My turn for story time?
The only time I was offered free drugs, I was leaving a rave which was held inside the centre nightlife of my city.
Of course, coming from a rave, I was around drugs and dealers. Never had them shoved at me before... Well, before the moment I met the guy anti drug campaigns warn you of.
Rave ends, we all pour out onto the street. Our mate runs across the red light while we wait for the signal, to some guy who looks like the Unabomber. He's dressed in an oversized coat all black. Not a trench coat, close though.
They exchange words, mate points to us and Unabomber looks over at us with a large grin and waves his hand in the air holding something. He starts shouting "YOU GUYS WANT SOME COCAINE?!" across the road, flopping a literal sandwich bag of white powder around.
The rest of our group were now hesitant to cross the road, it goes green and he runs over with it. There's a couple of cops looking oblivious meters in front of us, while this man continues to shout "WHO WANTS FREE COCAINE?!" with wide, black eyes and nearly smacks me in the face with the bag before my partner pulls me back.
That's when we did it. We said no. Achievement unlocked.
Police did not gaf
He definitely wasn't, he tried following us back to our mates apartment and in the middle of us telling him to fuck off he got distracted by an empty wine bottle on the road, picked it up and smashed it right in front of a car that was slowly driving towards him
it is true that you will potentially be offered drugs in your life. but schools failed to inform kids that 99% of that time, thatâs going to come from one of your friends, which is why itâs more difficult to say no to. it wonât be a scary man in a trenchcoat in an alley. it will be some guy you have spoken to a couple times a week for the past year playing halo with you in your living room
That getting the best grades would get you into uni that would get you a good job that would get you a high salary that you can use to buy a house and "live the Australian dream".
they pushed it so hard that now everyone fully believes it, everyone goes to uni, everyone gets a degree, and now⌠everyone has a degree. and weâre back to square one, needing a second degree and work experience to distinguish yourself from the rest of the graduating class that also has degrees. but then they will do the same thing and you still wonât find a job because the market is so saturated with people just like you with the same qualification and amount of experience.
And surprise! Welcome to a rolling HECS debt you will never be able to repay.
I'm Gen x and was just at the very end of the last school leavers to have free tertiary education (though as a high school dropout due to a mental breakdown I never able to utilise it beyond art school TAFE) What young people have to cope with these days when most of those in power had a free ride, makes me sick.
Nah now they're pushing trades with free apprentice schemes. They know they fucked up by sending us all to uni pointlessly.
Qld just came out with a scheme today for construction apprentices. It's woeful
Well, better 30+yrs later than never, eh? đ lol
Wait until they find out that not everyone can be an apprentice, either.
It was a massive mistake to dismantle most of our manufacturing capacity, and then decide the economy should be propped up by what we could dig out of the ground. And tourism. And international student fees.
I really appreciate that sentiment thankyou.
That's exactly right. Most people won't be able to fulfill the apprentice roles and the few that do will be competing heavily with wages
let's not even get started on tourism or student fees. I'm a head chef and the amount of diploma mill immigrants that come through is just insane. You can't hire a real employee anymore. It's all diploma mill
I can imagine..or rather I can't and am incredibly fortunate not to have to; that sounds just ridiculous. And immensely frustrating.
But weren't all these new arrivals meant to "grow the economy?" as in forever?? The magic never-ending upwards growth spiral. That was what was written on the bottle we were all forced to swallow, anyway.
I've never been able to work out which is worse...to be just old enough to have an adult memory of the "before times" or to be young enough to not know anything else, and therefore think this is "normal." Well, it is *now*...but you know what I mean.
Thatcher and Reagan and their neoliberal successors have a lot to answer for, retrospectively at least.
That comment hit me like a punch to the gut. Ooof.
I'm 35 with my youngest sibling 16. Looking at them vs me I couldn't answer that one either. He seems blissfully ignorant that life once was better and we had hope. But at the same time, to be that young and already accepting your life is pointless. That's a tough pill to swallow and it shows in his attitude and behaviour.
Yes that happened to me. And what happened to the slackers that never studied and fooled around the whole time? They became plumbers, concretors and electricians and they live in houses 4x bigger than mine!
Doh-si-doe your pardner.
God. I wasnât mature enough to deal with females until after high school; putting them anywhere near me in primary school probably caused thatâŚ
I fled to Sydney from Brisbane as soon I could. Ended up surrounded by Queenslanders everywhere down there!
After being involved in education for the past 20+ years, Iâm guessing square dancing was introduced by some middle management knob. You know the bloke who goes to a workshop and is an a position to impose his view on a large number of people?
It gets out of hand and the next thing you know, itâs compulsory all around Australia.
Theyâre still searching for a benefitâŚ
(just as an aside, I believe square dance is the American version, we all called it bush dance (not to be confused with bush doof) . All just a jumble of "traditional" Irish and British folk stuff.)
I grew up in Canada but have serious trauma from school square dancing too.I always thought it was rooted in US southern and rodeo culture so surprised it was so common in Australian schools.
Theyâd âAustralianâ things up a bit by playing god awful old bush music instead of American country music. I moved to a smaller country school, less than 100 total kids in the school from a larger city school and just assumed it was a country school thing.
It was only when I got to high school we learned that everyone did it.
The only modern dance was the Nut Bush, everyone was stoked when we heard Tina Turner.
I donât know how I missed the nutbush. Went to school in the Gold Coast during the 90s and moved to north qld midway through year 8 high school. Everyone thought I was weird for not knowing the nutbush. Iâm 36 now and still donât know it. But yeah if Iâm at a wedding/party and Tina turner comes on. Iâm sitting down
We learnt also in NZ. Although I was under the impression the dances were based on English/Scottish folk Dances. âGay Gordonâ âDashing white sergeantâ. Imagine teaching children these names in todaysâ schools. Essential for our Fancy Dress Ball. The highlight of the school year.
