You have to feel for the children, says Gill Harris

“Have a go at humiliating yourself,” she urged. “No problem!” we cried.

The average score around the office was a feeble 5/10. I scored a whopping eight, which just goes to show guessing does pay off. And if I’d known that when I was 16, I wouldn’t have had quite such a miserable time in the run-up to my O-levels. Which just goes to show you do indeed live and learn.

But back to the SATs. The question that really left us slack-jawed and drooling was: “I went to the cinema after I’d eaten my dinner.” Is the word “after” there being used as a subordinating conjunction or a preposition?

A what? Conjunct your subordinates all you like when you’re a university undergraduate, - even give GCSE pupils a go at sorting out their gerunds from their present participles – but 11-year-olds should be enjoying learning.

They should be reading because it opens their minds, not because every word in the sentence has a function and there is a label that describes that function which they need to learn by heart so the Government can measure which schools are better than others.

Even Schools Minister Nick Gibb got the answer wrong when it was put to him on the radio. Egg on face (‘on’ being a preposition in this context). Although presumably he’d argue he got it wrong because education wasn’t as good in his day as it is now that he’s Schools Minister. Whatevs, Gibby. Every 11-year-old in the country would like to flush your head down the loo right now.

If we’re making our children sit difficult tests, perhaps this is a policy we should roll out to other sectors of the community, in the interests of fairness.

We could, for instance, give politicians a yearly exam. Example question: If you have terrible taste and wish to erect a miniature replica of the Taj Mahal in your garden for your ducks to live in, should you: a. Pay for it yourself out of your own pocket because you can easily afford it?

b. Claim it on expenses because you are a greedy, corrupt little half-wit?

c. Have a word with yourself and abandon the whole tacky and expensive idea?

This way we’d be able to put together a league table of which MPs have a modicum of common sense and which ones are money-grubbing, power-hungry buffoons. Their salaries could then be performance related.

Back to the youngsters, it’s no surprise that mums and dads across the country kept their kids off school recently in protest at the tests for primary school pupils.

No six-year-old should be worrying about whether they really explained themselves adequately when answering the question ‘How successful are the arguments against the factuality of meaning advanced by Kripke’s Wittgenstein?’ Or lying awake at night mentally preparing for questions such as ‘What are the lessons of higher-order vagueness for the study of vagueness?’ They should be learning to do joined up writing. Along with some of our politicians.

Of course in my day, it was all Latin declensions and melting your Biro over the Bunsen burner. And, it has to be said, neither of those has turned out to be particularly useful in adult life.

But I do remember learning being mostly interesting and potentially relevant.

Although there was the inexplicable incident which saw our history teacher, Miss Yates, leading me and my 12-year-old classmates around the playground while we pretended to be oxen ploughing the ground back in the medieval days of serfs and.... come to think of it, I can’t remember anything else about my first year of history classes at secondary school. All that sticks in my mind is pretending to be an ox... but it was a damn sight easier than those SATs and I’m pretty confident I could still do it now, should the situation arise.

PS It’s a subordinating conjunction. So now you know.

I’VE seen it all now.
A long time fan of Masterchef, I found myself muttering under my breath the other evening when a top chef showed a contestant how to barbecue a prawn’s head so you can squeeze its brains over the tail and serve it to poor, unsuspecting diners. I say unsuspecting because surely nobody in the right mind would order a dish with ‘prawn’s brains sauce’ from a menu. Would they?

Bedside Manners

IT’S funny the situations you find yourself in sometimes.
As previously mentioned, my 88-year-old mother had a fall recently while doing the housework. She thought she was all right at the time, leapt back to her feet - and went on to bake a fruit cake. It was only the next day she discovered she couldn’t move, having severely damaged her back.
So I went back to see her recently on a mercy mission to do the housework and generally make her feel better.
But what can you do for an octogenarian with a knackered back?
I asked my sister if Mum needed anything.
“Bring half a cucumber,” she said.
So off I went to Mum’s, in full Florence Nightingale mode, clutching half a cucumber and a can of Deep Heat. Here I was, confronting the cruelties of old age 
and the terror of mortality and feeling absurdly 
under-equipped.