School dinners are, by definition, disgusting. The smell that pervades whatever space they are served in, soaked into the very fabric of the furniture and architecture, degrades whatever other uses that space is put to; gym, assembly, the school play, orchestra rehearsal, examinations, they are all tainted by that smell. Parents' evenings are inhibited by it, as the rearing back in disgust effect is exacerbated by the wave of memories of school dinner experiences.
And now Labour is threatening to make the school dinner a universal punishment; refusal will offend (as it so often does) so refusal will not be available. Under the functional guise of nutritional benefit and meeting need without discrimination, the prison-house shades will close about our growing children, in the form of swill on a plastic tray with indentations for slop-with-gravy, and slop-with-custard.
The school day will stretch from early morning to the evening, without hope of escape into the free world from 12.30 to quarter to two. Any expression of aesthetic or gustatory discrimination will be met with cultural aggression.
Eating with others is a very important social act, highly elaborated and often determinant in setting hierarchies and exchange relationships. It is not a suitable activity to be imposed in demonstrably failing schools.
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Our school dinners were bloody gorgeous, but this was back in the day when you got proper food. And proper puddings, with custard.
It all went wrong sometime in the mid-seventies when some bright spark thought it was a good idea to offer choice. Choice is good for adults. For kids it usually ends up as chips.
And now, of course, basic good-for-you stuff like salt and butter aren't allowed anywhere near school meals. Funny thing is - even though a lot of us went home to a second two-course meal, you didn't get too many fat kids wobbling around in those days.
Karen
perefectvery harsh.school dinners at hatfield grammar were excellent some people had two others just joined the wrong end of the queue and got them free.but that was then.the meals at my daughters school are excellent.i would take my wife there for a meal in the evening if they would but open.your hours are out.we got an hour plus today they get 30 minutes for lunch just not enough time.however the trouble with browns meals is they will be free at a price-you eat what we tell you to eat.young people today will just ignore him just as when the school leaving age goes up thousands will ignore that.they just don't get it them oldnulabs.
Can I have dinner round yours love?
I certainly enjoyed by Hatfield School dinners. Sadly even before we left College Lane everything had started heading south (food included).
Our school dinners were accompanied by readings from Lives (and Deaths) of the Martyrs; most off-putting.
But I was really referring to the small HGs' school dinners which were divided into two experiences. School dinners in Italy and school dinners in England.
Spaghetti bolognese, they learned, covers many things. As does the word 'pasta'. Not to mention tinned, plum tomatoes served raw from the tin as some kind of middle ground between vegetables and fruit. Pizza I will leave the Neapolitans to weep for. Other dishes from other cultures no doubt have raised other cultures' eyebrows.
But to reiterate my point, people should be free to choose who they eat with; it matters much more than who they learn or fail to learn sums with.
My memories of school dinners in the 40s and 50s are quite positive and all in all good value for about 1/3d. We all got fed adequately - and even on occasion there was enough left over for seconds.
My most unfavourite meals were sweetbreads, which made me feel sick just by looking at them, and I have never been near them since; and mashed swedes, which even today the smell of them also makes me feel ill.
Bon appetite!
1/3d, Nomad? You'll be recalling dividing £67/13/6d by £14/11/5d next. (no writing down, of course).
As nomad says the school dinners back then were good value.
It was possible to get more if you told the women that dished them up you were hungry.
These were very large women with very muscular arms. So no lip to them. They didn't need feminism.
School dinners?
I will never recover from the teasing for having once referred to it as lunch
You shouldn't have tried to eat your pudding with a fork. Yi!
HG: Of course, but you seem to have forgotten the farthings too! Off the top of my head guess, ooh, about £4.12.9d. I also only know how to do sums in feet and inches; this new fangled mm,cm,km stuff is all Greek to me.
Getting their sums right seems all Greek to the Greeks too, Nomad.
I'm sure you've got that sum right (she said hopefully).
