Tag Archives: primary school

The Pain (and Joy) of Sending Your Kid to School

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Jack’s last day of nursery was melancholic. For me. Not for him. He ran out with a smile on his face and a spring in his step, just like he had every other day. I alone was left to feel the weight of time pressing upon both our shoulders, leaving Jack free to dance between sunbeams in the soft summer breeze. As it should be. That’s part of a your job as a parent: to absorb life’s upsets and irreconcilable truths on behalf of your children so that in later life their existential horrors can be all their own.

When that nursery door slammed shut behind Jack on that last day, he had no idea it would stay shut forever. It sounded like a gun-shot to me, but he didn’t even flinch. Future, past, and present run together in his thoughts like an artist’s palette in the rain. His life – time itself – isn’t portioned or partitioned, and so existence simply is, and things simply are. There’s nothing to fret about; no subtext to analyse. Christ, I envy him. [gulps down another Citalopram]

My wife and I took Jack out of nursery on a Thursday, a week before term officially ended, because we were flying out for a family holiday/honeymoon combo that very afternoon. I collected him at mid-day, a few hours before take-off. As we left the building his classmates were still whooping and dashing and laughing, business as usual, so Jack had no sense of something momentous having happened. There were no cues around him to tell him how to feel. It made me wonder just how much of our sadness is ceremony, a ritual learned like the steps of some lugubrious waltz. It is sad, though. The best, happiest and most innocent days of his life are now behind him, and, in a cruel twist of fate and biology, he probably won’t ever remember them.

Us on Jacks first day of school. His crazy little brother his doing his Gollum thing in the background

The end of nursery and the beginning of primary education can be a tough transition for children and parents alike. Walking through your kid’s nursery class as a parent or guardian is like walking through some wonderful dream. It’s a magical, toy-filled living room you never have to tidy up, with grubby, screaming kids in it that you never have to endure for any longer than you absolutely need to. You can spend as little or as much time in there as you like. When you drop your kid off in the morning you can spend twenty minutes helping them to settle, feigning wonderment at their ten thousand identical pictures of stick men, and variously tripping over other people’s children; when you pick them up at the end of the day you can spend another twenty minutes in hovering about, hoping that the nursery teacher isn’t going to pull you aside to tell you that your little cherub has stabbed a fork into another kid’s eye, or started reciting grandpa’s favourite racist rhyme about Chinese people.

During the day you can pop in to drop off egg cartons, or bits of pasta with googly eyes drawn on them, or a bag of Y-Fronts, or illuminous hymn books, or whatever crazy shit they’ve asked you to donate this month. You can stick around for the bulk of the day helping them to make fairy cakes with bogies baked into them, or build towers out of tea-bags, tea-spoons and tubs of butter. You can turn up in the middle of the day and take your kid out of class to attend a Mongolian throat singing lesson, if that’s what tickles your fancy. Nursery is an amorphous, collective experience.

School isn’t, and by necessity it can’t be, because part of school’s function is to prepare children for the hellish institutions in which they’ll find themselves trapped as adults, and you can’t take your favourite aunty, rolls of sticky-back plastic, coloured paper and a stuffed parrot to work with you as an adult, unless, that is, your favourite aunty has a massive stroke and you’re employed as her carer.

When you drop your child off for their first regular day of school, you’re bundling them into a fortress. This isn’t your world anymore. YOU… SHALL NOT PASS! The military discipline starts aproper. The kids are organised into quiet, at-heel little lines, awaiting the clanging-ding of the school bell and the Pavlovian rigours of the education system… although with rather more of an emphasis on gluing things and drawing pictures of cats than that last sentence implies.

Jack jumped into his first day with happiness and curiosity. As we all sat in the gymnasium receiving our talk from the headmistress, teachers started calling out kids’ names so they could be grouped together for the walk to class. When Jack heard his name, you’d have thought he’d won an Academy Award. ‘That’s me! That’s my name!’ he said, jumping out of his seat.

I have only vague recollections of my early years at primary school, little flutters of memory, like magic cuts of video-reel blown in the wind: pipe cleaners; that glue that sets on your hand like a second gooey skin; the smell of chalk and sadness; little desks arranged like rows of square islands at which our tiny forms were marooned, adrift in a sea of quiet and boredom; dusters the size of 100-year-old tortoises.

