Difference between revisions of "Cheltenham Grammar School"
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At the time I attended there it was a boys-only school, with a corresponding girls-only school called Pate's Grammar School for Girls, also in Cheltenham. Having been at two high-school level co-ed schools in California and Ontario, Canada, I might have expected it to be somewhat dismaying to have no girls around, but in reality I didn't miss them. The nice thing about the absence of girls was the corresponding lack of distraction! There were a few female teachers (referred to as "masters", just like the male teachers), but the bulk of them were men. And of course these, being "old" were not distracting. Only one class I attended had a female teacher, and this was the extra-curricular class on computer programming, taught by a math teacher. I don't remember her name, unfortunately. The programming language in this case was Fortran, a language that I never had to deal with afterwards in my career as a programmer. The school became co-educational in 1986, when Pate's Grammar School for Girls merged with Cheltenham Grammar School. | At the time I attended there it was a boys-only school, with a corresponding girls-only school called Pate's Grammar School for Girls, also in Cheltenham. Having been at two high-school level co-ed schools in California and Ontario, Canada, I might have expected it to be somewhat dismaying to have no girls around, but in reality I didn't miss them. The nice thing about the absence of girls was the corresponding lack of distraction! There were a few female teachers (referred to as "masters", just like the male teachers), but the bulk of them were men. And of course these, being "old" were not distracting. Only one class I attended had a female teacher, and this was the extra-curricular class on computer programming, taught by a math teacher. I don't remember her name, unfortunately. The programming language in this case was Fortran, a language that I never had to deal with afterwards in my career as a programmer. The school became co-educational in 1986, when Pate's Grammar School for Girls merged with Cheltenham Grammar School. | ||
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Revision as of 06:29, 18 June 2022
In 1969-1971 I attended Cheltenham Grammar School, later renamed as Pate's Grammar School, during my family's residence in the United Kingdom due to my father's employment. The school is located on Princess Elizabeth Way in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
That's "Old School"
One of things that caught my attention about the school was its antiquity! The building the school was in (and is largely still in, though remodelled extensively) was not old, but had been on its site was ten or twelve years (or less). The school was founded with a fund bestowed to Corpus Christi College, Oxford by Richard Pate in 1574. So the institution itself was a little less than 400 years old when I started there in 1969.
The design of the building at the time I attended harked back to castles. There was a multi-storey octagon-shaped building housing a few classrooms, a library, and study-carrels. The carrels were in the top storey, and were under the dome of the structure. I don't know now what this stand-alone building was called, but it had a shallow moat all around it! The moat extended into the open courtyard between the main instructional rooms. Unfortunately, this domed structure no longer stands -- it was replaced by a larger building, and of course, the moat is gone. I understood that the shape of the building was influenced by Dr. Arthur E. Bell, the headmaster when I first joined the school.
Boys Only? Oh my! (but no longer)
At the time I attended there it was a boys-only school, with a corresponding girls-only school called Pate's Grammar School for Girls, also in Cheltenham. Having been at two high-school level co-ed schools in California and Ontario, Canada, I might have expected it to be somewhat dismaying to have no girls around, but in reality I didn't miss them. The nice thing about the absence of girls was the corresponding lack of distraction! There were a few female teachers (referred to as "masters", just like the male teachers), but the bulk of them were men. And of course these, being "old" were not distracting. Only one class I attended had a female teacher, and this was the extra-curricular class on computer programming, taught by a math teacher. I don't remember her name, unfortunately. The programming language in this case was Fortran, a language that I never had to deal with afterwards in my career as a programmer. The school became co-educational in 1986, when Pate's Grammar School for Girls merged with Cheltenham Grammar School.