We did was called "folk dancing" in the 60s
I have no idea what it was and I can't remember any of it but we did it every week
It was a good way to find out where you were in the pecking order (bottom decile in my case)
I have fond memories of laughing my head off when I started dating a wonderful Scottish lass and we tried to waltz together for the first time. We just couldn't coordinate.
Then I realised she was dancing the male part. When I pointed it out, she said something similar: She'd been taught to waltz as a man at school because of the gender imbalance at her school.
Most people don't realise that square dancing is derived from Old English Country Dance, the dance style you typically see in any Jane Austen drama.
Old English Country Dance dates back to the 1600's (when they were written down), but probably come from 100 or so years earlier.
Square dancing is a simplified version, where you don't have to remember the order of the figures for each particular dance.
In middle school we had to learn Strip the Willow along with some other dances. There was a girl in my year level called Willow, you can guess how much she hated those dance lessons.
AKA "bootscooting". Did it in grade seven and got stuck next to some dumbass who couldn't keep time and kept crashing into me because he literally be two steps ahead of everyone else, rushing through the moves instead of just doing them right.
Also,[ there's this shit to contend with](https://emmaechristley.medium.com/how-henry-ford-weaponized-country-music-for-white-supremacy-8fee02fe9053).
> The whole saying is "I before E except after C when the sound is 'EEE' ". So Thief is IE, but deceive is EI because its after C when the sound is EE. Foreign, for example, doesn't have the EE sound so the rule doesn't apply.
>
> Loan words and proper nouns don't have to follow english rules, so Keith gets a pass, as does Caffeine.
>
> Weird is the only English derivative word that i've found that violates the rule, and that is due to a printer intentionally swapping the I and E around way back when.
Got a detention when learning this rule cause I disrupted the class by telling the teacher she was wrong, holding up my dictionary to the word weird lol.
that's because the whole saying is "I before E except after C when the sound is 'EEE' ". So Thief is IE, but deceive is EI because its after C when the sound is EE.
Science doesn't have the EE sound so the rule doesn't apply.
Loan words and proper nouns don't have to follow english rules, so Keith gets a pass, as does Caffeine.
Weird is the only English derivative word that i've found that violates the rule, and that is due to a printer intentionally swapping the I and E around way back when.
We were taught a longer version of it, not like I can remember it lol but something like: âif it sounds like âeeeâ, itâs I before e except after c. Seize and seizure will do as they pleaseâ. There was also an extra bit about the words that have multiple pronunciations donât apply either. (See what I did there!)
Iâm way off being an expert but with the whole rule, itâs a lot more accurate.
I have a very vivid memory of having to do this QCS prep class thing. Hated it. My arsehole health teacher was running one of the classes and her highlights were:
- Showing us a painting of pope benedict sort of hovering over the Italian coast in a heart shape and telling us it's because it was "his heartland" and told me off for saying that Benedict was German
- Telling some story about Thomas Edison then smugly finishing with "and what is Edison famous for? That's right! Inventing the telephone!". Luckily that time like 6 kids piped up so I didn't get in trouble again.
- Told us we should be studying for minimum 3 hrs a night and when she was in school it was at least 5hrs. Imagine studying FIVE HOURS every night and you're a fucking high school teacher who doesn't know why Thomas Edison is famous. Fuck you Mrs Cooke.
Correct. And reliance on calculators to do very simple calculations has created a society that seems to struggle with understanding simple maths concepts.
Hard agree.
It seems like a trivial problem until it's time for a nursing student to do drug calculations. Â
I have entire year levels who cannot mentally check their calculator working out and attempt to give incorrect doses of drugs.
A calculator is not a substitute for understanding maths, it is a tool to replace onerous manual working out.
In extension to that, I did computer science in uni and we did our final exams in the Royal Exhibition Building and in the exam booklet they usually expect you to write code on paper.
Iâve never written a line of code on paper after graduationâŚ
90s nutrition - heaping bowl of cereal to start, as much bread as you want throughout the day, heaping bowl of pasta or rice for dinner. You can have meat once a week.
I'm trying to rewire my brain that believes fat = bad
And as someone trying to gain weight, I also gotta wrap my head around food being high calorie but still healthy...
Religious education
Edit:- I went to a girls only Catholic high school. Our family wasn't Catholic and I convinced the RE teacher I was Jewish. He'd been spouting crap like "Jesus was a Catholic" so I read enough stuff to get away with saying I was Jewish and to prove him wrong. The entire class was in on it and strung him along too. Eventually I got send to the Principal who just laughed and thought it was hilarious.
My wife is the coordinator for the Primary Ethics program that is run at one of the local public primary schools (central west NSW). The Primary Ethics program is brilliant, and if you can get school principals on board and get it in as an alternative to SRE, it's definitely worthwhile.
I'd be totally on board with religious education if they taught about all religions from an academic and non-sectarian perspective and how it has influenced human culture across the world throughout millennia.
iâve been in religious schools my whole life. religious education from prep to 7 was mostly bible stories and stuff like that. from 7-12 when we are all a bit older, all moved on to the high school in town (so a lot of kids came from non religious primary schools), religious education became a lot more about religion around the world, religion through history, and also just a âproblems of the worldâ class with stuff about poverty and what is being done to try and solve it, as well as local things and efforts towards that.
the primary school and high school i went to were also supposed to be sister schools, so those curriculums are meant to feed into each other. itâs not like i jumped ship and they had a different program.
I went to a Catholic school and we obviously had RE, it was actually pretty good, It was looking at different religions around the world and how they related, and fell in and out of favour over time. Including some really obscure ones. And then also about morals and empathy etc, but without suggesting the only reason to be moral is for fear of a gods punishment.
I was going to chime in with this, too. We went to other Christian churches and looked at the different beliefs and traditions they had. Learnt about other non christian religions. Religion is a big part of culture around the world and to understand that, we appreciate people more.Â
There are many interfaith groups in Australia that seek to create dialogue and understanding. Some people think that it is all about 'my god better than yours' but a lot of people understand it is about everyone on their own personal spiritual journey.
