Pav’s Patch: School wasn’t like this in my day

I KNOW I’m old and miserable, but when I took my son to the induction evening at his secondary school, I was staggered by just how much things have changed since I said goodbye to Hyde Grammar in 1975.

First of all, some of the women teachers were a bit tasty and I found that quite unsettling.

In fact, almost as unsettling as the fact that one of the male teachers looked about 12, there wasn’t a corduroy jacket or leather elbow patch in sight, and I felt that many of the parents were young enough to be my children.

Perhaps it’s age, but I recall that almost all the women teachers at my school were right old battleaxes. At junior school there was a woman who could explode into furies of unbelievable intensity.

It was so bad that one night, after we went through the daily ritual of locking the cupboards, I realised that I’d forgotten to return a book to her. I should really have left it until morning but decided to ask Paul, a very nice lad, to hand it to her for me.

I can still remember hearing her scream “I don’t want that” as I fled down Old Road.

Actually, there was one pretty woman teacher at Hyde Grammar — a Mrs Roberts. There was one marvellous day in 1968 when she walked across the junior yard in her mini-skirt and the place came to a standstill. Even football was forgotten for two minutes.

Can you believe that getting your dinner at my son’s school is done by means of bunging your hand into a fingerprint reader? Amazing! At my school you had to spend 30 minutes in the dinner ticket queue.

The maths pack we bought included a huge calculator — no log tables now. In fact, does anyone remember how to use logs, cosines and all that stuff?

Actually, to be fair, I’m not a total fossil. They did have calculators when I was at school and I remember a lad bringing one in and how we marvelled at it, especially when we realised 80085 looked liked “boobs” when you read the display.

And it was amazing how much time you could spend calculating the square root of just about every number you could think of.

Last October, we went to an open day at the school and they showed a DVD of what the place was supposedly like in 1908. The head told the children not to be scared. Trouble is, it really was just like my school in 1968.