Published on 12, July, 2020
I found school a traumatising experience and I still don’t think I’m completely recovered yet. I don’t know what the worst part was – the noise, bullying, lack of understanding from horrible teachers, the difficulty in fitting in, trouble finding classes because the school was split up into buildings so you had maths in building A and then science in building D. I never did get used to that.
I did enjoy the learning though. I still like to learn now but prefer doing it from home watching videos on YT and reading books on how to do this and that. It’s how I learnt to play the guitar and how I learnt to make my own bird box for the birds in my garden. I think all children should get to learn from home because it would make schooling a lot more fun, if you don’t mind being on your own.
My favourite time was the holidays. I could stay home and shut myself in my room without fear of having to go to school and face all the dread and horrors. Back then I never wanted summer to end!
At school I did attempt to make friends but I got bullied and gave up in the end. I did make one friend though, another girl who was also bullied. We bonded over the fact we were targeted by the bullies. It was a friendship that lasted though. The only good thing to come out of me going to school.
In general I did not enjoy school. From start to finish it was absolute hell. My worst memory of it was my maths teacher, a woman who knew I had anxiety and hated having to talk and she always made me stand up and answer questions when she knew I couldn’t answer it correctly.
Luckily that is all over now. I would never go back and anyone who has to go to school has my sympathies.
I was fortunate to have some really inspirational teachers who accepted my geekiness. I went to a grammar school where geekiness was the norm. Looking back I can see the traits in many of my friends, like Glen who had not only memorised most of the London Transport bus routes, he knew what make of bus they operated and how often they ran.
A lot of the teachers were eccentric (in some cases that's a euphemism for barking mad) which made life interesting. In one maths lesson, our maths teacher came up with the information that Korean socks have a separate big toe, like mittens. How this was relevant to quadratic equations I am still trying to work out fifty years later.
A lot of stuff would not happen these days, like we had to wear caps until year nine, and at the end of the term there would be a pile of caps behind the gym, a perfect would produce a can of petrol, and they would be cremated. The teaching staff pretended not to notice, but somehow the caretaker just happened to be standing by with a fire extinguisher.
Talking of the caretaker, he had a German shepherd, and all the new first years were told that if they met her they had to say "Good morning (afternoon, evening as applicable) Janet." That was like a password.
Apparently a few years after I left they stopped singing the school song after a particularly enthusiastic rendition ended up with a kid falling off the stage and breaking his arm - don't ask.
Or there was the time when we had a bit of rivalry with a local secondary modern, and one of their kids put a felling axe through a classroom window. We had twelve police cars outside the school that afternoon, all lined up one behind the other. There were no major casualties, although a few of the CCF cadets complained that they would have to re-polish their boots after resolving an issue where a few of their boys were threatening one of our younger kids. Not that one condones violence ...
So despite three hours' homework a night, and having to line up in the playground each morning for uniform inspection, it was not that bad.
It's good to read a more positive experience! I'm glad someone found it to be not too bad. At my school the teachers weren't very eccentric, most appeared bored and had a vendetta against me lol. That's how it felt anyway. In my school the teachers sounded and looked depressed, if we had had more enthusiastic teachers it might have felt a better environment to be in.