With farthings I suppose you have to - no, it's beyond me. We just moved points left and right, much easier; but there were old sum books in the stock cupboards that were occasionally brought out to scare us.
There was considerable confusion with overseeing the small HGs' homework until it was explained to me that a decimal point in Italy is a comma and vice versa. So a million (quite a common number in pre-euro days) is not 1,000,000 but 1.000.000 (and while it shouldn't have mattered, it confused me).
"dividing £67/13/6d by £14/11/5d"
= 4, remainder £9/7/10d, I think (not writing down, as you said).
Now I teach children who still can't grasp multiplying by 10. The easier you make it, the dafter they get.
Pushes back sleeves: everything has to be converted into pennies, yes? Then the remainder has to be reconverted into pounds, shillings and pence? So we need our times 12 and our long multiplication by 240? But we'd better do an approximation first so we know what we're working towards, so we need to round things out for ease of approximating? Right. So if we say £70 divided by £15 we'll get our 4 and something under £10 remainder. So you're there Rolph; I'm hoping for marks for method.
Nomad, See Me.
My favourite recollection of school dinners is lamb chops baked in large trays, perhaps 30 at a time, resulting in the delightful sight of small boys eating them with their hands, while the fat literally trickled down their chins.
Ah, the joys of English boarding schools!
The reason the regime wants to make school "dinners" (they mean lunches, of course) universal is that the right to "free" school meals is a mark of poverty, and the other children always get to find out who qualifies, whereupon those unfortunates then suffer abuse and derision unless they are of a stature to impress. You would not believe the lengths the schools go to, to try to keep this information secret, but it always leaks out. So if everyone gets free "dinners", there is no discrimination. In theory.
Ah, the joys of British state education.
Hallo teacher, you called?? Sorry I'm late, but was absent yesterday (granny's 15th funeral, I think).
WY: Similar considerations were/are applied to uniforms - ie if everyone wears the same clothes there can be no distinction as to relative wealth among the pupils as everyone dressed the same. Happy sailing to you, Sir..
Re the sum, I can't recall the exact numbers, but I simply divided 67.65 by 14.55 (or something very similar) and came up with 4.64 which I then roughly converted to £sd.
Let me repeat, sums and science were not my strong points and I really struggled to (just) get my O levels - I was inclined the other way and invariably came top of my grammar school class in English, French and Latin exams. Subjects which came easily and naturally to me. Those who were good in maths and science invariably were in the lower half when it came to the languages. Different brains and aptitude I suppose. If we were all alike nothing would ever get done!
£14/11/5d is 8/7d short of £15.
4 x £15 = £60.
So the remainder is (£67/13/6d - £60) + (4 x 8/7d).
= £7/13/6 + 32s + 28d
= £7/13/6 + 32s + 2/4d
=£7/13/6 + 34s + 4d
=£7 + 13s + 6d + 34s + 4d
=£7 + 47s + 10d
=£9 + 7s + 10d, or £9/7/10d
We NEVER had to do something like that, and as I say, children who can't divide by 12 also can't divide by 10.
The duodecimal system is very good for dividing sums of money by time periods or groups of people, and was appropriate when people were paid in pennies per day or shillings per week.
The x12 and x20 system is not responsible for the rip-roaring inflation of the 20th century that has systematically robbed savers and now pretty much bankrupted the nation (except for a fantastically rich and corrupt elite).
I would also point out that there are 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day - because government hasn't yet found a way to inflate time.
There are also 360 degrees in a circle, still used for navigation the world over.
If ever we do for the pound what France did for the franc in January 1960 (100 old = 1 new), the duodecimal system may come into its own again.
The rule of 10 is just part of the great plan to erase the past and all links to it, so that we may have Year Zero and the socialist millennium.
I own to having chosen numbers that I see as 'awkward' to deal with when setting up the pounds shillings and pence long division. I expect it never would have been set but although I started out in decimals at my junior and infants there was still the shadow of 'this is easy, you should have had to deal with harder systems'.