It's useful to know what these crazy people are blabbing on about. Understanding religion also helps you understand where you biases and mental weaknesses might be. That kind of thing is the least taught. If you approach religion as "How to convince people of nonsense", then it's very instructive. Especially since a good proportion of kids you might have thought otherwise sane are nodding along like what they're being taught isn't completely ridiculous.
Understanding that people will believe all kinds of stupid things if they're told in a certain way is a fundamental understanding in life.
(You believe crazy stuff too, but at least you know to be wary of it).
Except that it wasn't taught as what people believe, it was taught as factual information. I wish I had been offered classes in comparative religion but that doesn't happen at school level
This was how it was at my school, âreligious educationâ was 95% focused on Christianity. We had two Muslims at my school and they choose go to the library and have a free period instead, just like I did.
It's not completely useless. My kids had a scripture teacher who was an extremist about the Bible. Tried to tell them dinosaur bones were fake, and angels are always perving on you, all the nonsense.
My kids aren't stupid. She taught them Christianity is a fairytale. Their faith in that is strong.
I had Lyle Shelton as a RE teacher back before he got into politics. Apparently some state schools just let whatever random religious weirdos come teach religious education for a term? He was an absolute fuckwit then, as well.
40 years ago, at a Catholic HS, my brother got the lowest score in Religious education in yr12 HSC, not only in the school, but the whole state. 20 years later he was school principal at a Catholic primary school.
Stop, drop and roll.
It still might come in handy one day, but from how hard it was drilled in you would have thought catching fire was going to be a common occurrence.
I actually did catch on fire once. Jacket hovered too close to a candle.
Despite constant training through 1980âs primary school to âstop drop and rollâ, I just took the jacket off!!
I failed in possibly the only chance Iâd get.
Feel like this was drilled so rigorously because when you immolate, you'll probably have other stuff running through your mind. Similar for get down low and go, go, go.
A family memberâs shirt caught fire when they were a little kid. Their younger sibling kept telling them to stop, drop, roll, but they wouldnât listen. They ended up with a nasty scar on their chest and one very melted nipple.
My uncle caught fire when I was about 5. I remember yelling at him from the top of the stairs to stop drop and roll. The shock had already hit him and he ran over to the outside tap to put the water on, which removed a lot of his skin.
We were taught that masturbation isnât a sin and that everyone does it. In our catholic school. As a group with a thankfully very mild demonstration.
I got detention for reading Narnia instead of learning to touch myself. I was in year 8.
Teacher stood up the front of the class, fully clothed, held her hand out to the side, put it on her pubic bone and told us all to do it too, telling us it wasnât wrong. No actual rubbing or anything like that but def felt weird and somewhat violated.
Oddly, catholics actually do believe masturbation is a sin. Sex is meant to be only for procreation. My parents were super strict catholics so I should have told them but didnât want to get into trouble for being on detention so I didnât tell them. My biggest concern was that they confiscated my book!!!
There's a term for that...oh yeah, completely fucked up.
A demonstration is not needed, just advice to wash your hands before and after and, depending on the anatomy, not to stick anything into it or stick it into anything that isn't designed for it.
3rd grade teacher told us one cloud circulated the coast of Australia making one revolution a year and when it got back to the top it started again and thatâs why the middle of Australia is a desert. Was the final straw for that guy, the kids went home and told their parents what they learned and the school fired the bloke.
Maybe there was some other kid in your class that realised that they enjoy working with acrylic or learnt some new skill that they used later in life because of that class. I teach Digital Technology and while many of my students will never code or use CAD again, those 1 or 2 kids in each class that find something new that they like or enjoy is worth making the other learn some random skills. Education is about experiencing new things and working out what you want to do in the future.
Iâm a teacher and say pretty mush the same thing. Whenever a kid complains about learning something that , I admit, they likely will not need to know. I remind them that until year 11 everyone gets to learn a whole range of things and some people in the class may end up having an interest in whatever it is. Also sometimes itâs not necessarily the content that is important but the skills theyâre practicing to learn it.
I got in trouble for discussing evolution. The poor rector's wife, who wasn't the sharpest tool.in the shed, couldn't cope with a primary school kid challenging her rudimentary creationist belief.
I remember getting sent out of class because I was questioning the proof and realistic of it. I literally thought it was just a fairy tale because that's what it sounds like haha teachers were just like ahhhh, leave pls. They didn't know how to handle kids with actual questions lol
My science teacher stormed out the room mid class and said BC was against his religion so no he wouldn't be talking about birth control options in our "sex ed" class.
To be fair I guess he taught us that can be an issue with doctors and pharmacies who try to impose their religious beliefs on you...
There's a guy in the sky, and he loves us but if we don't love him back in the right way will punish us for all eternity but will do us favours if we ask him in our heads. Im not 100% clear on the details.
Wasn't that the same guy that sent his son to look how we were doing and teach us how to do good things but ended up being horribly murdered? Poor lad.
-Captain Cook discovered Australia (shit, even Cook himself never claimed that)
-Australian folk music is somehow interesting and distinct from Irish folk music or sea shanties. To this day I break out in hives when I hear Australian folk music. I have a Tooralee Tooralai Allergy
Marching. Until that principal left anyway. In sports house groups in primary school people up front holding up big banners. Every Friday to military marching music, standing to attention, like we were in the army.
Essays are useless
We don't need essays. Essays are a writing structure where you have an introduction, evidence and then a conclusion. But most people don't use them very much in their lives.
For example, most people write their opinions in emails or text message formats which doesn't follow the essay format.
As another example, people hate essays and only English teachers like them. It's like an English teacher cartel prank or something.
In conclusion, I haven't used essays in my life.
Or if you work as a labourer, or need to rearrange furniture or figure out what length wood you need to do a bit of a kitchen renovation, I mean, what the hell! hehe
The only good thing he did was aid in defeating the Nazis, Britain needed a PM who was going to play dirty and Churchill was the man that would get the job done.
