A search for ‘Gleanings’ as Autumn takes a grip on the world

Date Published: {J}

I’ve been hunting about in shelves and in the garage in recent days trying to dig-out the household copy of Gleanings – which is not to pretend that I was still in secondary school at any time in the past 30 years, I just kept it when my youngsters finished school.

Complete with doodles, matchstick men walking about the margins, bewildering notes on things like onomatopoeia, and initials scrawled here and there, it went through the hands of probably three sons at the very least and is a reminder of slightly more frugal days in education.

Those were still the times when it was possible for a number of youngsters in the same family to use the same textbook over a number of years – the hand-me-down worked because curriculum changes were not at the dizzying pace of today, and there was not as much use of ‘workbooks’.

These days, for instance, much of maths seems to be built around the use of workbooks. I can only speak for first level maths, for that is the level I see occasionally as a grandchild does her homework. From what I see on television in relation to second level maths, they seem to spend their time counting sweets!

In the case of the workbook, one kid will use the book to put down the answer in the allocated slots in the pages, and the book is useless thereafter, unless you were to take to the Tippex and try to erase the answers.

In any event, you’ll probably find that a few pages are changed and a new edition has to be bought in the case of many books. It all sounds somewhat wasteful at a time when education is anything but ‘free’ and the idea of ‘re-processed books’ seems entirely appropriate to an era when we should be more cognisant of the use of resources.

However, I digress . . . this was not supposed to be about sparing paper and the fact that textbooks began to be replaced far too often in the era when we were ‘awash with money’, according to one loodromaun running the country. It is about my search for our copy of Gleanings, because I wanted to look at it in the context of the onset of Autumn.

You see, memories of my schooldays were recalled recently as the gradual passing of the year went on a-pace during those sunny days last week. The temperatures soared briefly, only to be replaced by ‘the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness’, as John Keats called it in his poem To Autumn.

I went off madly hunting for my Gleanings because I didn’t quite agree with Keats . . . but had to fall back on Google. I know that book is in the garage, somewhere!

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.