Things are different for Jack (and will be for his brother, Chris, who’s still got a few blissful years of googly-eyed pasta in-front of him). They’re better. The powers that be have closed the gulf between nursery and the early years of primary school. They now all bleed into each other, making the transition between the two a lot smoother, and a lot less daunting. We’ve finally cottoned on to the fact that little kids are better taught through play, fun, and tactile learning. There’s plenty of time for them to sit deathly still in a suffocatingly quiet room bored shitless and wishing they could escape once they join the work-force.

I remember my primary one teacher, Miss Donaldson, a thin, teetering waif of a woman whose head looked altogether too delicate to rest upon her stick-like shoulders. She was like Popeye’s Olive Oil but with big 80s glasses, and the personality of an awkward and squirrelly church organist who didn’t really like children. Her skin was a waxy alabaster, her cheeks a bright rosy red, like they’d just been pinched by a crab. She once shouted at me for opening my packed lunch about a minute before the lunch bell, and my mum came to school to shout at her. I had some of my first sexual thoughts about Miss Donaldson. They were wholly PG in flavour, of course, because no 18-rated input had yet reached my eyes (and glands). I had a dream where she gently rebuked me while parading about in white underwear. This tells me that I must’ve studied the lingerie section of the Argos catalogue in some detail at some point in my very formative years.

Luckily – or perhaps unluckily – for Jack, most primary school teachers these days are young, attractive urban professionals in their mid-twenties, so any burgeoning romantic and sexual fantasies he goes on to develop around the authority figures in his life will be a little less Dickensian in character.

It scares and excites me in equal measure that Jack is now a few notches removed from the sphere of our parental influence, and will continue to move further away with each passing year. Our input, once absolute, will now be diluted, and sometimes overwhelmed by the data and cues he receives from other sources: peers, teachers, other authority figures. I’m excited to see him learn new skills and information, uncover hidden talents and barter with exciting ideas and concepts, but I’m terrified of that inevitable day when some wee git in his class tells him what a dildo is.

I was largely a good little guy when I was a nipper, although I was undeniably off-kilter. At home, when I was 4, the local farmer had to chap my mum’s door to tell her I was in his field ‘yaa-ing’ at the half-wild horses like I was a cowboy. When I was 5, at the height of my parents’ divorce, amid the uncertainty and confusion, I blagged my way out of the class at day’s end and walked 2 miles home on my own. A few years later I tried to get our headteacher to sign off on distributing a comic I’d co-produced with a classmate, a request she denied on the grounds that the strip on the front cover showed a man boiling a baby. FASCIST!

I wonder what stories and memories my kids will have to share once they’re looking back on their school days, Wonder Years-style, like I am now.

God bless technology, is all I can say. It’s a modern scourge, certainly, but also an indispensable window on Jack’s learning. We, as parents, may be physically blocked from the classroom (except on play-days and parents’ nights), but social media grants us full access to their daily activities and highlights. We need this, because Jack has already become a teenager.

‘How was school?’

‘Good.’

‘What did you learn about?’

‘Stuff.’

[sigh]

[consults phone]

It’s going to be an interesting twelve years.

Young Jamie: Portrait of the Artist as a Wee Bastard – Part 1: Merlin

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Have a read at this story I wrote when I was eight-years-old, and then wallow in the pointlessness of it all as my 35-year-old self tries to provide some context.

MERLIN

It all starts off very innocently, like Enid Blyton meets Tolkein with a homeopathic splash of Clive Barker. A bunch of lads on a quest for treasure, facing adversary, fighting foes and helping each other out along the way. Aaarrgghhh, a wolf! Never fear: you can always bet on karate Callum and his sharp sword of lupine vengeance! Yay! Aaaarrrgghh, a canyon! Never fear: we’ve got bridge helmets! Ya… wait a minute, we’ve got what? You know, bridge helmets; it’s not phallic or a horrible medical condition or anything, it’s literally a helmet that shoots out a bridge to aid safe passage in times of trouble! Oh well, in that case… YAY! ‘Mon the bridge helmets!

