Ten Reasons to Be Glad I'm Done With School

Ahhh those long-ago school days.
Not for me a High School Musical experience. No cheerleaders. No pep rallies.
I was more like Drew Barrymore in Never Been Kissed. You know, Josie Grossie.
The New Zealand version.

You see
I was a nerd.

Complete with thick glasses, bad mother-cut hair and hand-me-down clothes.
I didn't begin life as an outcast. My nerdy-ness developed as school progressed. In fact you could say that school itself was the pressure cooker that revealed my Inner Nerd, leaving me friendless, shy, brainy, bookish and wearing glasses {although I can't really blame school for the glasses, that's just bad genes}.

But even nerd-ship aside, there's a bunch of reasons why school sucked and I'm glad those days are gone.

Here's my Top Ten Reasons I'm Glad I'm Done with School...

{KEY}

New Zealand Grades in the 70's and 80's

Primary School = age 5-10; Primer 1-4; Standard 1-4

Intermediate School = Age 11-12; Form 1-2

High School = Age 13-18; Form 3-7

Reason #1: Leaving Behind my Nerd Status
Out in the big wide world nobody knows I'm a nerd. There is no "in-crowd" to be left out of, I can just be accepted for my wonderful self... wahoo! Hey, can I come hang out with YOU? You there, with the huge blog-following... can I come sit by you at lunch...? I'll just polish my specs and then I'll be right over...

Reason #2: Embarrassing Health Talks
Remember those? Brand new Form One girls having to sit through The Talk. And not just the one from your mum either. The one with the Deputy Principal, the diagrams and the film. "Your Changing Body" or something. The way the Form Two girls blushed while us little girls fresh from primary school tittered. But just wait girls, next year its your turn to blush.

Reason #3: Puberty Blues
Puberty sucked, didn't it? All that anxiety about whether your boobs would always be one bigger than the other. The embarrassment of being a nine year old girl with boobs on swimming day {not actually me, but a poor girl in my Std3 class who waited til we were all gone before she'd get dressed.}Wondering if you would ever get your period and when would it come {hopefully not in the middle of science class}...?

Reason #4: The Inconvenient Crimson Tide
The embarrassment of getting your period in the middle of science class. The shame of fainting in the hallway on a pile of schoolbags when you got bad cramps. Your mum refusing to let you stay home from school because having a period is not the same as being sick. Your P.E. teacher refusing to let you out of P.E. because having a period is not the same as having a broken leg.

Reason #5: P.E. Hell
I know most normal kids loved P.E. but I was a nerd, remember?
Worst teacher of all, scary Sergeant Major Miss Critchley, in Third Form. She was sixty-ish and still going strong, marching the hallways with her spiky grey hair and piercing eyes.

Nothing short of a broken leg would excuse you from having to participate. And those awful romper shorts we had to wear! So embarrassing. I'm sure it was the uniforms that started my loathe-hate relationship with physical activity. By the time my parents caved and bought me the regulation track pants, it was too late. P.E. had forever put me off running and jumping... and shorts.

{P.E. = Physical Education; also called Phys Ed}

Oh dear. Check out that spelling. Someone needs to go back to High School...

Reason #6: Sucky Science
Not just because of that embarrassing incident in third form science. I liked Biology well enough. But Physics = snore. As for Chemistry and that darn periodic table... I learnt it alright, but now I can't forget it - though what use it has ever been in my adult life I can't tell you.

That little rhyme we learnt to help us remember: "How he likes beer by cupfuls not over-flowing. Nervous Nana made all silly people stop clicking around Kate's car..."


Hydrogen, Helium, Lithium, Beryllium, Boron...
See! I still remember it nearly thirty years later.
It did not help that my bearded science teacher wore walk-shorts, with socks... and sandals.

Reason #7: Useless Maths
Oh mathematics, where are you now?
Where in my life is the trigonometry, algebra, matrices? Oh quadratic equations, what have you ever done for me other than given me a headache while I tried to figure you out?
Teach me times tables, yes. Teach me to handle money, the principles of good finance, by all means. These skills I can use.
Any day with maths on the timetable was a bad day. Maths was the bane of my education, yet still, I passed all my exams and took it all the way to sixth form. But now I look back and ask, why?

Reason #8: Ugly School Uniforms
I have worn my fair share of ugly uniforms, given that my family moved around a lot.
Four different school uniforms I had to endure, each more ugly than the last.
Bought two sizes too big, "with room to grow" of course.
What started out flapping like a tent in a hurricane with all the spare room, was bursting at the seams by the time we moved on. After all, these were the days of "puberty" and "changing bodies".