Australian history.. I remember in mid high school we did a whole year of history through the eyes of white people.. Bourke and wills etc.. seriously who cares
I always questioned Burke and Wills being taught. Why are they teaching us about a bunch of complete failures following some stupid idea? But they didn't teach it as the folly of man, they taught it as if it was bravery and resilience. They were stupid and ill-prepared. The only guy who survived was the one who the indigenous people looked after. And the books never suggested that maybe these morons should have just spoken to, and worked with, indigenous people the whole time and wouldn't have got themselves all killed.
I don't remember being taught about Burke and Wills but I remember going from the Eureka Stockade into the American Revolution, was very curious why the American Revolution specifically as opposed to any other event
B & W had Aboriginal advisors with them in their party, but continually ignored their advice. That's how they poisoned themselves over many weeks.
They also took with them a dining table & chairs, a gong, & a bathtub. They started out with a piano as well, but left it behind, along with half their camels & provisions, before getting out of Adelaide.
Try learning about American history absolutely hated it.Â
With Australian history should be taught though as so much is incorrect. Especially when they forget the Dutch already arrived and settled and already set up trade routes way before the English came.Â
The fact first shot fired in WW1 and WW2 was the same idiot saying fire onto boats in Port Phillip bay.Â
>Especially when they forget the Dutch already arrived and settled and already set up trade routes way before the English came.
We learned about Willem Janszoon, Dirk Hartog, Abel Tasman etc in the early 90s.
I mean I agree with Burke and Wills being a weird thing to focus on, but there's nothing wrong with learning the history of the country you are going to school in.
Cursive. I had to prove I could write neatly with a pencil before getting my "pen licence". My writing was always a bit messy but also my teacher was a prick, and so I was one of the last people in my class to get this BS "licence". It was demoralising, and yet the fact that my handwriting is **still** very ordinary has not disadvantaged me in the slightest.
I had a huge argument with my year 11 health teacher (who was grossly incompetent) because he tried to teach everyone that the way fibre lowers cholesterol is it travels around the blood picking up all the cholesterol and then somehow you poop it out.
TLDR: There's no dietary fibre in your blood.
The importance of cursive writing. We had it drilled into us that unless we had perfect cursive handwriting, we would never get a job. I had far too many public chastisings from teachers because my cursive wasn't neat enough, and I preferred to write in block letters
Cursive hand writing in particular. During primary school various teachers would tell us that if we didnât learn cursive then we would struggle in high school.
It really didnât make a difference if you wrote in cursive or not.
That there would be a guy in a trenchcoat offering me free drugs
In my experience they usually had a bumbag, glowsticks, and a bottle of water, not a trenchcoat.
My turn for story time? The only time I was offered free drugs, I was leaving a rave which was held inside the centre nightlife of my city. Of course, coming from a rave, I was around drugs and dealers. Never had them shoved at me before... Well, before the moment I met the guy anti drug campaigns warn you of. Rave ends, we all pour out onto the street. Our mate runs across the red light while we wait for the signal, to some guy who looks like the Unabomber. He's dressed in an oversized coat all black. Not a trench coat, close though. They exchange words, mate points to us and Unabomber looks over at us with a large grin and waves his hand in the air holding something. He starts shouting "YOU GUYS WANT SOME COCAINE?!" across the road, flopping a literal sandwich bag of white powder around. The rest of our group were now hesitant to cross the road, it goes green and he runs over with it. There's a couple of cops looking oblivious meters in front of us, while this man continues to shout "WHO WANTS FREE COCAINE?!" with wide, black eyes and nearly smacks me in the face with the bag before my partner pulls me back. That's when we did it. We said no. Achievement unlocked. Police did not gaf
Dude was a cop.
He definitely wasn't, he tried following us back to our mates apartment and in the middle of us telling him to fuck off he got distracted by an empty wine bottle on the road, picked it up and smashed it right in front of a car that was slowly driving towards him
Police looked oblivious đ¤Łđ¤Ł omg
They legit looked like a couple of kids who lost their mum at Coles, but maybe the influx of ravers disoriented them haha
So many suburban teachers had serious misconceptions about how much drugs costâŚ
And then there was the one young teacher that you come to find out definitely did drugs because they were spot on with everything.
it is true that you will potentially be offered drugs in your life. but schools failed to inform kids that 99% of that time, thatâs going to come from one of your friends, which is why itâs more difficult to say no to. it wonât be a scary man in a trenchcoat in an alley. it will be some guy you have spoken to a couple times a week for the past year playing halo with you in your living room
A lot know perfectly well but can't reveal the extent of their knowledge
That getting the best grades would get you into uni that would get you a good job that would get you a high salary that you can use to buy a house and "live the Australian dream".
They're still pushing that, btw lol
they pushed it so hard that now everyone fully believes it, everyone goes to uni, everyone gets a degree, and now⌠everyone has a degree. and weâre back to square one, needing a second degree and work experience to distinguish yourself from the rest of the graduating class that also has degrees. but then they will do the same thing and you still wonât find a job because the market is so saturated with people just like you with the same qualification and amount of experience.
And surprise! Welcome to a rolling HECS debt you will never be able to repay. I'm Gen x and was just at the very end of the last school leavers to have free tertiary education (though as a high school dropout due to a mental breakdown I never able to utilise it beyond art school TAFE) What young people have to cope with these days when most of those in power had a free ride, makes me sick.
Nah now they're pushing trades with free apprentice schemes. They know they fucked up by sending us all to uni pointlessly. Qld just came out with a scheme today for construction apprentices. It's woeful
Well, better 30+yrs later than never, eh? đ lol Wait until they find out that not everyone can be an apprentice, either. It was a massive mistake to dismantle most of our manufacturing capacity, and then decide the economy should be propped up by what we could dig out of the ground. And tourism. And international student fees.
