which is so beautiful that I have put it on the mantelpiece. They really are gorgeous when they’re all shiny like that (“fresh firecoal”, if I remember my Gerald Manley Hopkins correctly). But not they’re not half so pretty when they’ve been soaked in vinegar and baked in the oven. 
(Does that even work? We used to try all sorts of things to harden the chestnuts, but everyone said that was the best. I could never get the hang of conkers, myself.)
Coincidentally, someone told me when I got to work this morning that putting a chestnut in each corner of a room keeps away spiders (a French trick, apparently). That same person was reading the Times newspaper in Costa Coffee later this morning, and saw that self-same advice, which seems rather synchonicitous or zeitgeisty or something. I can’t imagine how it would work – my spiders seem to climb in through the windows.
So! you were never told, ‘not’, to go behind the bike sheds with the boys!
Conker? On a string? We call that a weapon and go hunting with things like that. Typically hunting for sisters and “the kid from that other block” but hunting none the less. And we use walnuts, blocks of wood, pieces of metal, the kind of stuff that leaves an impression.
I think the biggest “don’t touch” lesson ever taught around me was at a family reunion. Someone took a beer from the wrong cooler. Big mistake. If it is BYOB only TYOB.
Back to being marginally on topic, I will surprise everyone by disagreeing with druid on the value of what kids get from teachers in a couple of areas. I think 'dee hit it already, but if parents are actually being parents then teachers are either very effective or entirely unneeded. I would lean toward the latter from experience as both student and teacher. A parent that is “raising” a child will spend time reading, talking, explaining, theorizing, experimenting. The interaction will build social skills and a love of learning and thinking. With students like this a teacher doesn’t really need to teach as much as present information.
On the other hand, if parents abandon their kids to the system then teachers need to teach. But how can they be effective with the diversity of personalities, home lives, problems, and God knows what else to deal with? I believe that most teachers are truly there to help, but are doomed from the day they start their job. The kids who could make the most from the teacher are over shadowed by those who suck the very life out of the class.
That overly simplistic and idealistic rant out of the way, the best teachers I had were Mrs Williams, 3rd grade, Mrs H (never know her last name) for sophomore biology, and Mr Stuart for comp/calculus. The one thing they all had in common was “leaving me alone” to explore the area they had to offer. Mrs Williams convinced the school to lift the restriction on what I could get out of the library which allowed me to explore Shakespeare (didn’t get much out of it at first), London, and the beginnings of Darwin and various other religions (I was in a school associated with a specific Protestant denomination). Mrs H let me veer off the curriculum and steer my own way into environmental impacts in biology at a level that was uncommon in high school. She even helped me to a few impact studies by opening sources of information that would have been closed to me. Mr Stuart, that poor man. I did home work for other classes during his calc lectures, taught myself assembly when he was teaching pascal, hacking the novel network by writing and installing a key logger on his terminal. He defended me as “being to limited by the system and only trying to learn how things worked”.
I will admit to being lucky, no, privileged, growing up as one of the kids raised by parents not the system. I was so disgusted by the ignorance around me that I did not see the real value to a college education until much later in life. Hence my current status as uneducated hick.
Which means that I completely agree with druid in this regard: The best teachers, editors, doctors, pilots, pick your field, are those that do their job in a way that makes “them” transparent, as if “they” were only there on the sidelines cheering you on.
Hmmm. The young Vic’s raised this before, with others I see. It’s obviously worrying him. Makes me wonder how low he’d be willing to stoop to snag such a boon for himself.
Mr Skallywag,
Not, 'wishing’, to overstate the obvious, but being left with no alternative: ‘I’ am Scrivener`s Psychoanalyst. Please stick to your own field of expertise. Thank you!
Dr Mulality
Jaysen, thanks for your comments on good teachers. Yes, the wise ones let you learn on your own. The task is hugely difficult, because children work at such a variety of levels. And their home environments are so disparate as well. (A child with ignorant, bigoted parents has far to go, alas.)
It’s a wonder that teachers have any success at all. My original point is that they are often forgotten or undervalued by their pupils. (Sadly, you never learned Mrs. H’s name.) In some areas, especially family traditions and moral values, parents can be fine teachers. But they’ve been out of school a long while, and much specific knowledge of our day (DNA, computers, the past perfect of awake) is well beyond them.
However, I have known a few home-schooled students, and they are great because they’ve read so much and are less susceptible to peer pressure, which is perhaps the worst effect of public or private schools.