I hated school. I hated everything about it.
Not primary school - that was nothing spectacular but it was alright and it passed in a pleasant swirl of school plays, friends, learning to write with fountain pen ... the latter very, very exciting and sparking my ever constant love of all things stationery! Especially exciting was the visits to the tuck shop. In those days we got those dinky bottles of milk at break time and I used to forgo the milk and hoard my milk money so I could go to the tuck shop on a Friday. For sixpence (today's equivalent of five cents) we ruled the playground. I could get a packet of sherbet with a liquorice straw, five apricots (orange sweets the size of an apricot) and a bag of gobstoppers. No primary school was fine - it was fun and that is the way it should be I think.
What I hated was secondary school and as soon as I registered that this was supposed to be education I rebelled. The uniforms, the prefects, homework, endless rules - everything was purgatory for me and as for the lessons, I despised the lessons. I didn't feel much antipathy towards the teachers - in fact I didn't feel much of anything about them other than that they really weren't very interesting at all. I just knew - I have no idea why - that there had to be a better way of doing things. For instance, my history teacher remained the same for four years and for those four years she dictated notes every single lesson: that I studied history at university had nothing whatsoever to do with her, and my love of history remained due to the nature of the discipline and the fascination I felt for it. French and Latin were big yawns and what I remember most about biology (life sciences) is being told that giving birth was like pushing a steam roller up a hill but if you struggled it was like pushing up two: wise words indeed!
Much of my loathing was directed towards geography and my geography teacher: I cared nothing for the annual rainfalls of various European countries, or for the crops grown in the Outer Hebrides and added to that, I was taught all this - and I use the word taught in the loosest possible sense of the word - by a small-minded bigot who did little to hide her contempt for the fact that I was Portuguese. She took delight in asking if we grew vegetables in our back garden and if we kept chickens as did all the other Portuguese immigrants. I remember going home and crying because I was Portuguese and asking my parents please to send me to another school. The only glimmer in an ever darkening universe was my love of reading and my books sustained me and kept me sane through all the tedious hours and hours and hours I spent in those bone chilling classrooms.
You will note that I have not as yet made any mention of maths or science and that is because I dropped them both at the earliest possible opportunity. In the British school system at the time if you dropped maths you had to do four languages to compensate and I embraced them wholeheartedly - anything not to have to learn to mix letters with numbers and to prove that x = 0: I was more than happy to accept my teacher's word for it and saw no reason to try to prove it.
And yet my desire to teach was not diminished - crazy right? The more boring the lessons and the more constricted I felt the more I knew that I could do it better. And I have spent the past 36 years always trying to do it better.
So what did I really learn from those years of high school? I learnt never to dictate notes; never to judge a student based on culture, class, heritage or anything else; to try to vary my lessons and to use new material wherever and whenever possible; that language is a wonderful gift - any language - and the ability to communicate the greatest gift of all; that in reading we can find true learning and meaning. And most of all, I learnt that unless you do something, anything, with passion, then you are just wasting your time and everyone else's.
How to sustain the passion? Ah, that is a story for another day.
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