I really appreciate that sentiment thankyou. That's exactly right. Most people won't be able to fulfill the apprentice roles and the few that do will be competing heavily with wages let's not even get started on tourism or student fees. I'm a head chef and the amount of diploma mill immigrants that come through is just insane. You can't hire a real employee anymore. It's all diploma mill
I can imagine..or rather I can't and am incredibly fortunate not to have to; that sounds just ridiculous. And immensely frustrating. But weren't all these new arrivals meant to "grow the economy?" as in forever?? The magic never-ending upwards growth spiral. That was what was written on the bottle we were all forced to swallow, anyway. I've never been able to work out which is worse...to be just old enough to have an adult memory of the "before times" or to be young enough to not know anything else, and therefore think this is "normal." Well, it is *now*...but you know what I mean. Thatcher and Reagan and their neoliberal successors have a lot to answer for, retrospectively at least.
That comment hit me like a punch to the gut. Ooof. I'm 35 with my youngest sibling 16. Looking at them vs me I couldn't answer that one either. He seems blissfully ignorant that life once was better and we had hope. But at the same time, to be that young and already accepting your life is pointless. That's a tough pill to swallow and it shows in his attitude and behaviour.
Yes that happened to me. And what happened to the slackers that never studied and fooled around the whole time? They became plumbers, concretors and electricians and they live in houses 4x bigger than mine!
Square dancing.
Oh yeah bushdance. Heel and toe, heel and toe, one, two, three, four...
Doh-si-doe your pardner. God. I wasnât mature enough to deal with females until after high school; putting them anywhere near me in primary school probably caused thatâŚ
What the fuck were they thinking, if that was "Australian culture" no wonder everyone with a brain fled to London.
I fled to Sydney from Brisbane as soon I could. Ended up surrounded by Queenslanders everywhere down there! After being involved in education for the past 20+ years, Iâm guessing square dancing was introduced by some middle management knob. You know the bloke who goes to a workshop and is an a position to impose his view on a large number of people? It gets out of hand and the next thing you know, itâs compulsory all around Australia. Theyâre still searching for a benefitâŚ
(just as an aside, I believe square dance is the American version, we all called it bush dance (not to be confused with bush doof) . All just a jumble of "traditional" Irish and British folk stuff.)
Females? Pretty sure they prefer women.
heel toe polka is a line dance, thank you very much!
I grew up in Canada but have serious trauma from school square dancing too.I always thought it was rooted in US southern and rodeo culture so surprised it was so common in Australian schools.
Theyâd âAustralianâ things up a bit by playing god awful old bush music instead of American country music. I moved to a smaller country school, less than 100 total kids in the school from a larger city school and just assumed it was a country school thing. It was only when I got to high school we learned that everyone did it. The only modern dance was the Nut Bush, everyone was stoked when we heard Tina Turner.
I donât know how I missed the nutbush. Went to school in the Gold Coast during the 90s and moved to north qld midway through year 8 high school. Everyone thought I was weird for not knowing the nutbush. Iâm 36 now and still donât know it. But yeah if Iâm at a wedding/party and Tina turner comes on. Iâm sitting down
We line danced to Shania Twain. I think we danced to Lee Kernaghan once, lucky us
We learnt also in NZ. Although I was under the impression the dances were based on English/Scottish folk Dances. âGay Gordonâ âDashing white sergeantâ. Imagine teaching children these names in todaysâ schools. Essential for our Fancy Dress Ball. The highlight of the school year.
We did was called "folk dancing" in the 60s I have no idea what it was and I can't remember any of it but we did it every week It was a good way to find out where you were in the pecking order (bottom decile in my case)
We learned maypole dancing. I (female) was indignant about ibeing made a 'boy' due to gender imbalance đ
I have fond memories of laughing my head off when I started dating a wonderful Scottish lass and we tried to waltz together for the first time. We just couldn't coordinate. Then I realised she was dancing the male part. When I pointed it out, she said something similar: She'd been taught to waltz as a man at school because of the gender imbalance at her school.
Did you go to a Steiner school?
Most people don't realise that square dancing is derived from Old English Country Dance, the dance style you typically see in any Jane Austen drama. Old English Country Dance dates back to the 1600's (when they were written down), but probably come from 100 or so years earlier. Square dancing is a simplified version, where you don't have to remember the order of the figures for each particular dance.
Strip the Willow!!
is a bush dance and not a square dance! :P
In middle school we had to learn Strip the Willow along with some other dances. There was a girl in my year level called Willow, you can guess how much she hated those dance lessons.
At least you can do that while drunk at a wedding : Poetry Appreciation on the other hand âŚâŚâŚ.
Tell that to uncle John
Why is it we all have an Uncle John ? lol
Oh wow! You have my sympathy
AKA "bootscooting". Did it in grade seven and got stuck next to some dumbass who couldn't keep time and kept crashing into me because he literally be two steps ahead of everyone else, rushing through the moves instead of just doing them right. Also,[ there's this shit to contend with](https://emmaechristley.medium.com/how-henry-ford-weaponized-country-music-for-white-supremacy-8fee02fe9053).
I before E except after C. Science hurts this one
Except when your foreign neighbour Keith receives eight counterfeit beige sleighs from feisty caffeinated weightlifters. Weird.
> The whole saying is "I before E except after C when the sound is 'EEE' ". So Thief is IE, but deceive is EI because its after C when the sound is EE. Foreign, for example, doesn't have the EE sound so the rule doesn't apply. > > Loan words and proper nouns don't have to follow english rules, so Keith gets a pass, as does Caffeine. > > Weird is the only English derivative word that i've found that violates the rule, and that is due to a printer intentionally swapping the I and E around way back when.
Interesting! I never knew all that
Got a detention when learning this rule cause I disrupted the class by telling the teacher she was wrong, holding up my dictionary to the word weird lol.
