I was surfing around the blog world today and found an funny little post at “A Mom And Her Blog” that brought back a flood of memories of my favourite teacher at school. Jack Trennary…. Maths…. Tamar High School… 1980 -1984…

He hated it when people didn’t enunciate their words correctly and, bearing in mind the school is on the Devon/Cornwall border in deepest South West England.. if you were heard to say “sem” instead of “seven” or “lem” instead of “eleven” the punishment was to write the word out on the blackboard (in front of the whole class) one thousand times… the coloquialisms of the West Country made it so incredibly hard to pronounce those two words correctly…

I still.. to this day.. say the words “seven” and “eleven” correctly…

Another of his favourite things was “Q&C’s” aka.. “Questions and Clouts”. Basically the na,e of the game was.. on a Friday he would tell you what questions he was going to ask you on Monday morning. The theory was that you then went home and spent some small amount of time over the weekend actually revising Maths. On a Monday morning “Q&C’s” would start. It was all so methodical… he would go around the class.. asking questions from the sheet that he had given you on the Firday afternoon.

• Get one question wrong.. Stand up
• Second question wrong… Stand up on your chair
• Third question wrong… Stand on the table… at which point you were clouted because you weren’t allowed to stand on the tables!!!!!

I cried so hard when I discovered that Jack Trennary had died…. he was my guiding light at school… I think everyone has one.. he was mine… he believed in me… he helped me time and time again… he would explain things over and over again until EVERY person in the class understood it inside out…

He was my school hero….