Week 8 - Infrastructure
Sep. 1st, 2025 05:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marjoricaThis is a story which does not cast me in a very good light.
When I was ten, halfway through what we call junior school in the UK, I changed schools. My new school had far better facilities than the old one. The class sizes were small. There was a plenitude of books, a plethora of supplies and a myriad opportunities to use them all. I was no longer in the land of one pencil and textbook sharing. Here we had an exercise book for every subject and the handwriting no longer had to be economically small. Paints and pastel crayons issued forth from the art cupboard as if it were some mythical cornucopia. Heck, we had an actual art cupboard. The school library was regularly restocked with new books and we were encouraged to take them home. We had French lessons, nature walks, an orchestra…. I bloody well loved it.
To be sure, our days were much more structured than I had been used to. Additionally, the teachers were far more strict and I was the idiot child who discovered what the rules were by inadvertently breaking them. Once I got myself over that psychological hurdle, it was as if the world had opened up to me. I respond well to structure and goals. Give me a nice system that I can rub up against and mildly subvert and it soaks up any rebellious tendencies that I have. I quickly learned that my maladroitness and perceived naughtiness would be more readily forgiven if I worked hard. I was totally there for that. I could do that. And so I did.
One of the policies of this new school was to assign us ongoing project work. This formed part of our homework and was meant to foster organisation and independent study. We could write literally anything we wanted to in our projects so long as we showed that we had done some research and it had been set up vaguely coherently.
My first project was for our nature studies. We could choose any creature that we liked and I chose birds. I traced diagrams of birds and all of their different feathers, with exemplars glued in. I undertook a deeply scientific survey of the birds which visited my garden one weekend. I made a microscope slide of a feather and drew the results. I sketched eggs. I conducted an avian intelligence experiment. I wrote a godawful poem about my favourite birds. Do not get the impression that I am painting myself as some sort of child genius for this work or that my grasp of ornithology was much deeper than the head of a pin. My classmates and I regularly swapped ideas about what the frig we could do next to fill up that weekend’s requisite number of pages. I suppose that the exercise taught cooperation too.
Once I had completed my stint as a world class bird expert, I did an extra project about butterflies and moths and could bore about them too. Next up were Anglo Saxons, then Ancient Egyptians and a very strange analysis of a stately home that we had visited. It had a famous architect, a huge collection chamber pots and writing about those seemed suitable recompense for a day largely spent riding the miniature train.
It went on and on. My parents, at first impressed, just got used to the idea that I would periodically turn the dining room into a cut-price version of the British Library reading room. I was happy enough, I was doing well. I even had time left over to go swimming, see friends and get fresh air.
Then came the canal project.
I still cannot quite contemplate canals without twitching. Should talk ever turn to making rivers navigable, I feel my eyes involuntarily roll. In many ways it should have been quite a jolly project. I had discovered that I very much enjoyed studying history. I was rather obsessed with maps. The project was centred on a school trip where we would go onto a narrowboat and travel on an actual canal.
Oh, the things I learned about stinking canals back then. How deep and wide to dig a canal and how to line one to keep it good. How a lock was operated that would float a boat up or down to a different level, using a cunning system of cogs and sluices. We painted papier-mâché pots with canal roses and learned an embroidery stitch apparently popular with canal people. We learned how much more quickly goods and materials could be transported by water than by road in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
Very quickly I discovered just how stultifyingly boring I found the whole thing. I really do mean stultifying. I could sit for hour after painful hour trying to find something that I could write that didn’t immediately slam me into a mental brick wall. My mother had to take me in hand, practically unheard of in my academic career of hitherto boundless, unhinged enthusiasm. That quality had, in this instance, been replaced with passive aggressive despair.
“Who is this person you have been drawing?”
“Duke of Bridgewater.”
“Why?”
“Because the picture will take up a full page.”
“No, why him?”
“He owned a lot of canals.”
“Why?”
“He had a lot of coal to shift.”
“Why?”
To make my young life a misery, of course.