Hideous, these uniforms were. Designed to make even the most comely of teenage figures look like a sack of spuds. I guess this was some kind of twisted attempt to dampen the flames of passion in the teenage boys we shared classes with.

The cool girls did their best to turn ugly into stylie, turning up their regulation hems and pushing down their regulation {oatmeal coloured} knee length socks.
But watch out if Miss Critchley was on duty at lunch time. She marched around with her ruler, and would make you kneel so she could measure your skirt, make sure it was the regulation length.
"Pull up your socks!" she would bark, and dish out detentions if she was having a bad day.
 Ahhh yes, glad to see the back of ugly school uniforms.

{NOTE: Most Intermediate & High schools in NZ wear Uniform}

Reason #9: Detention
What, a nerd in detention?
Ah yes. In my attempts to fit in and adjust my permanent nerd-status a little, I too pushed my socks down and rolled my skirt over at the waistband. I was trying to look normal.
But Miss Critchley spotted me on a bad day.
Next thing I knew I was sanding desks outside the principal's office.
Where everyone who passed by could point and laugh.
Detention was nothing like The Breakfast Club at my school.

Reason #10: Bullies
Bullies are what killed school for me. I wouldn't have minded being a simple no-mates-nerd if only the bullies could have left me alone.
See, my parents moved around a lot. Ten schools I went to. That was OK at primary school, but when we moved away from Auckland to the forestry town of Tokoroa, I was in trouble. They didn't like Aucklanders there, and I remember once when the teacher left the room, the class gathered around singing, "Auckland is a dump and so are you-ou..."
A dumb song, it didn't even make sense, but it still hurt. I was ten.

Worse was yet to come when we moved up to Intermediate school, the following year.
I was put in a class with the meanest girls in the school, with not one single person I knew from my Primary school.
The girls were rough and scary. Some of them ended up in the Black Power gang, I heard later.
These girls would take kids they didn't like around the back of the bike sheds and give them "the bash."
But before I knew all that I tried to make friends.
I looked out for other kids who knew nobody and made an effort to befriend them.

Too bad those other new girls turned on me... after I'd confided that my dad was a pastor. They shared this fact with the rest of the class who would gather round me bowing and singing hallelujah and saying, "Ha! Your dad wears a long black robe..!"
I tried to ignore them, I really did.
I just took my book outside and read by myself.
But they wouldn't leave me alone. They kept at me til they made me cry.
They'd push my head down into the book. They chased me with dead wetas*...
I should be glad they didn't give me the bash, but the meanness and exclusion and taunting was enough.
And so began my days as a nerd. Friendless, bookish, shy, nervous, wearing very ugly glasses.
I lost my confidence and it took years for me to find it again.

{*Weta = a very big ugly bug native to New Zealand}

I hate bullies. Bullying and meanness of any kind turns my stomach.
Bullies are weak, cowardly and insecure. They take out their problems on those who can't defend themselves to make themselves look bigger and feel better .
But when you're a kid you don't know that.
You think they're picking on you because there's something wrong with you.

Now, I wonder where those girls are. I wonder what they're doing with their lives and if they remember me, that scared lonely pastor's kid they once picked on.
And I wonder what they tell their kids about bullying.
.............

Well. I didn't see that coming.
There I was writing a funny post for Writers Workshop and out poured all that other stuff.
See why I like blogging?
Better (and cheaper) than therapy.


My Ten Schools:
1975: St Annes Catholic School, Manurewa, South Auckland
1976: St Josephs Catholic School, Grey Lynn, Auckland
1977: Pt Chevalier Primary, Pt Chev Auckland
1978: Titirangi Primary (three months)
1978-1980 Sunnyvale Primary, West Auckland
1980: Tokoroa North Primary, Tokoroa (6 months)
1981-1982: Tokoroa Intermediate
1983-1984: Forest View High School, Tokoroa
1985: Spotswood College, New Plymouth (three months)
1985-1986: Inglewood High School, Taranaki


How were your school days?
Were you a nerd, a cool kid or something in between?

For Mama Kat's Pretty Much World-Famous Writers Workshop. Writing Prompt #5: Top Ten reasons why you're glad you're done with school... also linking up with Shell's Pour Your Heart Out {since I ended up Pouring out my Heart}

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