They say that your real learning begins when you forget everything you were taught at school. I think many of us were compelled to accept this dictum as our kids were growing up.
Mathematics (we called it maths for short, they say math) grew steadily tougher and was impossible without younger people coming in as tutors to help beleaguered parents, even at the risk of the child eloping with one of them.
Political maps of India and the world change with bewildering frequency: the old family atlas can no longer cope.
With global warming, even weather conditions can no longer be like the old textbooks ordained. Crops likewise. Dudley Stamp became bikrivala material. History moved from an emphasis on the world of kings and queens to that of ordinary men and especially women, chemistry was much more quantitative than one remembered it. At a girls' school the needlework was the biggest problem because one had become the mum and had to do it all now even if one had been the bane of one's own needlework teacher at school.
A wonderful geography teacher of Anglo-Burmese origin at school taught me how to do detective work around a photographic landscape: tell you where it was, what crops could be grown there, what food the natives ate, the kind of clothing they needed for the climate. National Geographic was her favourite journal and became mine. I learnt time sums from her. 360 degrees = 24 hours, therefore 15 degrees in longitude = 1 hour and 1 degree = 4 minutes. Even with the empire slowly dwindling, London with its 0 degree longitude continued to be the centre of the world and the rest of us calculated time accordingly.
The International Date Line had to be put in somewhat warily on an outline map so as to prevent some tiny islands in the Pacific from becoming schizophrenic. I had just learnt the word and used it in a class test in this context: Mrs Malaprop was duly ticked off by Mrs Tresham (with a twinkle in her eye).
Also that you gained a day travelling across the IDL in an easterly way and lost it in the other direction. They were pleasant memories when one actually travelled though by the time zones and daylight saving time meant you were hardly accurate when you made those 'divide by 15' calculations.
Once when travelling from Singapore to California, I actually forgot I would be crossing the IDL and therefore arrived on the same day even after many hours of travel. Many decades after leaving school, I could imagine the scolding I would have received from Mrs T for being silly. Young people nowadays are not bothered with the calculations at all: they have all the information readymade on the "apps" to their mobiles. They miss something.
Samoa was one of these "schizophrenic" islands. Much later one learnt from Margaret Mead's engaging ethnography (since dismissed as untrue) the rites of passage of the young Samoan into adulthood, without a painful adolescence, that curse of western societies.
Now I learn from The Telegraph that Samoa has decided for sound economic reasons to do away with its connection to US time and instead go with Asia, Australia and New Zealand in its choice of day. Samoans skipped a whole day (December 28, 2011) in their calendar last year as its citizens made a historic leap across the International Date Line.
I love the thought that fun-loving Samoans can, if they wish, make an hour's plane journey to American Samoa, whenever they wish to repeat a birthday or an anniversary!
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