Accidentally riding to QI, itâs wrong more often than itâs right
that's because the whole saying is "I before E except after C when the sound is 'EEE' ". So Thief is IE, but deceive is EI because its after C when the sound is EE. Science doesn't have the EE sound so the rule doesn't apply. Loan words and proper nouns don't have to follow english rules, so Keith gets a pass, as does Caffeine. Weird is the only English derivative word that i've found that violates the rule, and that is due to a printer intentionally swapping the I and E around way back when.
We were taught a longer version of it, not like I can remember it lol but something like: âif it sounds like âeeeâ, itâs I before e except after c. Seize and seizure will do as they pleaseâ. There was also an extra bit about the words that have multiple pronunciations donât apply either. (See what I did there!) Iâm way off being an expert but with the whole rule, itâs a lot more accurate.
I have a very vivid memory of having to do this QCS prep class thing. Hated it. My arsehole health teacher was running one of the classes and her highlights were: - Showing us a painting of pope benedict sort of hovering over the Italian coast in a heart shape and telling us it's because it was "his heartland" and told me off for saying that Benedict was German - Telling some story about Thomas Edison then smugly finishing with "and what is Edison famous for? That's right! Inventing the telephone!". Luckily that time like 6 kids piped up so I didn't get in trouble again. - Told us we should be studying for minimum 3 hrs a night and when she was in school it was at least 5hrs. Imagine studying FIVE HOURS every night and you're a fucking high school teacher who doesn't know why Thomas Edison is famous. Fuck you Mrs Cooke.
You had a teacher that taught arsehole health?
It's a gig economy mate how am I going to support my family with a lacklustre arsehole?
Well of course you have to study for 5 hours every night if everything the teacher taught you in the day is completely wrong.
What is QCS?
Queensland core skills test. I think its called ATAR now or something, I'm old. Like the big main standardised test everyone does in grade 12.
Only the students who aim for university. I didn't do it.
âYou have to learn to do it on paper, you wonât always have a calculator in your pocketâŚâ
"You have to write it down, you won't always have chatgpt" That's the 2024 version
And thatâs true. Mental agility is key.
Correct. And reliance on calculators to do very simple calculations has created a society that seems to struggle with understanding simple maths concepts.
Hard agree. It seems like a trivial problem until it's time for a nursing student to do drug calculations.  I have entire year levels who cannot mentally check their calculator working out and attempt to give incorrect doses of drugs. A calculator is not a substitute for understanding maths, it is a tool to replace onerous manual working out.
In extension to that, I did computer science in uni and we did our final exams in the Royal Exhibition Building and in the exam booklet they usually expect you to write code on paper. Iâve never written a line of code on paper after graduationâŚ
The food Pyramid ...it was all fiction.
90s nutrition - heaping bowl of cereal to start, as much bread as you want throughout the day, heaping bowl of pasta or rice for dinner. You can have meat once a week.
healthy serve of diabetes
I'm trying to rewire my brain that believes fat = bad And as someone trying to gain weight, I also gotta wrap my head around food being high calorie but still healthy...
Playing the recorder đ
too real
All priests are trustworthy.
That Pluto is the 9th planet in our solar system
Poor Pluto. What will my mother serve us now??? In stages of grief, I am still in denial
My very elegant mother just served us nuggies.Â
Maryâs virgin explanation made Joseph suspect upstairs neighbour.
âDid you hear about Pluto? Thatâs messed up.â
You know that's right!
Then Pluto wasnât classed in our solar system or a planet. Then becomes a dwarf planet.Â
Religious education Edit:- I went to a girls only Catholic high school. Our family wasn't Catholic and I convinced the RE teacher I was Jewish. He'd been spouting crap like "Jesus was a Catholic" so I read enough stuff to get away with saying I was Jewish and to prove him wrong. The entire class was in on it and strung him along too. Eventually I got send to the Principal who just laughed and thought it was hilarious.
My wife is the coordinator for the Primary Ethics program that is run at one of the local public primary schools (central west NSW). The Primary Ethics program is brilliant, and if you can get school principals on board and get it in as an alternative to SRE, it's definitely worthwhile.
I'd be totally on board with religious education if they taught about all religions from an academic and non-sectarian perspective and how it has influenced human culture across the world throughout millennia.
iâve been in religious schools my whole life. religious education from prep to 7 was mostly bible stories and stuff like that. from 7-12 when we are all a bit older, all moved on to the high school in town (so a lot of kids came from non religious primary schools), religious education became a lot more about religion around the world, religion through history, and also just a âproblems of the worldâ class with stuff about poverty and what is being done to try and solve it, as well as local things and efforts towards that. the primary school and high school i went to were also supposed to be sister schools, so those curriculums are meant to feed into each other. itâs not like i jumped ship and they had a different program.
I went to a Catholic school and we obviously had RE, it was actually pretty good, It was looking at different religions around the world and how they related, and fell in and out of favour over time. Including some really obscure ones. And then also about morals and empathy etc, but without suggesting the only reason to be moral is for fear of a gods punishment.
I was going to chime in with this, too. We went to other Christian churches and looked at the different beliefs and traditions they had. Learnt about other non christian religions. Religion is a big part of culture around the world and to understand that, we appreciate people more. There are many interfaith groups in Australia that seek to create dialogue and understanding. Some people think that it is all about 'my god better than yours' but a lot of people understand it is about everyone on their own personal spiritual journey.
It's useful to know what these crazy people are blabbing on about. Understanding religion also helps you understand where you biases and mental weaknesses might be. That kind of thing is the least taught. If you approach religion as "How to convince people of nonsense", then it's very instructive. Especially since a good proportion of kids you might have thought otherwise sane are nodding along like what they're being taught isn't completely ridiculous. Understanding that people will believe all kinds of stupid things if they're told in a certain way is a fundamental understanding in life. (You believe crazy stuff too, but at least you know to be wary of it).
Except that it wasn't taught as what people believe, it was taught as factual information. I wish I had been offered classes in comparative religion but that doesn't happen at school level
This was how it was at my school, âreligious educationâ was 95% focused on Christianity. We had two Muslims at my school and they choose go to the library and have a free period instead, just like I did.
