i have only recently realised just how many things i was told as a child were complete lies. i dont just mean the obvious things, santa and the toothfairy and the fact that eating my crusts is good for me. I mean the really ridiculous crap that they jammed into my head just to get me to remember the simple things in life.

For instance, the "rhymes" they got me to remember. For some reason, if a rhyme is educational, it doesn't actually have to rhyme. They usually start out with the best intentions, maybe the first two lines rhyme, and I can only assume that that is where the original author of the poem intended it to end, but then some politically correct twat had to add a couple of extra lines to make sure all the bases were covered. For instance:

"I before E, except after C"

Fair enough, that is a basic rule of English spelling, its short, to the point, neat and it rhymes. A winner? No. Because then some smart arse had to add:

"Except on some occasions."

What a cock. They ruined the entire thing. Not only does it not rhyme, it doesn't fit the rhythm, there are too many syllables, it makes use of the word 'except' only 3 words after it was last used, and it completely ruined the purpose of the poem for me. After that little line was added, every time I came upon an I and an E (not to mention a C), I always thought "Is this one of those occasions?" and I ended up, asking someone, guessing or using another word entirely. Bah.

Oh but there's more. There is a poem I was taught in order to remember how many days there were in each month:

"30 days have September, April, June and November,
All the rest have 31,
Except for February which has 28, or 29 on a leap year."

First of all, I don't see why each month has to have different amounts of days; it was a bad decision in the first place. Surely it's meant to be based on the moon or the female menstrual cycle or something. That would be a better system all round because it would mean that pregnancies would only last a month.

Secondly, I realise the choice of rhyming months was limited but to my mind there are at least 4 months that end in 'ber', so figuring out which 2 out of 'September', 'October', 'November' and 'December' had only 30 days required me to actually memorize the days in each of those months, thus again avoiding the point of the memory aide.

And don't get me started on rhyming in this one. Only the first line rhymes, and that is with itself, so I hardly count it at all.

Probably the best rhyme was "The length of the heater, is about a meter" which I used a lot when I was first learning about meters. Of course what they didn't tell me was that this particular poetic rule about rules only applied to the one heater. In the classroom. The actual length of a meter is fixed and does not depend on the dimensions of the nearest heating apparatus.

Most of the other rhymes I took from primary school were dirty and came from the playground rather than the classroom, but at least they rhymed and did a little more to expand my vocabulary.

And so I emerged from primary school knowing lots of useless information disguised as educational poetry. I then spent all of Key Stage 3 re-learning all the correct rules about poems and meters. After that I spent GCSE getting really confused whilst learning that a real poem doesn't actually have to conform to any rules. Not even correct spelling, so English Class is ultimately pointless. On the plus side, I got to learn about the plays of Shakespeare, on the negative side, I had to read some of them. Let me tell you, that guy didn't even use real words!

and then i get to A Level, and i think its all over, these stupid rhymes.
enter millie.
if there was a champion of the worst unryhming rhymes ever, thats her. never mind the fact that the rhymes rarely made any sense and were often harder to remember than what they were supposed to help me remember (if you get what i mean), but then what does she d