Aaaarrrgghh, a pit of snakes…It’s at this point where everything becomes a little bit Tarantino-y. A new cast of characters from my class is introduced, who are all summarily dispatched in a series of increasingly brutal ways. Oh, Hi Brian…KABOOM! Brian? BRIAN? Hey, Kenny, how’s it goi… AAARRRGGHH! Into the pit with you, Kenny, and you’d better not even think about inexplicably finding a sword in that pit of snakes! Oh, you’ve inexplicably found a sword in that pit of snakes, have you? Well, I haven’t got time to ponder the ridiculousness of that plot contrivance, for I am about to ENGAGE THE BRIDGE HELMET, AN INSTRUMENT OF MERCY THAT I DOTH REPURPOSE AS A WEAPON OF WAR! SAY TOODLE PIP TO YOUR NECK, YOU SWORD-FINDING MOTHERFUCKER! Any more baddies want to try their luck? Oh, hi James Dick… I Hope you’re a fan of… face-punching! Biff! Boof! Badam! As if it wasn’t bad enough already for the poor boy having to suffer through primary school with a surname like Dick (subtlety and compassion are rare bed-fellows indeed among the male under 20s), he gets put into my story and further brutalised by enduring a murky, open-ended fate at the hands of a gorilla.

‘A gorilla found him.’ It says so much without really saying anything at all, leaving you, the reader, to imagine for yourself the specifics of poor James’ treatment at the hands of this savage bipedal beast. I’m leaning towards a biblical interpretation of ‘found’. I always imagine a gentle ‘tap tap’ of the shoulder followed by a blood-curdling scream, and an angry, whispered warning from the gorilla that ‘what happens in the dark, dark forest, STAYS in the dark, dark forest, son.’

At least Craig gets the kind of quick death that can only come from being ‘found’ by a comet (it’s too weird to consider a biblical interpretation of ‘found’ in this instance, although feel free to imagine a frightened boy being fucked by a comet). Thankfully for my band of merry goodies, and the wider planet, the comet only seems to scorch a one-human-sized area of ground, leaving me to doubt that what we’re dealing with here is actually a comet. They’re not renowned for their precision. By my young self’s comet-related reckoning, the dinosaurs should’ve been able to harmlessly header their comet back into space and get on with lumbering about and eating things.

The ending’s a bit rushed, in the sense that there’s a fire, the all-too-convenient discovery of WATER HELMETS and a whopping one-hundred-grand pot of prize money. I dunno, death, murder, cold-heartedness, greed. It’s clear I was a child growing up in Thatcher’s Britain. All that was missing from the narrative was a magical poll-tax riot.

A lot of elements in this tale that are ripe for Freudian analysis: extending helmets, helmets that spray liquid, a pit of snakes, a boy called Dick. This story was clearly about my own penis.

I love my teacher’s red-pen critique at the end, which boils down to: ‘Loved the story, Jamie, really loved it, right up until the bit where you murdered all of your friends, you fucking sociopath.’

Young Jamie – Confessions of a Serial Douchebag (Part 13)

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Little Marcos was an adventure play-area in Glasgow. I could've drawn a thousand different things to represent the experience on the page: colourful things, fun things. Instead I chose a giant sign that reads 'Little Marcos'. A sign, I may add, that never existed in real life. How can I be sure it never existed? Because the little stick family I drew beneath it suggests a scale that would place the sign somewhere in the region of sixty-feet above our heads, and composed of letters more than a hundred feet high. It's a degree of opulence that tends not to exist outside of Stalinist Russia or an alternate universe where the Nazis won. Clearly I had a lot of space to fill on that page, and instead of offering a considered and detailed picture, my young brain simply thought, 'Fuck it, teacher, you're getting big letters and you'll be happy with them, pal.' And, indeed, the teacher seemed satisfied, seeing fit to dispense another in a long line of too-easy ticks. I would’ve respected her more had she written: “Jamie, you’re a lazy wee cock. If you were Van Gogh I expect that your famous self-portrait would've been a canvas with the words 'THIS IS ME' written on it. PS You disgust me.” Screw her, though, because she didn’t seem to notice that I’d spelled Little Marcos “Little Mar'Cos”, with an apostrophe half-way through the word, as if it was a Klingon moon or something. Actually, where does the apostrophe go? Was the proprietor Marco, or his Spanish cousin Marcos? Was there one little Marco, or several? OK, this one's a bit of a minefield, so I think I'll excuse my teacher's brazen approach to marking in this instance. Less forgiveable is the blind eye she turned to my spelling of “cousin's”. Going to my cussons party was I, teach? The soap party? All of us herded into a big warehouse, being scrubbed down for three hours? You bloody goof-ball of a woman. Anyway. I think I should be commended for coming up with an alternative set of lyrics to 'Fast Car' that improve the song immeasurably. Try it. Experiment with different ways of fitting my diary extract to the song. I did. For about ten minutes. AND THEY SAID I’D COME TO NOTHING?!!

