How tall is Inga Swenson

Nik said on 13/Oct/17
@ Sandy Cowell - Hi!

Well nowadays there will be more and more children towering over their teachers and I think it is good to celebrate children and adults of all heights. I think it would be a great idea for children to study height as part of their curriculum as this subject area would teach children about the distribution of children's and adults heights, thus opening them up to knowledge on a topic that is relevant to us all! Studying height would hone good analytical skills amongst children and I don't think it would be a bad idea for adults to study this topic as statistical trends are fascinating things to study, particularly in something that is central to all of us! What I think would be really interesting would be to collate data on enough adults to make it representative of society and to do the same for children, and just for men, and just for women, then produce a scatter graph from the information and have written analysis on the results available, with the analysis done for all levels of curriculum from the KS levels through to A' level and degree standard levels!
Also the students of this topic should be encouraged to give their own analysis of the results too as well as having access to the analysis of the results at different levels of education! Representing societal height data on other types of graph and chart would be a great idea too!
I remember at high school that merit slips were handed out for good performance in any aspect of school life and demerit slips were given out for poor effort at something. At junior school I remember having a teacher called Mr Atkinson and he would give children stars for excelling at something, the stars would go up on a notice board and if anyone accumulated a certain number of stars they would get a chocolate bar!
It's great when teachers deviate away from the set curriculum and Mr Houlder, the head of history at High School, would draw the curtains, turn off the lights, and tell us ghost stories, not that I have ever believed in such things. Like you said when teachers deviate from the set curriculum it can often be more interesting than the normal lessons and plus it can inspire, reward, and aid children in so many different ways! This is a good thing and along with the general curriculum will set children up for an inspirational and rewarding early taste of life!

Cheers!

Subwoof said on 6/Oct/17
What is her equivalent 2017 height?

Sandy Cowell said on 5/Oct/17
@ Nik - Hi! It certainly is fascinating seeing school children standing taller than their teachers and it was such a rarity when I was at school that it was almost unheard of! We had a small geography teacher who later became my English teacher, and he was really good - at both his subjects! He was born and grew up in India and had seen some incredible geographical phenomena, including the world's biggest vocano (beginning with 'k' - I can't spell it off hand!) erupting when he was a boy! In fact, you could say he was utterly passionate about his subjects, and he spent many a lesson deviating from the set subject to tell us about what he had seen, but it is these stories that I can remember still now, rather than boring Ordnance Survey signs! My brother, having been to the same school, had him too, though not for English, but he agrees that the tales he told us outshone the proper lessons!

I think he (Mr Vaughan) must have been about 5ft5.5/6 at the most! If someone had asked him, it wasn't the sort of question he'd have felt like shying away from. Quite the contrary! He was as outspoken as the day is long and he would discuss 'The Two Ronnies' in our English lessons! If 'Blackadder' had been around then, he'd have discussed that too! Anything with a prowess for clever word use!

I'm sure he would have let us do a Survey on our heights as well and how we are perceived as a result! I have said it before, and I'll say it again: height surveys would make a truly fantastic topic for kids to undertake at school! They would benefit in the science and English departments, to name but two! We did do a height survey at both junior and senior schools, but the approach in both cases, especially the way it was handled at junior school, was all wrong! In junior school, our heights went on the notice board - and certain kids were made fun of! To add fuel to an already smouldering fire, the teacher then took our weights and stuck the results on the board as well! Then things really got out of hand, with rude descriptive words taking over from many a child's name!

Yes, school is a great place for learning, making friends and preparing kids for the real world. There are great things to be learned there and some not so enjoyable memories which are taken away when we leave, but imagine where we'd be without it! It's our first little brush with others, and there that we learn that this world consists of people of all different heights! Fantastic!

Nik said on 4/Oct/17
@ Sandy Cowell - Hi!

You couldn't have described her any better! I think it is great to celebrate girls and women of all levels of height and men and boys of all levels of height. I think it is fascinating when school children are taller than their teachers and I see quite a few local school children taller than myself! It's fascinating because some school kids are over 6 foot!
Inga Swenson does sound Scandinavian, possibly Norwegian or Swedish, but I don't know! Her height too suggests that she could come from one of those countries, like you said.
It would be interesting to know why some people stop growing much earlier than other people as well as why some people grow much earlier in childhood and I think that 11 or 12 does sound early to stop growing but I suppose we are all different. Julie will have gone from being way taller than all the other girls at 12 to still being taller than a significant majority at 16, but at 16 she would be smaller than a handful in her school year!
Growing up and seeing children of different heights is a great thing for everyone to celebrate!

Cheers!

Sandy Cowell said on 1/Oct/17
She's lovely and has the face of a winsome little angel, with huge enquiring eyes!

I don't know who she is, but with a name like Inga Swenson, I was expecting her to be possibly Scandinavian, so that might have been the reason why. Maybe her ancestry comes from round there. Hey - her height of 5ft9 backs up that she comes from one of those 'tall' countries!

Inga confesses to reaching her optimum height at the tender age of 14, and then gives out a sigh of relief that she grew no more. You can't blame a girl who is inches taller than most of her friends in her early teen years to be happy to have stopped growing then, but it's not that uncommon! A couple of girls I went to school with were the same: Samantha was 5ft11 at the age of 12, three years my junior and walked home from school with me some nights whereas Julie, who at age 11 was 5ft8 and well in excess of a foot taller than the small ones, was actually in my class so we all watched as we grew, slowly but surely, nearer and nearer to her height, month by month, year by year. By the time we were 16, she didn't seem that tall any more. A couple of girls had caught her up and the smaller of us weren't straining our necks so much to look up to her. It was a delightful experience really, and I'm sure Julie, whose sense of humour was second to none, enjoyed it as we all grew nearer and nearer to her! That must have been an equally scintilating experience for her as it was for us to watch her 'shrink!' A lovely part of growing up that only we, as humans, have the intelligence to appreciate!

I have no alternative than to go for 5ft9 for Inga because I have only ever 'known' her as that!