She took to getting me to read about any topic related to canals and then tell her about it. No matter how wooden I was, I next had to sit there and write up what I had just said. Sometimes she broke the rule of letting me learn for myself by dictating back to me what I had just said so that I could write it down. It was like pulling teeth.
I know now that the history of canals in the British Isles is not, strictly speaking, boring. It’s more than just a footnote in the history of transportation, supplanted by the railways. They responded to a need in a changing economy. Their building and design could be remarkably complex and formed the foundation of careers of a great many engineers. Even the act of changing the way that water travels across the landscape is quite fascinating, from the building of aqueducts to inclined plains. There is a lot of why and a lot of how in the subject and those form the basis of many lines of enquiry.
I was not old enough to effectively express that even then I found it distasteful that we were being taught peppy tunes about life as a bargee or narrowboat operator. Families crowded into cramped quarters, being hounded as undesirables, earning very little in the pursuit of making other men very rich. The brutal lives of the horses that towed the barges along before coal engines came in. The dirt, disease and death at every stage from construction onwards. People wanted to transport a lot of goods cheaply and that is where my brain shut down.
I was perhaps just old enough to start to take on board that often, as a pupil or as an adult, we have to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do. Sometimes it does us good to develop discipline rather than rely upon motivation. Sometimes starting a task and finding a handle on it can be the most difficult part and that is a skill too. Sometimes the dread and the feeling of being overwhelmed needs to be overcome if we are to make any progress at all.
Life, canals and writing prompts. Don’t let them bring you down.
***
Vote here by Friday September 5th https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1198390.html
When I was ten, halfway through what we call junior school in the UK, I changed schools. My new school had far better facilities than the old one. The class sizes were small. There was a plenitude of books, a plethora of supplies and a myriad opportunities to use them all. I was no longer in the land of one pencil and textbook sharing. Here we had an exercise book for every subject and the handwriting no longer had to be economically small. Paints and pastel crayons issued forth from the art cupboard as if it were some mythical cornucopia. Heck, we had an actual art cupboard. The school library was regularly restocked with new books and we were encouraged to take them home. We had French lessons, nature walks, an orchestra…. I bloody well loved it.
To be sure, our days were much more structured than I had been used to. Additionally, the teachers were far more strict and I was the idiot child who discovered what the rules were by inadvertently breaking them. Once I got myself over that psychological hurdle, it was as if the world had opened up to me. I respond well to structure and goals. Give me a nice system that I can rub up against and mildly subvert and it soaks up any rebellious tendencies that I have. I quickly learned that my maladroitness and perceived naughtiness would be more readily forgiven if I worked hard. I was totally there for that. I could do that. And so I did.
One of the policies of this new school was to assign us ongoing project work. This formed part of our homework and was meant to foster organisation and independent study. We could write literally anything we wanted to in our projects so long as we showed that we had done some research and it had been set up vaguely coherently.
My first project was for our nature studies. We could choose any creature that we liked and I chose birds. I traced diagrams of birds and all of their different feathers, with exemplars glued in. I undertook a deeply scientific survey of the birds which visited my garden one weekend. I made a microscope slide of a feather and drew the results. I sketched eggs. I conducted an avian intelligence experiment. I wrote a godawful poem about my favourite birds. Do not get the impression that I am painting myself as some sort of child genius for this work or that my grasp of ornithology was much deeper than the head of a pin. My classmates and I regularly swapped ideas about what the frig we could do next to fill up that weekend’s requisite number of pages. I suppose that the exercise taught cooperation too.
Once I had completed my stint as a world class bird expert, I did an extra project about butterflies and moths and could bore about them too. Next up were Anglo Saxons, then Ancient Egyptians and a very strange analysis of a stately home that we had visited. It had a famous architect, a huge collection chamber pots and writing about those seemed suitable recompense for a day largely spent riding the miniature train.
It went on and on. My parents, at first impressed, just got used to the idea that I would periodically turn the dining room into a cut-price version of the British Library reading room. I was happy enough, I was doing well. I even had time left over to go swimming, see friends and get fresh air.
