Tag: Schooldays

Not Knowing

I have written before about my unfortunate tendency to say “I don’t know” when I really don’t know the answer and how that is misinterpreted by some as “I don’t care.”  I struggle to find a way around it.  What should I do?  If I pretend to know the answer, I will be asked what it is and subsequently exposed as a liar.  I am happy to be seen as ignorant, but not a fraud.  I have taken to saying “I don’t know, but I will try to find out,” which puts me in exactly the same position as the question setter, e.g. asking the smart speaker.  (So, the answer is apparently ‘I’m sorry, I do not understand your question.  Would you like to hear some music by Milli Vanilli?”)

The main problem is that there is just so very much that I do not know: if the universe is a giant vacuum and the planets in it are all very heavy indeed, why don’t they just fall down to the bottom?  If not knowing stuff was an academic subject, I would be top of the class.

Back in my schooldays, there were always two types of ‘top of the class’ classmates: the quiet boring ones that nobody minded and the ‘look at me’ smart-arses that everyone wanted to flick with a wet towel after P.E.  Some people are effortlessly brainy and – as it is nothing special to them – generally unassuming.  They will seldom be the one with their hand up in class.  They will have their head down.

My head was seldom down.  It was more normally up in the clouds.  When pushed into a corner, hemmed in by unfathomable facts, my mind takes flight.  Concentration is all well and good, but it gets very boring after a while.  My brain had far more adventures than my body as a child, most of them in the midst of the failings of The League of Nations or the formation of an occluded front in the mid-Atlantic.  I enjoyed Art, because ‘going off on one’ was a requirement and I loved English (right until Geoffrey Chaucer and Thomas Hardy sucked every molecule of joy out of it) because I had a teacher who actually allowed creativity in Creative Writing, but I also had French (which seemed like Double Dutch to me), Latin (Dead Double Dutch), Physics (in which my own misunderstanding of all around me began to develop), Chemistry, Biology, History, Geography, as well as woodwork (in which my ineptitude was given new bounds by various sharp and pointed implements) and Sport, which distanced the barriers of my stature from my combative spirit.

The school allowed me to stay on to the Sixth Form – I have no idea why: academically I was not close to good enough and through those two years my application to learning was close to zero.  I like to think that I was good for morale.  In reality, I fear that all I was actually good for was the school budget: one more boy off the government’s unemployment bill.  I learned how little I knew that could ever help me in life and how much I knew that could help me in a pub quiz.  This is the story of my life.  I have a jumble sale head, full of tatty, unloved remnants of knowledge, but not a single shiny new air-fryer.  School taught me to say ‘I don’t know’ and I did it a lot because, more often than not, I didn’t.  And I don’t.  I hope you understand…

Wasted Opportunities (part one)

Photo by Mwesigwa Joel on Unsplash

When I look back on my schooldays, my overwhelming sense is one of wasted opportunity coupled with the intense sensation of crushing disappointment and the faintest scent of Mycil Foot Powder…

I was a bright kid in my early school days and I cruised through my eleven plus* without any real idea that I had ever even taken it.  This is the pattern of my life: I am successful at things only when I don’t realise I am doing them.  In retrospect, that is the point at which everything started to go wrong.  Those of us who ‘went up’ to the grammar school from the council estate became class traitors, the enemy of some of those we had grown up with and, although I’m pretty certain that it never even occurred to any of my new school friends, I felt keenly a class structure that I had never encountered before and, most particularly, my own place at the bottom of it.  Worse, I had always been one of the brainboxes at my junior school, but here I was in the midst of an intake of about a hundred kids, all of whom I felt  were considerably brighter than me.  (They were.)  I knew that I was going to find school a challenge, but I was not prepared for the misery that a walk home through the streets of my formative years was to bring me, bedecked in the reviled Billy Bunter cap and blazer** I was forced to wear, facing the hatred of those whom I had formally thought of as friends.  A daily trip from school gate to Dante’s abandoned tenth level of Hell.  It was alarming how quickly I cracked. 

I buckled down for a while, tried to work my way through it – in class I had my hand up more often than a trainee vet – and at the end of my second year I was awarded the prize (a book about Tutenkhamen that I still have to this day) for ‘Progress and Industry’ which, even then I understood was a euphemism for ‘stupid, but tries hard’.  Armed with this knowledge, I immediately stopped trying hard and became a full-time pain in the arse instead.

I scraped a handful of GCSE passes by whatever means, I am not sure, having reached a point where I did not even attempt to offer an excuse for not doing my homework.  My low point being an assault on an English Literature exam having made no attempt whatsoever to read any of the three set texts: Twelfth Night a play that I thoroughly enjoyed seeing live, but could make neither head nor tail of on paper; Far from the Madding Crowd the coma-inducing text of which I hoped to bypass by reading about a quarter of a revision guide, and The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales which I saw no point whatsoever in even pretending to have read since I was so out of my depth by the foot of the first page that I would have required rescue by the RNLI***.  Never-the-less, for reasons I can only begin to imagine, I was offered a place in Sixth Form – a future-life enhancing gift that I gratefully accepted by making no effort at all to study during the two years I was granted.  For whomever it was who saw something in me back then, and for all of those who had to put up with me during those two years – most especially those who had to try and ‘teach’ me – I can only offer my sincere apologies.  I do, at least, now have the maturity to know how badly I behaved towards you, and the self-awareness to understand that I completely blew a chance that I didn’t really deserve in the first place. 

An opportunity wasted on an almost Oliver Reed scale…

*A basic IQ test, taken at age eleven, and the means of determining whether one went to Grammar School and took ‘O’ levels or went to Comprehensive School and learned to smoke.  That the most successful people I know failed the eleven plus, and most of those with emotional difficulties passed it, probably tells you all you need to know.

**God knows how my parents afforded it.  It cannot have been easy for them and, as my gratitude levels were below zero, not terribly fulfilling.  They never complained.  I wish they had.

***The Royal National Lifeboat Institute