Little Marcos was an adventure play-area in Glasgow. I could’ve drawn a thousand different things to represent the experience on the page: colourful things, fun things. Instead I chose a giant sign that reads ‘Little Marcos’. A sign, I may add, that never existed in real life. How can I be sure it never existed? Because the little stick family I drew beneath it suggests a scale that would place the sign somewhere in the region of sixty-feet above our heads, and composed of letters more than a hundred feet high. It’s a degree of opulence that tends not to exist outside of Stalinist Russia or an alternate universe where the Nazis won. Clearly I had a lot of space to fill on that page, and instead of offering a considered and detailed picture, my young brain simply thought, ‘Fuck it, teacher, you’re getting big letters and you’ll be happy with them, pal.’ And, indeed, the teacher seemed satisfied, seeing fit to dispense another in a long line of too-easy ticks. I would’ve respected her more had she written: “Jamie, you’re a lazy wee cock. If you were Van Gogh I expect that your famous self-portrait would’ve been a canvas with the words ‘THIS IS ME’ written on it. PS You disgust me.” Screw her, though, because she didn’t seem to notice that I’d spelled Little Marcos “Little Mar’Cos”, with an apostrophe half-way through the word, as if it was a Klingon moon or something. Actually, where does the apostrophe go? Was the proprietor Marco, or his Spanish cousin Marcos? Was there one little Marco, or several? OK, this one’s a bit of a minefield, so I think I’ll excuse my teacher’s brazen approach to marking in this instance.
Less forgiveable is the blind eye she turned to my spelling of “cousin’s”. Going to my cussons party was I, teach? The soap party? All of us herded into a big warehouse, being scrubbed down for three hours? You bloody goof-ball of a woman.
Anyway. I think I should be commended for coming up with an alternative set of lyrics to ‘Fast Car’ that improve the song immeasurably. Try it. Experiment with different ways of fitting my diary extract to the song. I did. For about ten minutes. AND THEY SAID I’D COME TO NOTHING?!!

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 11)

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pineshop

First of all, I know a teacher’s job is to steer pupils towards greater knowledge and understanding without emphasising their ignorance or undermining their fragile confidence, but surely, in this case, it would’ve been appropriate for my teacher to have remarked: “THAT’S a fucking motorbike, is it, Jamie? THAT thing, that looks like a log on wheels with a human face and a blue top-hat, with a scorpion’s stinger coming out of its ass? Maybe you should’ve been smacked in place of Tasha, you dense little dickbag, along with whomever named that dog Tasha in the first place. Tasha? Is it a dog or a Slovenian hooker? I’m absolutely convinced that your entire family should be exterminated. At the very least, I hope you’ll be infertile, Jamie.” That’s what I would’ve written in response to this piece of shit, so it was probably a blessing that I never went into primary teaching. I can see it now: “Timmy, you’ve spelled your name Tymmee. Look, let’s just stop wasting each other’s time here before one of us gets hurt. I’d strongly advise you to get the fuck out of my class and never come back.” Normally the teacher writes in red at the bottom of the page those words the pupil has spelled wrongly, to let them practise spelling it out correctly. Here, the teacher has used this space to convey her incredulity that my family would be going to a pine shop to buy a car. “A pine shop?” she gasps. “A pine shop?” I rage back at her. “Haven’t you heard of a pine shop, woman? What are you, working class? Where else would my family go to replenish its fleet of wooden cars, you arsehole?”

