Homework

 Homework 

I was just thinking about the fact that if I don’t remind my child to do his homework he will forget to do it and that I should really find a way of getting him to take responsibility for doing his own homework so he doesn’t forget and I remembered how much trouble I would be in at school if I forgot to do my homework and I think that might be why I encourage him so much and do the remembering for him. when I think back now I think that I was treated as though I had not done my homework because I was in some way lazy, or had not been bothered to do it but actually I used to go to the library after school every day rather than go home and I would do my homework there as there as there is little else to do in a library, especially when you spend several hours in one  - four or five hours each day. On Wednesdays the library in my home town would be closed in the afternoon, so I could not go there after school but I also could not go home. I would use the library nearest school, in the next town, and it closed early on Thursdays, so was not open on a Thursday afternoon. If I was in the wrong town on early closing day I would have to find some other way of spending my time to avoid going home and I remember sheltering in the multistorey carpark on a rainy day when the library was closed, and it just wasn’t possible to do  your homework in the multistorey carpark crouching beneath the stairs with the wind and the rain coming through the gaps in what from the outside I thought would be walls.

I didn’t know what the inside of multistorey carpark looked like before I used them for ineffectively sheltering from the rain because neither my parents owned or drove a car so I had never actually been in one and I had very little experience with cars.

It’s one of the things that was a disadvantage at school and lead to weirdness. so for example in physics we were being asked about where we see mirages and I have no hope of knowing the answer it is on a road sometimes you can see a mirage on the road as you’re driving along but I’d never been driven along the road so I could not have answered that question.

In biology my biology teacher took great pleasure in demeaning me in class. she used central heating systems as an analogy for the heart pumping blood around the body as she quizzed me not on the heart physiology and anatomy and the body but on the anatomy of a central heating system and of course we didn’t have one of those at home, we had storage heaters and yet she kept wanting me to tell her how the switch for the immersion heater was connected to a pump she said to me how does it get about this water and I’m saying you open the tap and it flows. to this day I still don’t believe that there is a pump involved in the system where water is heated up in the tank by immersion heater and flows out of the hot tap when you operate it. This made everybody else in the class laugh and she behaves as if I was being deliberately difficult but she was asking me about something that I could not have known anything about - central heating systems and it was a biology class not plumbing and I never claimed to know anything about plumbing in any case . and she didn’t tell me that she was using central heating systems as her analogy so I could not have known To tell her that was alien to me. Her going on about the switch must be connected to a pump, rather than an immersion heater and trying to get me to say so made everybody else in the class laugh and she behaved as if I was being deliberately difficult but she was asking me about something I could not of known anything about the central heating system as it was a biology class not plumbing and I never claimed to know anything about plumbing in any case and she didn’t tell me that she was using central heating systems as an analogy so I could not of known where she was coming from so I couldn’t understand I’ve possibly I’m still her question and yet to use that to mean me that is not the only time that that particular biology teacher chose to demean me in class. she was going to talk to us about secondary sexual characteristics and she asked us what is it that attracts men to women. and I said breasts. and she behaves as she had not heard me say the word breasts, so Required me to repeat myself. so I said breasts and she asked me to repeat myself and I said breast, so she asked me to repeat myself so I said breasts and eventually the girl to the right of me started saying breasts breasts breasts breasts and Mrs Dent, who is frankly evil, stopped. it wasn’t that she hadn’t heard  - she just wanted to have me say breast repeatedly because she believed that would humiliate me. What a nasty piece of work.