School issues
Jul. 3rd, 2012 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnI got an invite to a school reunion. I'm not going.
I have many complicated and stressful feelings about the private school I attended, but most of them are not good. Clearly, from the fact that there IS a reunion, and apparently a spontaneous one, not organised by the school, some of the other people who went there thought it was great, but I am full of the not having enough words to describe how dismal it was. I have never been so bored, cold, miserable, bored, uncomfortable, humiliated, oh, and did I mention bored?
You know the episode of Doctor Who where he goes into hiding as a human teacher at a boarding school in 1913? It was like that. Marginally less violent, but only marginally. And this was in the 1980's. Compulsory rifle practice in uniform. I am not kidding. (I can't actually remember now if the bayonet practice that I am thinking happened... really happened. Surely, it can't have done. Can it? ) OK, in the event of zombie apocalypse some of my school skills will probably come in very handy, but until then, I have forgotten as much as I feasibly can about my schooldays, and am working hard on forgetting the rest of it.
What baffles me now is that once I'd worked this out, I didn't simply ask to go somewhere else. I was there for six years : I could easily have changed, but I didn't. I think by the time I'd really got my head around the place a degree of learned helplessness had set in, and I just sat there like a rabbit in a box rather than getting my act together. Fortunately, I am not a natural arsonist. If I were, it would have burned to embers many years ago.
I ignored the first Facebook message (damn you Facebook!). Then I got another one. I have just managed to get my act together enough to say 'sorry, no thanks' politely to the person who contacted me: a person whose existence I had completely forgotten, but probably didn't deserve the wail of 'GO AWAYYYY!' that was my instinctive reaction...
I have many complicated and stressful feelings about the private school I attended, but most of them are not good. Clearly, from the fact that there IS a reunion, and apparently a spontaneous one, not organised by the school, some of the other people who went there thought it was great, but I am full of the not having enough words to describe how dismal it was. I have never been so bored, cold, miserable, bored, uncomfortable, humiliated, oh, and did I mention bored?
You know the episode of Doctor Who where he goes into hiding as a human teacher at a boarding school in 1913? It was like that. Marginally less violent, but only marginally. And this was in the 1980's. Compulsory rifle practice in uniform. I am not kidding. (I can't actually remember now if the bayonet practice that I am thinking happened... really happened. Surely, it can't have done. Can it? ) OK, in the event of zombie apocalypse some of my school skills will probably come in very handy, but until then, I have forgotten as much as I feasibly can about my schooldays, and am working hard on forgetting the rest of it.
What baffles me now is that once I'd worked this out, I didn't simply ask to go somewhere else. I was there for six years : I could easily have changed, but I didn't. I think by the time I'd really got my head around the place a degree of learned helplessness had set in, and I just sat there like a rabbit in a box rather than getting my act together. Fortunately, I am not a natural arsonist. If I were, it would have burned to embers many years ago.
I ignored the first Facebook message (damn you Facebook!). Then I got another one. I have just managed to get my act together enough to say 'sorry, no thanks' politely to the person who contacted me: a person whose existence I had completely forgotten, but probably didn't deserve the wail of 'GO AWAYYYY!' that was my instinctive reaction...
