The year I started school the world was different.

My grandson Ryder started school this year; I started school in 1952 and the world was different but some things have not changed. I wish him well as he travels through the school system. I know based on feedback from my daughter that he will do better than I did when I started. 

School and I did not get off to a good start, I was given the opportunity to complete grade one twice. The first time through grade one, I failed. Today schools don’t fail students at grade one. 

Failing grade one was not traumatic for me because of the way my parents saw the situation. When we moved to another part of the province, my parents saw the move as an opportunity for a new start for me so they enrolled me in grade one and told me I was going to school. I did not know (until I had graduated) that I had repeated my first year. So I went to school, made new friends and I found I liked being at school, so I did well.

Here are some other things that have and have not changed since I started school:

·       West Germany has 8 million refugees inside its borders. Today Germany is welcoming millions of refugees from Syria. 

·       Elizabeth II is proclaimed Queen of the United Kingdom at St. James's Palace, London, England. She is still Queen.

·       In the Hague Tribunal, Israel demands reparations worth $3 billion from Germany.  Israel is fighting the Palestinians for land.

·       The Treaty of Taipei is signed between Japan and the Republic of China to officially end the Second Sino-Japanese War. There is still war in Syria, Iraq and the middle east

·       The Diary of Anne Frank is published, and is taught in schools in Canada yet today.

·       The United States Army Special Forces is created and a year or so ago, killed one of the leaders of the Islamic State Terror Group the Taliban Obama Bin Ladin

·       A British passenger jet flies twice over the Atlantic Ocean in the same day. Now they fly hundreds of times a day

·       Martial law is declared in Kenya due to the Mau Mau uprising. Kenya is still at war, at least 147 people, mostly students, have been killed in an assault by al-Shabab militants on a university in north-eastern Kenya

·       The first successful surgical separation of Siamese twins is conducted in Mount Sinai Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio. The first successful full face transplant was done in 2015

·       The Nobel prize for Literature that year went to François Mauriac.  In 2015 it went to svetlana alexievich, a russian writer

·       The Nobel Peace prize went to Albert Schweitzer. Last year it went to The Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet is a group of four organizations that were central in the attempts to build a pluralistic democracy in Tunisia in the wake of the Jasmine Revolution of 2011

Since you like Math and Science, this may be of interest to you:

·       The Nobel prize for physics went to Felix Bloch and Edward Mills Purcell from the United States for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith. 

·       In 2015 it went to Arthur Bruce "Art" McDonald,a Canadian astrophysicist. He was awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Japanese physicist Takaaki Kajita, for the discovery of neutrino oscillations and demonstrating that neutrinos have mass