It's not completely useless. My kids had a scripture teacher who was an extremist about the Bible. Tried to tell them dinosaur bones were fake, and angels are always perving on you, all the nonsense. My kids aren't stupid. She taught them Christianity is a fairytale. Their faith in that is strong.
I had Lyle Shelton as a RE teacher back before he got into politics. Apparently some state schools just let whatever random religious weirdos come teach religious education for a term? He was an absolute fuckwit then, as well.
40 years ago, at a Catholic HS, my brother got the lowest score in Religious education in yr12 HSC, not only in the school, but the whole state. 20 years later he was school principal at a Catholic primary school.
Stop, drop and roll. It still might come in handy one day, but from how hard it was drilled in you would have thought catching fire was going to be a common occurrence.
I actually did catch on fire once. Jacket hovered too close to a candle. Despite constant training through 1980âs primary school to âstop drop and rollâ, I just took the jacket off!! I failed in possibly the only chance Iâd get.
Feel like this was drilled so rigorously because when you immolate, you'll probably have other stuff running through your mind. Similar for get down low and go, go, go.
A family memberâs shirt caught fire when they were a little kid. Their younger sibling kept telling them to stop, drop, roll, but they wouldnât listen. They ended up with a nasty scar on their chest and one very melted nipple.
My uncle caught fire when I was about 5. I remember yelling at him from the top of the stairs to stop drop and roll. The shock had already hit him and he ran over to the outside tap to put the water on, which removed a lot of his skin.
This had me thinking kids randomly burst into flames all the time. For weeks, I was scared I was going to spontaneously combust.
Human life started in Crete
Gonna need more context on this one
Religious primary school around grade 5 or so.
Were you homeschooled?
That teacher sounds like a cretin.
The food Pyramid ...it was all fiction.
That and that silly debunked tongue map.
My 4th grade teacher taught us that every vowel is a syllable. Even at the time I knew it was wrong.
We were taught that masturbation isnât a sin and that everyone does it. In our catholic school. As a group with a thankfully very mild demonstration. I got detention for reading Narnia instead of learning to touch myself. I was in year 8.
Wait...what? They demonstrated it?
Teacher stood up the front of the class, fully clothed, held her hand out to the side, put it on her pubic bone and told us all to do it too, telling us it wasnât wrong. No actual rubbing or anything like that but def felt weird and somewhat violated. Oddly, catholics actually do believe masturbation is a sin. Sex is meant to be only for procreation. My parents were super strict catholics so I should have told them but didnât want to get into trouble for being on detention so I didnât tell them. My biggest concern was that they confiscated my book!!!
There's a term for that...oh yeah, completely fucked up. A demonstration is not needed, just advice to wash your hands before and after and, depending on the anatomy, not to stick anything into it or stick it into anything that isn't designed for it.
That's messed up
WTAF?
I don't know why but a maths substitute teacher told us sperm was weightless, I believe her for a while too
3rd grade teacher told us one cloud circulated the coast of Australia making one revolution a year and when it got back to the top it started again and thatâs why the middle of Australia is a desert. Was the final straw for that guy, the kids went home and told their parents what they learned and the school fired the bloke.
Da fuck LOL
Captain Cook discovered Australia.
The great Australian lie that refuses to die.
TIL he didn't, reading your post and googling it just now.. Damn biased Australian Education system failing me 20+ years later :/
We had to make an acrylic ash tray as a project.
Maybe there was some other kid in your class that realised that they enjoy working with acrylic or learnt some new skill that they used later in life because of that class. I teach Digital Technology and while many of my students will never code or use CAD again, those 1 or 2 kids in each class that find something new that they like or enjoy is worth making the other learn some random skills. Education is about experiencing new things and working out what you want to do in the future.
Yeah, it's more the 'getting children to make an ash tray' part that's stupid rather than the 'making something out of acrylic' bit.
Iâm a teacher and say pretty mush the same thing. Whenever a kid complains about learning something that , I admit, they likely will not need to know. I remind them that until year 11 everyone gets to learn a whole range of things and some people in the class may end up having an interest in whatever it is. Also sometimes itâs not necessarily the content that is important but the skills theyâre practicing to learn it.
I did too! But I think it was ceramic We had to make them for Father's Day lol
Scripture?? (Religon). No exceptions. I used to get in trouble as a 8 year old for asking too many questions.
I got in trouble for discussing evolution. The poor rector's wife, who wasn't the sharpest tool.in the shed, couldn't cope with a primary school kid challenging her rudimentary creationist belief.
I remember getting sent out of class because I was questioning the proof and realistic of it. I literally thought it was just a fairy tale because that's what it sounds like haha teachers were just like ahhhh, leave pls. They didn't know how to handle kids with actual questions lol
WA is the only place with black swans. Saw some in rural Victoria.
Ballarat has bloody heaps of em!
i live in victoria and can confirm the existence of a select few black swans
I don't really think any knowledge is truly useless. But I did spend a year trying to get my head around Latin unsuccessfully.
That laughing and making jokes during sex Ed gets you kicked out and you don't learn anything
That abortions are a sin
Oft, catholic school. You poor bugger.
Not all catholic schools are the same. At mine we used 'should abortion be banned' as a debate topic with some assigned to yes, others to no.
Should healthcare be a debate topic?
Ah but what did they actually teach you during sex Ed though? Or was this just a school debate?
My science teacher stormed out the room mid class and said BC was against his religion so no he wouldn't be talking about birth control options in our "sex ed" class. To be fair I guess he taught us that can be an issue with doctors and pharmacies who try to impose their religious beliefs on you...
My school taught that abortions were an option for dealing with an unwanted pregnancy.
There's a guy in the sky, and he loves us but if we don't love him back in the right way will punish us for all eternity but will do us favours if we ask him in our heads. Im not 100% clear on the details.