Young Jamie: Kindergarten Cock (Part 6)

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Coasters was a roller-skating rink. It was essentially a giant, health and safety nightmare: you could hire rickety, worn-away boots with wobbly wheels; feel safe under the protective gaze of psychopathically disinterested marshals; navigate a wooden rink that still had nails sticking through it; and embrace a million opportunities to trip over the stalls of the grandstand or tumble down concrete stairs to your doom. Coasters operated at a time when nobody cared if their kid came home with a broken hip, or dead. Anyway, skating wasn't the point. Coasters wasn't really for skating. It was a place where teenage girls went to get fingered. But on wheels! (Richard Desmond, if you're reading this page, now is the best time to commission 'Strictly Come Fingered on Skates' for Channel 5) I remember shitting myself at Coasters - literally shitting myself. Sexy, eh? Right into a pair of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle orange Y-fronts. Probably mushed the turtle's head right into Splinter's face. I'm pretty sure, given when the Hero Turtles were on TV, that when this shitting occurred I would have been a) way too old to have been wearing Hero Turtle Y-fronts and b) too old to be accidentally shitting myself in public. I whipped them off in the cubicles, smuggled them outside and stashed them under a big pile of litter. Sorry council workers. I know a child's poo pants aren't exactly considered the jewel in the crown of a working day. Anyway, my sister will love this drawing. I've given her the waist, hips and torso of the big black woman from the Tom and Jerry cartoons, plus the haircut of a 53-year-old woman. Not to mention a London police uniform from 1952. And I've made her boyfriend look like Freddy Krueger with bad acne. I wonder where Angelo is now? Probably running a chip shop somewhere. Or a skating rink.

Coasters was a roller-skating rink. It was essentially a giant, health and safety nightmare: you could hire rickety, worn-away boots with wobbly wheels; feel safe under the protective gaze of psychopathically disinterested marshals; navigate a wooden rink that still had nails sticking through it; and embrace a million opportunities to trip over the stalls of the grandstand or tumble down concrete stairs to your doom. Coasters operated at a time when nobody cared if their kid came home with a broken hip, or dead. Anyway, skating wasn’t the point. Coasters wasn’t really for skating. It was a place where teenage girls went to get fingered. But on wheels! (Richard Desmond, if you’re reading this page, now is the best time to commission ‘Strictly Come Fingered on Skates’ for Channel 5) I remember shitting myself at Coasters – literally shitting myself. Sexy, eh? Right into a pair of Teenage Mutant Hero Turtle orange Y-fronts. Probably mushed the turtle’s head right into Splinter’s face. I’m pretty sure, given when the Hero Turtles were on TV, that when this shitting occurred I would have been a) way too old to have been wearing Hero Turtle Y-fronts and b) too old to be accidentally shitting myself in public. I whipped them off in the cubicles, smuggled them outside and stashed them under a big pile of litter. Sorry council workers. I know a child’s poo pants aren’t exactly considered the jewel in the crown of a working day. Anyway, my sister will love this drawing. I’ve given her the waist, hips and torso of the big black woman from the Tom and Jerry cartoons, plus the haircut of a 53-year-old woman. Not to mention a London police uniform from 1952. And I’ve made her boyfriend look like Freddy Krueger with bad acne. I wonder where Angelo is now? Probably running a chip shop somewhere. Or a skating rink.

Young Jamie: Kindergarten Cock (Part 5)

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This entry documents what was likely my very first encounter with a real, live English person. Not that I was in the habit of socialising with English corpses, you understand (although that would explain a lot). At least this proves I wasn’t exposed to strong anti-Sassenach sentiments in the home. It would have been distressing for me to have come across a childhood diary entry that went like this: ‘Met Bryan from England. Stabbed him for Culloden. Did homework.’ Thankfully, I only assassinated Bryan’s character, not his nationality. Boring. Is there any worse label? Well, OK, ‘murderer’ is slightly worse, and I dare say most light entertainers from the 1970s would kill to be remembered as ‘boring’ right now. It’s not a good thing to be called, though, is it?: ‘Aw, you’re really gonna love Bryan; he’s so boring!!!’ Bryan’s a name that drips with boring anyway. If his parents knew they were going to pass on the STD of dullness to their son they should have taken preventative measures and called him Papa-Zulu, or The Hawk. Or Dancing Peter or something. Did you see what happened in the text though? I didn’t just call Bryan ‘boring.’ I said he was boring ‘aswell.’ As well as me? What a high opinion I had of myself. We probably just sat there in that shed sipping green tea, as I flipped through my stamp collection, and he made a series of withering remarks about how impossibly high the mortgage rate was for first time buyers. Thank god my un-boring cousin turned up to add an exciting dash of bullying into the mix!

