Thoughts on my Education

I do not remember a time when I couldn’t read. I don’t remember anyone teaching me to read. All I know is when I went to school at 5, I was already a fluent reader. Of course, at that age, most of it was a fluency in decoding rather than understanding what I read. My father who was basically a self-educated man understood this very well. I can remember him telling my aunt that it didn’t really matter that I didn’t understand the books I was reading. "She gets something out of it,", he said, "and when she is older, she will go back and get the rest." He was quite right.

Until I was eleven, I quite honestly thought I was the smartest person in the world. This was because I had five years of getting top grades without studying. Then came the 11 plus exams and the sheep were separated from the goats! I earned a place at a school were everyone was as smart as me and many were smarter! And it was then I learned to study… Actually, theoretically, I DID know how to study since my school system assigned specific homework, and quite a lot of it, on specific nights and my mother sat me down at the dining room table to study for two hours every night. Since I really was a clever little girl, I had done my homework already in school and so I basically had a mandatory two hour reading time every day which suited me very well.

When I was 13 and my sister was 11, we were sent away to a boarding school in a Catholic convent. The school included boys and girls but the girls were aged up to 16 and when the boys were 11, they went away to another school. Not every one was boarded at the school. In fact, the majority were in the day school group. I LOVED this school. Again, although the standards were high, I did well academically. I was away from my parents’ constant fighting and in a situation where I flourished. I remember the two hour study periods where I polished off my assigned homework in 15 minutes and had an hour and a half to read. At the weekends, we played out doors a lot in the paddock. One of my best memories is of sitting up in a tree and reading all afternoon.

What was a wonderful place for me was not a good place for my sister. She got compared with me a lot and not in a good way. "Why can’t you be more like your sister!" was said to her often. In fact, this phrase actually became a joke between us when we were both adult. When she was fighting for her dyslexic son to get help going through school, it suddenly occurred to her that Toby was having the same difficulties as she had going through school. When she was in her fifties, she had herself tested and was amazed to discover that she was actually very bright but had a severe problem with spelling. So she decided to get her degree {in art history} through Open University and with lots of help for her spelling problem she did just this.  {She was helped a lot by the fact that her husband was an art historian. If she needed a book about pretty well any artist, he produced it from his shelves!} She put a lot of the blame for her difficulties in school on the boarding school where she learned that what was expected of her was to be me!

When I was 18, I went to a Catholic college for girls {no, not women } in Liverpool. I had a double major in Art and English literature. Both of these subjects require a lot of outside work so I was either in the art room with an assignment or reading. For the first time in my whole life, I can remember that I actually felt I had too much reading to get through! Part of my problem was that although I was a speed reader, I actually didn’t retain much. So, at that college, I taught myself to read, turn the book over and write down what I remember. Then I turned the book back and reread and amended what I had written. I also learned to take good notes and to rewrite them immediately I had some spare time. One of the most useful things I found was not to write down everything a teacher said. If he or she said something one already knew, why write it down? Notes were for helping one to learn things one didn’t know, not things one already understood!

Maybe more on this later…

"… A human activity having for its purpose the transmission of the highest and best feelings to which men have risen." (on the purpose of art).

Leo Tolstoy

"Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going."

Jim Rohn

"Enjoyment is not a goal; it is a feeling that accompanies important ongoing activity."

Paul Goodman