Quick! Change the rules!
When I was 8, the head of my primary school left and was replaced by a wet, pc woman who'd been a nurse but had left because she 'didn't like cleaning out the bedpans'. Hmmmm....

She always tried to make everything fair and equal, which is difficult in certain circumstances - like with a lot of competitions, the whole point of which is that someone WINS and someone LOSES.

We had a competition for building miniature models. I'd won the year before, and this year mine was the best again. It wasn't my fault the others weren't as good! To avoid me winning two years in a row, they then announced at the end that everyone would get a prize for taking part, so no one won. Because the whole school had basically taken part, we all got something so crappy I can't even recall what insignificant piece of crap it was.

Then, the head organised a reading competition. Whoever read the most within I think it was a month, would win. This was held for ages 6-11 (quite a difference, no?) and there were kids with learning disabilites in the school. We had to hand in slips saying how much we'd read the night before, signed by our parents.

In assembly, the head said to everyone "Well done to Yoseph, he read 32 pages last night!" Yoseph was one of the brightest kids in my class, not exactly a struggling reader. I put up my hand. "Miss, I read 32 CHAPTERS last night". I hadn't had any homework, so there'd been nothing better to do. Soon after this, the competition was soon not a competition, and it was roundly denied by the head that it ever had been - it was just an exercise to get the kids to read more. She'd finally realised that it wasn't exactly motivational to set kids of low ability directly in competition with those of high ability when they had no chance of winning. Stupid twunt. The whole thing just really pissed me off.

To cap it off, my annoyance only increased when I got given a merit certificate written by her which said 'For trying very hard at reading'. Made it sound like I'd only just managed to finish a Meg and Mog book with help from my teacher. I wasn't sorry to leave next year when we moved...
( Hampster Squared has stuff at www.tilla.co.uk, Thu 4 Aug 2005, 16:05, Reply)