We recently paid a visit to our Goddaughters in Northwich and the younger of the two proudly showed off some of her schoolbooks. They revealed that she is buidling up a good level of general knowledge, is good at arithmetic, and her writing is good for a primary school child. She attends Comberbach Primary School in Cheshire.
Like all children she spells words phonetically and obviously some of them were not spelled correctly. What surprised me is that her teacher does not point out all her spelling mistakes as "it is not good for the child to have her spelling mistakes pointed out". Judging by the level of spelling observed elsewhere this would seem to be quite a common trait. Are kids so fragile these days that they are going to be marked for life if their mistakes are pointed out? If so I wonder why all us wrinklies are not wandering the world with twisted personalities because we had "spelling books" in which we wrote out the correct spelling of words we had previously spelled incorrectly.
The second thing which annoyed me in her school work was an exercise they called "Symmetry". In this exercise various shapes are displayed and the student has to indicate lines of symmetry. Part of this involved World Flags and lines were drawn on the flags to indicate where they were symmetrical. For example most vertical tricolours have one horizontal line of symmetry. Horizontal tricolours have one vertical line of symmetry.
Incredibly the teacher of these young people had told them (and drawn on their flags) that the flag of the United Kingdom has both a vertical and horizontal line of symmetry. I was taught by my primary school teacher the correct orientation of the Union Flag when I was 10 years old and it has stuck with me ever since. Our flag does not have reflection symmetry, due to the slight pinwheeling of St Patrick's cross, which is technically called the counterchange of saltires.
It annoys me intensely when I see a Union Flag hung upside down and have pointed it out on many an occasion, even once getting the manager of the Holiday Inn in Istanbul to lower and re-hang our flag when he had it inverted. Nobody would dream of hanging the USA Flag or that of Canada or Australia upside down (unless you were at sea and in distress) so why can't our young people be taught this simple item of loyalty and education. The most chauvinist and jingoistic feast of the year, the Last Night of the Proms, features patriots of all nations waving their flags but embarrassingly it is only ever the Brits who wave their flags upside down.
To fly the flag the correct way up, the broad portion of the white cross of St Andrew should be above the red band of St Patrick (and the thin white portion below) in the upper hoist canton (the corner at the top nearest to the flag-pole), giving the Scottish symbol precedence over the Irish symbol.
Rant over!!
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