We were taught to have all sorts of bonds and adjustment to nearest easier to deal with numbers as well which I fear may have been an attitude that has permeated thinking about all sorts of other materials. A 'that's more or less this and the answer is probably somewhere around here' attitude that isn't good; also we had a lot of 'if you see this then do that' teaching which makes for quickness of response but only within a particular mind set. It's very useful to get a start and even a rough map of how to get somewhere but we weren't given the obverse 'if you see this, always wonder whether it is unlike, not like'.
Nomad, I shall turn to you in moments of grammatical doubt - which turn up more and more often. Not speaking a native tongue every day and all the time is altering how words come out.
HG: As you know I do not live i England - and thus have the same foreign language difficulties as you. Happily, however, the vast majority of folk here do have facility with English, and although a lot of it is very battered, people do generally understand what the other person is trying to say.
HG: There is a posting on Bearwatch which has taken chunks these exchanges and added a few frills. I tried to add a comment but that blog uses a different comment system and I have no intention of subscribing to any of the choices on offer, so I shall take the liberty of posting my comment here and if anybody wants to re-post it over there, please be my guest.
"One reason why I enjoy passing time reading blogs is that a simple discussion of the cost of a plate of bangers and mash 50 years ago segues automatically into a discussion of advanced physics. Quite amazing, and a bit like a box of chocs in that you never know what you will get next".
Apologies for using your bandwidth.
Bearwatch is an Angels favourite blog, Nomad. Clever and absolutely backed-up by author-erudition and links to sources.
Trouble is if I followed all the interesting links there I'd be penniless and the house would go to rack and ruin.
Blog-tech isn't something I work at so I don't know what's happening there when you offer a comment.
You're so right about what discussions segue into. I've wasted half a Sunday morning discussing with Mr HG about how we were taught arithmetic and the fact that he was formally required to grasp the notions of commutative, associative and distributive. Obviously I was being familiarised with these but he was being formally instructed, rather as Italian school students are required to acquire Italian (not to mention Latin and Greek)grammar formally.
It boiled down to should people be taught to do things but without being told what they are doing? Or should we knowingly stand on the ground cleared and mapped-out by others before us? A lot of time can be wasted constantly reinventing wheels; most school-level teaching is concerned with transferring knowns, so perhaps the pleasures of repeating the joys of discovery and realisation ex novo should be down-graded.
Certainly musicians, for instance, don't take kindly to naive journeys of discovery - it's do as I tell you to do or give me convincing intellectual and practical reasons why not and, while you're at it, show me that you have fully grasped the formal structures you're supposed to be using to produce appropriate performance. Hence, perhaps, competent performance from very young adepts. A small HG was told kindly but plainly that there is no egalitarianism in music; a pupil does as the master tells them.
We underestimate the joys of successful performance in anything, and over-value the worth of personal discovery which commonly is an inadequate route to competence.
Yes, HG, copy first and understand later. Edward de Bono's insight was that we find the long way first, then refine to find the quickest. Simple (integrated) understanding is the hardest to achieve, hence the martial arts tradition that the highest masters return to the beginner's white belt.
Nomad: wish I knew what the problem was. I've excluded anon comments (I think) because I was getting spam - is that it?
The modern way of giving children several ways to do multiplication in ways that make all the steps plain (to the logician), confuses them.
Thanks HG. I noted your comment chez Bearwatch - also one of my daily reads.
As for musicians, I taught myself to play the electronic organ with the help of a few illustrated chord books. I amuse myself by playing "with" it rather than "on" it. But my golden rule was always if I don't like a tune I won't play it.
Sackerson: Yes, I think that must be the problem as I do not subscribe to any of the other formats. However, fear not; I may be unable to comment there but I shall remain a daily caller as I do find your blog interesting, informative and stimulating.
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