Milk monitor and prefect aren’t the same thing but they would have a similar appeal to the Gareths of this world. Adult working environments have similar posts (this is coming from the gobshite who agreed to be his office’s Fire Officer). Here’s what thay have to say in the Slough branch:
Tim: “Team Leader don’t mean anything mate”
Gareth: “Excuse me, it means I’m leader of a team”
Tim: “No it doesn’t. It’s a title someone’s given you to get you to do something they don’t want to do for free - it’s like making the div kid at school milk monitor. No one respects it”
Gareth: “Er I think they do”
Tim: “No they don’t Gareth”
Gareth: “Er yes they do, cos if people were rude to me then I used to give them their milk last… so it was warm.”
oh dear.
i was a prefect.
my school was pretty twee.
we had form prefects, year prefects, school prefects, class counsellours, green officers.
the only ones with any power were the head girl and deputy head girls (usually captains of swimming, hockey and netball) and the school prefects who were in their final year. all were elected to the shortlist by the girls in their year, but selected by staff.
we could hand out detentions, order marks, lines and appointments with the headmistress.
I must admit I was a prefect in charge of milk many years ago. All it did for me was to put me off milk for life. The smell of several hundred bottles of warm milk slowly turning sour in a hot June sun means that ,to this day, I cannot drink a glass of milk.
mwap, I think the idea is to explain to the furriners what “head boy” means, and calling someone a “Gareth” kind of defeats the purpose if they don’t know who Gareth is
I’m also surprised there haven’t been any jokes so far about how terms like “head boy” and “fag” might be misunderstood across the Atlantic. Let’s assume we’ve heard them all before shall we?
At my high school in Canada we had a Head Boy and Head Girl. They were merely co-presidents of the student’s council, so in practice their job was to organize dances and sports events.
green officers were in charge of recycling class waste, collecting for charity events, making people bring stuff for “bring and buy sales”, old clothes drives etc. and organising cleanup of the school grounds and classrooms on a rota duty.
“twee” means that sort of achingly middle class cuteness.
you know what i mean.
the sort of people who object to “serviettes” and insist on “napkins”…
in their kids packed lunches.
You kinda lost me with the serviettes thing, irishgirl, but I think I get what you’re saying. The kind of clean-cut, Girl Scout-y, vaguely sportsy, upper/middle class thing?
I should point out that things have moved on since Tom Brown’s Schooldays.
I teach at a co-educational Private School, which has both boarders (e.g. parents work abroad) and day pupils.
(We don’t, of course, have corporal punishment.)
Our Head Boy and Girl are selected in a two stage system.
First the whole 7th form year (i.e. 17-18 year olds) vote for 6 boys and 6 girls to be prefects (prefects each have responsibility for an area of the School e.g. meals/dances).
Next the 12 prefects go on an activity day with team exercises, and then elect the Head Boy and Girl.
Their duties are to represent the pupils on various occasions, report on pupil suggestions from the School Council, and generally act as role models.
We didn’t have hall monitors, but they seem, at least judging from tv shows, to be kids who wear a sash and demand to see your hall pass if you’re in the hallway when you shouldn’t be.
As for class president it goes like this(roughly): someone decides that they’re popular, and would like to have something nice to go on their college application, so they run for class president. They tell everyone they’re running, and make promises that they would never be allowed to keep. (If you elect me, I’ll make it so we no homework on Fridays!) This may or not involve giving a little speech to tell people why you would be good at it. After the speeches all the kids in the grade vote of the person they like the best/hate the least, almost always without considering the speeches and promises made. The votes are tallied up, and the announcement of who won is made. This may or not may involve the losers crying.
Once the person is president, they meet once a week/every two weeks/once a month, with the other officers (VP, Treasurer, Secretary) and some faculty member to discuss " issues." They get out of class to do this. The issues are usually things like fundraising for 8th grade/Senior class trips and the Prom/middle school dances. Once in a great while there are “class meetings” and everyone in the same grade gets to skip class to hear an update on what the Student Council has been doing with the money the class raised. Our prez frequently screamed at people to shut up so the council could be heard over the din of bored students. YMMV.
So, are they still more or less the same in your opinion?
They seem pretty different, as here prefects and head boys/girls have more of a disciplinary function.
It must be said however, that I went to a fairly conservative school, kind of an Antipodean imitation of an English public school. So although my school was state funded, we had uniforms, streamed classes, prayers at daily assembly and a prefect system.
Alongside the old prefect system wsa a system of class reps at all levels, which seem to be similar to elfkin477’s description of class presidents.
Just to confuse matters even more we also had a student representative on the Board of Trustees (the school’s governing body). It was a fascinating position asyou got to hear about all the suspensions and expulsions and see how the budgets worked and so on.
Yeah, still roughly similar. Although that all sounds quite a bit more complicated than the system I experienced first hand, it varies a lot from school to school, as you can tell from other responses in this thread.
For instance, at my school there was much less expectation that pupils would be involved in fundraising for educational activities, and less opportunity for formal meetings between pupils and staff. And unlike the example given by kiwiboy there was no contact whatsoever between the Head Boy/Girl or any prefect and the school’s Board of Governors.
But my experience of hall monitors, which is also from films and TV, suggests that they would be like our prefects (or form captains as they were called at my school). Shepherding the other kids around the school and keeping the class quiet when the teacher was out of the room just about covered their responsibility. I did the job for five years.
Where I attended in a Canadian private school, we had prefects and a head boy chosen by the headmaster. They were delegated significant leadership and disciplinary authority. They were a very valuable part of the school community. I recall looking up to them.
istara:
“naff” isn’t going to be of much help to our American cousins either is it? Here’s what Merriam-Webster has to say:
Main Entry: twee
Pronunciation: 'twE
Function: adjective
Etymology: baby-talk alteration of sweet
Date: 1905 chiefly British : affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint <such a theme might sound twee or corny – Times Literary Supplement>
