Homework Then and Homework Now

Homework Then and Homework Now ©

By Michael Casey

Taylor Swift is singing behind me, our family study gets pretty crowded now that I share the front room with my daughter doing her A levels.  My daughter brings all sort of people with her, yesterday it was the Black Eyed Peas, who knows who it will be next. Thankfully it’s only their voice that fills room not their gyrating   bodies or their disco balls. There is only enough space for one set of balls in the house after all.

A nice beat is nice as you do your homework, or a gentle piano piece, anything that helps as background music. They say that certain music stimulates the brain and helps study. Though I’m sure parents will disagree and say it just drives everybody nuts. I can remember my mother banging on the front room door screaming for my brother to turn the volume down as Mr Dixon was on night shift. My brother was listening to Cream music on a reel to reel tape recorder via a Toblerone   shaped  speaker. I still have that speaker in a corner of our living room. It has survived 50 years. My brother did get into Queens Oxford, my other brother inherited the speaker and he was a Freshman in 1975 at Downing Cambridge. You can check it out if you don’t believe me. Me, I just met Eric Clapton at CPNEC Birmingham at the  start of this Millennium.

I used to listen to a large Bush radio while I did my homework, Folkweave used to be good and BBC Radio4 and other shows. The radio was my company and support as I was all alone as my brother had left home, to be a coal miner in Newbold Vernon, he may have invented the Gap Year in 1974.

The radio, or a voice from a radio fills a void and you are not alone while you do your homework. Do 40 mins of Latin is not as arduous if you have the radio for company. So 40years ago I heard the repeats of great comedy shows while I did some homework. That extended my Comic Reach a few more decades backwards. While I struggled with the Ablative Absolute that only Boris and Jacob would find easy, 40 mins really was 90 mins. Why, because it was so hard you had to spend that long just so you had done a respectable amount for Mr Proctor our Latin teacher to mark. I even had Double Latin on a Friday afternoon, so I have suffered. So I know how important music while you work really is.

My girls litter the house with their books as they do homework, and they plug earphones into their ears as they study this and that. However this year my big daughter did her GCSEs, which everybody takes at 16 here in England. She got good grades and goes to a good school, the same one her  clever cousins went to.  She is now studying her A levels, Maths, Biology, Chemistry and Philosophy. So when she decided she wanted better food in exchange for better pass grades I abandoned our regular supermarket 5 months ago, to feed her better quality food. She does eat rice with everything on the Chinese side of her diet, remember she is a Birmingham/Shanghai girl. But we all enjoy the improved diet, wholemeal bread all the time is a great new favourite for me too.   

Now we share my “study” ok it’s just the front room where my computer lives on a horrid metal trolley thing. I promise myself one day when you all buy my books on Amazon

 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Michael-Casey/e/B00571G0YC

then I’ll have a nice house and a desk like Charles Dickens’ one, you can google to see a picture of his study. Yes I know I’ll probably be dead before such a thing happens, but I like  to dream. On the practical side I had to throw out a settee and make way for a table for my daughter to work at. Sprawling around the house is not an option at this level of study. Her younger sister steals it to do her school work on now too, as it’s a power thing, a proper study desk. It is twice the size of my computer trolley.

I can even remember when we went as a family looking for a homework table for another brother when he passed the 11 plus exam, now that must be 50 years ago. Well the table worked he did get to Cambridge. It was a drop leaf table with a wooden curved back chair with a red seat that I think could come out. I’m can clearly remember looking through the plate glass of the shop window and dad and mum and us kids talking about would the chair and table be good enough for my brother. It may have been a Sunday too as the furniture shop was closed, it may have even been in the city centre. Thinking of all this it is little wonder that I’ve ended up as a writer, undiscovered and penniless, will one of you just print this off and leave it in Rupert Murdoch’s loo, then I may finally have the Dickens Desk and a house to put it in.

That was 888 words, which may be lucky if I were Chinese, so it’s nearly time to finish and head for bed . My daughter has finished for the evening and all is quiet she has half tidied up her desk. It does annoy me the clutter the girls leave behind, as I keep this room tidy always. But now it’s like having the Odd Couple share my space with me, but as I face the opposite way to them , I only get annoyed when I turn around. They have introduced me to some good music that they play as they study and I follow a few things on Spotify now. My 100 CD collection is stuck in the 1980s and 1990s as I don’t buy any new ones, so Spotify is good as it expands my mind musically.

All in all I am like my dad, buying a table so my kids can study, just as he did, even though they do have a big one in their bedroom already. It’s the drop leaf table I used when I first started writing decades ago.  But now my girls think studying in a bedroom is so passe. A study is what they want, just so long as they don’t want me to die out the way so they can have more study room.