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 9)

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I was ahead of my time as a joke writer. At the age of seven I’d already decided that set-ups were superfluous. The real secret to comedy magic, I knew, lay in omitting integral qualifying components, spelling shit wrong and moving straight to the punch line. Hell, sometimes a free-floating punch line is all you need. ‘To get to the other side! He smells terrible! I’ve got some cream for that! I’m here all fucking week, ladies and gentlemen.‘ So why, you may ask, is the narrator baa-ing when there’s been no mention of sheep? Who cares??! This shit’s funny! Regrettably, that joke is still funnier than anything I’ve written since. Nice screwdriver joke, though, Young Me. It’s not my favourite screwdriver joke of all time, though. My favourite screwdriver joke is the one where this nun walks up to a broken-down bus, and she sees its driver mucking about with wires and panels. He’s desperately trying to repair it, and she looks him up and down and then shouts to him: ’Do you need a screwdriver?’, and he shouts back, ‘Mmmmmooooooooooo!’

I was ahead of my time as a joke writer. At the age of seven I’d already decided that set-ups were superfluous. The real secret to comedy magic, I knew, lay in omitting integral qualifying components, spelling shit wrong and moving straight to the punch line. Hell, sometimes a free-floating punch line is all you need. ‘To get to the other side! He smells terrible! I’ve got some cream for that! I’m here all fucking week, ladies and gentlemen.‘ So why, you may ask, is the narrator baa-ing when there’s been no mention of sheep? Who cares??! This shit’s funny! Regrettably, that joke is still funnier than anything I’ve written since. Nice screwdriver joke, though, Young Me. It’s not my favourite screwdriver joke of all time, though. My favourite screwdriver joke is the one where this nun walks up to a broken-down bus, and she sees its driver mucking about with wires and panels. He’s desperately trying to repair it, and she looks him up and down and then shouts to him: ’Do you need a screwdriver?’, and he shouts back, ‘Mmmmmooooooooooo!’

Young Jamie: Portrait of a Serial Douchebag (Part 1)

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I found a holdall in my mum’s attic that’s full of old jotters from primary school. Over the next few weeks I’m going to share a few choice entries from primaries 2 – 5.

Today’s sample comes from my Primary 2 News jotter, in which I expertly summarised my actions, thoughts and deeds from the weekend.

Ah, yes. I might've been greedy (seventeen colouring books? How very middle-class of me) and shit at writing, but at least I had counting nailed. There are indeed seventeen splodges of colour in the beautifully rendered picture above the diary entry. I was deadly at counting, and this skill has paid dividends in the adult world. I'm awesome at counting up how much money I don't have. Sorry for saying there were seventeen splodges of colour. There are clearly 'seventeene.' It wasn't a spelling mistake, as my teacher knew fine well. Clearly I was so advanced I'd decided to slip in a wee bit of Shakespeare.

Ah, yes. I might’ve been greedy (seventeen colouring books? How very middle-class of me) and shit at writing, but at least I had counting nailed. There are indeed seventeen splodges of colour in the beautifully rendered picture above the diary entry. I was excellent at counting, and this is a skill that has proven indispensable in the adult world. Now I can itemise all of my bitter regrets, and count up all of the money I don’t have. Sorry for saying there were seventeen splodges of colour. There are clearly ‘seventeene.’ It wasn’t a spelling mistake, as my teacher knew fine well. Clearly I was so advanced I decided to slip in a wee bit of Shakespeare. I was always doing that at school. Even when I needed a piss I’d put my hand up and say, ‘O but that thou wouldst graciously grant me leave from this place so that I may take a wee-wee, perchance a jobby, fair maiden.’ Either that or I’d just blow my face purple and shite in my Ghostbusters’ Y-fronts right there at my desk. Also note how I clarified my intended use of the colouring book to avoid confusion: ‘to colour in.’ Why am I not Prime Minister by now?