Testing time for parents seeking to make the grade
Exam season is almost upon the elder of the two teenagers living in the house and efforts at revision are finally under way. Having made an open offer to help, occasionally he will emerge from behind the closed door of his bedroom – where noone really knows how much schoolwork is actually going on – with a question.
And, like so many things in parenthood, it is quite the ageing process trying to help the Class of 2024 prepare for subjects you haven’t given a second thought to since the Class of 1986’s day.
Back then GCSEs were called O-levels and a notable chunk of the modern-day History syllabus hadn’t yet happened.
Much as our own parents must have been mortified at learning we were sitting papers on the Cuban Missile Crisis so it is sobering to learn our kids are having to bone up on the Gulf War.
Being asked questions about George Bush and
Saddam Hussein and realising he thinks I’m as ancient as I thought my parents were for reminiscing over Castro, Khrushchev and Kennedy.
Jurassic Park was still seven years away when we sat Biology and he’s asking me about DNA and genetics which I don’t remember being part of the syllabus when we were dissecting frogs and sniggering at sex education classes which most of us had long since learned the basics of from older brothers and their video collections.
Parents learned as long ago as primary school that centuries of Maths teaching had been swept away a decade earlier by something unfathomable called HegartyMaths.
For the uninitiated HegartyMaths was an educational subscription tool used by many of Britain’s schools. You’d watch a video and were then presented with a series of questions about the topic you just watched.
There are countries which didn’t exist in the 1980s now part of Geography classes while the Oxford English Dictionary has added an untold number of new words over the past four decades.
And if you want to know the French word for internet then you are best looking it up on l’Internet as we had yet to access the world wide web when we were learning languages.
All of which serves to undermine the age-old adult argument that exams were tougher in our day when you’re floundering around trying to explain why you don't know which nation’s capital is Pristina when you only discovered Kosovo was a country when they drew England in the qualifiers for Euro 2020.