Then came the canal project.
I still cannot quite contemplate canals without twitching. Should talk ever turn to making rivers navigable, I feel my eyes involuntarily roll. In many ways it should have been quite a jolly project. I had discovered that I very much enjoyed studying history. I was rather obsessed with maps. The project was centred on a school trip where we would go onto a narrowboat and travel on an actual canal.
Oh, the things I learned about stinking canals back then. How deep and wide to dig a canal and how to line one to keep it good. How a lock was operated that would float a boat up or down to a different level, using a cunning system of cogs and sluices. We painted papier-mâché pots with canal roses and learned an embroidery stitch apparently popular with canal people. We learned how much more quickly goods and materials could be transported by water than by road in the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
Very quickly I discovered just how stultifyingly boring I found the whole thing. I really do mean stultifying. I could sit for hour after painful hour trying to find something that I could write that didn’t immediately slam me into a mental brick wall. My mother had to take me in hand, practically unheard of in my academic career of hitherto boundless, unhinged enthusiasm. That quality had, in this instance, been replaced with passive aggressive despair.
“Who is this person you have been drawing?”
“Duke of Bridgewater.”
“Why?”
“Because the picture will take up a full page.”
“No, why him?”
“He owned a lot of canals.”
“Why?”
“He had a lot of coal to shift.”
“Why?”
To make my young life a misery, of course.
She took to getting me to read about any topic related to canals and then tell her about it. No matter how wooden I was, I next had to sit there and write up what I had just said. Sometimes she broke the rule of letting me learn for myself by dictating back to me what I had just said so that I could write it down. It was like pulling teeth.
I know now that the history of canals in the British Isles is not, strictly speaking, boring. It’s more than just a footnote in the history of transportation, supplanted by the railways. They responded to a need in a changing economy. Their building and design could be remarkably complex and formed the foundation of careers of a great many engineers. Even the act of changing the way that water travels across the landscape is quite fascinating, from the building of aqueducts to inclined plains. There is a lot of why and a lot of how in the subject and those form the basis of many lines of enquiry.
I was not old enough to effectively express that even then I found it distasteful that we were being taught peppy tunes about life as a bargee or narrowboat operator. Families crowded into cramped quarters, being hounded as undesirables, earning very little in the pursuit of making other men very rich. The brutal lives of the horses that towed the barges along before coal engines came in. The dirt, disease and death at every stage from construction onwards. People wanted to transport a lot of goods cheaply and that is where my brain shut down.
I was perhaps just old enough to start to take on board that often, as a pupil or as an adult, we have to do things that we don’t necessarily want to do. Sometimes it does us good to develop discipline rather than rely upon motivation. Sometimes starting a task and finding a handle on it can be the most difficult part and that is a skill too. Sometimes the dread and the feeling of being overwhelmed needs to be overcome if we are to make any progress at all.
Life, canals and writing prompts. Don’t let them bring you down.
***
Vote here by Friday September 5th https://therealljidol.dreamwidth.org/1198390.html
no subject
Date: 2025-09-02 04:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-02 10:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-03 06:04 pm (UTC)"Give me a nice system that I can rub up against and mildly subvert and it soaks up any rebellious tendencies that I have."
Damned right! (grin)
The Duke of Bridgewater bit made me chuckle. “Because the picture will take up a full page.”
I really enjoyed this!
Dan
no subject
Date: 2025-09-03 07:45 pm (UTC)Bloody canals…
no subject
Date: 2025-09-03 08:02 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-04 03:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-04 03:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-05 08:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 03:50 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-05 10:38 pm (UTC)(That was my response after they rejected the reasoning, how it could apply to their lives, etc.)
You have my permission to never even think about canals again ;)
no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 03:52 am (UTC)I still can’t get over what a whiny little git I was about it all. Then again, it was spread out over a whole term, which is about a thousand years when you are that age.
no subject
Date: 2025-09-05 11:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-09-06 03:53 am (UTC)