During my first couple of weeks at SUS, I happened to get lost rather a lot (it was a big school on many levels). One particular day I couldn’t locate my classroom (think I was meant to have economics – a topic totally unheard of by me at the time). I, along with other lost souls, were rounded up from all the corridors (when we were meant to be in various classes) and taken to an empty classroom. There were 15-20 of us in all!
I assumed we’d be held there temporarily, until someone could physically take us to where we were meant to be…. But no…
From that day on, once a week our motley crew of lost pupils walked into what was soon to become ‘our’ room for that period. No register was ever called and no lesson name was allocated to it. Mr Ellison was clearly ‘spare’ at the time and was our usual guardian, although occasionally an elderly female teacher turned up in his place, possibly Mrs Gibby (obviously the school was completely aware of this bizarre little group).
For a whole year, neither school nor students made any effort to return us to our original classes. I, for one, ended up never taking a single class in economics (a blessing in disguise perhaps).
We had no text books or exercise books for this ‘lesson’ and used our ‘rough books’ when needed. 75% of the time we’d walk in to see a long word written on the blackboard (ie: CONSTANTINOPLE). We had 30 mins to make as many words out of it as we could, and then we would discuss our results to see who had the most! It was like a quiz!
It all seems so very far-fetched nowadays… a whole bunch of students held voluntarily captive in a room one day a week in order to play quizzes, instead of undertaking their ascribed educational topics.
We were a very elite band. You could only be in the group if you happened to have been lost and found on a specific day at the beginning of a new term in a new school…The odd thing is that all of us were clearly ‘off the radar’ for that weekly period, and yet none of us chose to go off for a skive.
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