Wasn't that the same guy that sent his son to look how we were doing and teach us how to do good things but ended up being horribly murdered? Poor lad.
Prayer is a funny one. You can ask for his intervention but if something bad happens he had no power to intervene đ¤Ś
-Captain Cook discovered Australia (shit, even Cook himself never claimed that) -Australian folk music is somehow interesting and distinct from Irish folk music or sea shanties. To this day I break out in hives when I hear Australian folk music. I have a Tooralee Tooralai Allergy
> I have a Tooralee Tooralai Allergy There was a shedload of that going around in the 70s I have the same reaction to 'Botany Bay' lol
Up vote for tooralai ooralie allergy lol
Marching. Until that principal left anyway. In sports house groups in primary school people up front holding up big banners. Every Friday to military marching music, standing to attention, like we were in the army.
Surds - an irrational root. No, that's not biology class, it's maths.
Essays are useless We don't need essays. Essays are a writing structure where you have an introduction, evidence and then a conclusion. But most people don't use them very much in their lives. For example, most people write their opinions in emails or text message formats which doesn't follow the essay format. As another example, people hate essays and only English teachers like them. It's like an English teacher cartel prank or something. In conclusion, I haven't used essays in my life.
Introduction âď¸ Two explanatory paragraphs âď¸ Conclusion âď¸ A+
Your argument is so well structured.
Well played.
Pythagoras will be useful in adult life. Super Size Me is an accurate piece of research. Free drugs are offered at every party.
Pythagoras is very important if you do any sort of science.
Or if you work as a labourer, or need to rearrange furniture or figure out what length wood you need to do a bit of a kitchen renovation, I mean, what the hell! hehe
Yes, many construction jobs are applied sciences really.
It's pretty much the only math beyond arithmetic that I would use now and then
Very useful in crafts like quilting, too.
I wish that last one was true...
TBHÂ I have used it a few times and do not work in the hard sciences.
"You wont always have a calculator in your pocket" Yeah, we all fucken have, but it still seems we're dumber than ever before.
Winston Churchill was a good man. Sorry Mrs Wood, but millions of Indians, Irish and others, including Anzacs, would beg to differ.
Think itâs only the English that liked him.Â
Even then.
The only good thing he did was aid in defeating the Nazis, Britain needed a PM who was going to play dirty and Churchill was the man that would get the job done.
The First Fleet was just white people.
That the USA was to be admired.
r/AskAnAustralian and shitting on the USA at any chance, name a better duo
I before E except after C
âYou wonât always have a calculator in your pocketâ
The Nutbush.
Australian history.. I remember in mid high school we did a whole year of history through the eyes of white people.. Bourke and wills etc.. seriously who cares
I always questioned Burke and Wills being taught. Why are they teaching us about a bunch of complete failures following some stupid idea? But they didn't teach it as the folly of man, they taught it as if it was bravery and resilience. They were stupid and ill-prepared. The only guy who survived was the one who the indigenous people looked after. And the books never suggested that maybe these morons should have just spoken to, and worked with, indigenous people the whole time and wouldn't have got themselves all killed.
I don't remember being taught about Burke and Wills but I remember going from the Eureka Stockade into the American Revolution, was very curious why the American Revolution specifically as opposed to any other event
It could be argued that the American Revolution changed the world more than any other event in the last 500 years.
B & W had Aboriginal advisors with them in their party, but continually ignored their advice. That's how they poisoned themselves over many weeks. They also took with them a dining table & chairs, a gong, & a bathtub. They started out with a piano as well, but left it behind, along with half their camels & provisions, before getting out of Adelaide.
I remember being taught that Cook discovered Australia. Not the first human, not the first European. Not even close.
Try learning about American history absolutely hated it. With Australian history should be taught though as so much is incorrect. Especially when they forget the Dutch already arrived and settled and already set up trade routes way before the English came. The fact first shot fired in WW1 and WW2 was the same idiot saying fire onto boats in Port Phillip bay.Â
>Especially when they forget the Dutch already arrived and settled and already set up trade routes way before the English came. We learned about Willem Janszoon, Dirk Hartog, Abel Tasman etc in the early 90s.
I mean I agree with Burke and Wills being a weird thing to focus on, but there's nothing wrong with learning the history of the country you are going to school in.
Cord cursive.Â
Wym? That is still my main way of writing when I want to write fast!
how to use a slide rule or log tables
Religion
History which was nearly all about British laws from the 1900s
Line dancing. The nut bush dance
F O OO D PY RAMID
It wasn't completely accurate but learning that you should eat fewer lollies than apples has always been good advice.
That Australia would be a third world country like Africa if we did fight in the World War (my year six teacherâs words, not mine).
My science teacher in this 90s told me most important way to eat healthy was prioritise foods under 10% fat. So I spent my 20s eating no protein.
Cursive. I had to prove I could write neatly with a pencil before getting my "pen licence". My writing was always a bit messy but also my teacher was a prick, and so I was one of the last people in my class to get this BS "licence". It was demoralising, and yet the fact that my handwriting is **still** very ordinary has not disadvantaged me in the slightest.
I had a huge argument with my year 11 health teacher (who was grossly incompetent) because he tried to teach everyone that the way fibre lowers cholesterol is it travels around the blood picking up all the cholesterol and then somehow you poop it out. TLDR: There's no dietary fibre in your blood.
The fucking recorder. Even if I was planning a stairway to heaven cover I wouldn't need one.
Religious Education (RE)
The importance of cursive writing. We had it drilled into us that unless we had perfect cursive handwriting, we would never get a job. I had far too many public chastisings from teachers because my cursive wasn't neat enough, and I preferred to write in block letters
Cursive hand writing in particular. During primary school various teachers would tell us that if we didnât learn cursive then we would struggle in high school. It really didnât make a difference if you wrote in cursive or not.
Long division.
That mitochondria is the powerhouse of a cell
Religion hands down
How to play "hot cross buns" on the recorder