FRUSTRATION.
Avoid this post if you aren't interested in me ranting about my school. Again.
Right, for this to make sense to people, you all have to take into account that my school is actually ridiculously fascist. All the time. Going there is like being on house arrest: you leave your house, go straight to school, go straight home. No going to shops, no meeting boys, nothing. In addition to this, we have all these stupid little rules that are completely and utterly unnecessary. Like, you can only wear scarves that are black, grey, white, navy blue or maroon 'Queen Ann crimson'. If it's the Wrong Colour, it gets confiscated. Same goes for hairbands, though a lot of the time you can get away with it. No jewellery, except a cross/crucifix which must be out of sight inside your shirt. You're not even allowed to wear WWJD bands. But then again, maybe all Church of England foundation schools make students hide the expressions of their faith.
Yeah, that's it. Perhaps I'm looking at this from the entirely wrong perspective. I mean, if students start wearing the wrong coloured socks to PE, the spirit of anarchy might spread to other parts of the school. Girls might start wearing rainbow hairclips, and the next thing you know, there'll be year 11s on the roof with machine guns.
Anyway, on with the story.
One of the deputy heads is called Ms. Lecky. She is annoying, tedious and self-absorbed. Yesterday my year was treated to a ten minute lecture on how the sixth form a few years ago was in a complete mess until she took over and sorted it out (single-handedly rescuing the school) and how it was really difficult because some students always refused to co-operate. (So... we got told off because a group of sixth formers from before we even came to the school misbehaved? Riiight...) She then went on to warn us that should we misbehave, they would not accept us into the school's sixth form. Brilliant. It was a pre-emptive telling-off. That's GCH school down to a T.
Yeah, so today she stood up and gave us what was pretty much exactly the same lecture again - only she called it a 'pep-talk'. HA. Whatever. Only this time she included the fact that she was 'aware that there are a lot of restrictions and rules in this school' and that 'perhaps the school motto about "raising independant women of the 21st century" is perhaps not being fulfilled'. I was feeling quite hopeful at this point, whatever I thought of Lecky. I thought that maybe the school had come to its senses, maybe they realised how irrational they were. Ha. What Lecky said went like this:
"The school motto says that one of our aims is to turn you all into independant 21st century women. And perhaps this isn't actually being fulfilled. We're considering changing the school motto."
Yep, that's it. They want to change the motto. Brilliant. Fantastic. They're changing the school motto instead of trying to change the school's policies. Does anyone else feel a little sceptical about this?
Also, the school trustees have bought up one of the residential houses behind the school to turn into offices and 'seminar rooms'. This makes me ask two questions:
1. Wouldn't it make more sense to turn the houses into somewhere for the students to eat, since at the moment we all have to sit on the floor on the stairwell because we have no where to sit down and eat?
2. How come the school can afford to buy houses in SW1 but we still have to use history textbooks from 1979?
So after school, as we were heading out of school, my friend Amy happened to be wearing a scarf, in school colours. And Ms. Pickard, ex-PE teacher bitch, built like a tank and with about the same amout of human emotion as one, came up to her and kept saying about how Amy shouldn't be wearing it in the building. Amy said she only had it on because she was just about to walk out the door. Pickard kept going on about how bad Amy was making her feel (POT. KETTLE. BLACK.) and Amy goes, "Miss, you're making me feel bad too" and then "I just don't think that the whole scarf thing is very important." And Pickard dragged her off to her office, where she and two other members of senior management shouted at Amy, who came out crying.
In the meantime, while we were waiting for her we were told off twice by teachers for having the audacity to be in the school foyer twenty minutes after the end of school, rather waiting outside where it was about 5 degrees.
Okay, okay. I know how whoever is reading this is feeling. You think I'm making a bit deal of this, that I'm blowing this all out of proportion and acting like a child. But the thing is, I've had to put up with this crap for the last five years. That's five years of blanket punishments, and stupid rules and irrational teachers and the thing is: my friends aren't even the Bad People in the school. We're good. We don't answer back, we don't do anything. But expressing your opinion in a perfectly polite way appears to count as answering back now. We're good.
I don't think that it's what actually happened today that made me so angry. That's just stuff. That's not really it. I think what it actually is that makes me so angry is that all this unfair and illogical stuff is going on around me and I can't stop it. I hate people being illogical, it's infuriating. But there's actually absolutely no way I can get my opinion across to teachers. It's like there's a huge gaping chasm between us, which I can't get across and the teachers seem to have no motivation to build a bridge. And if I shout my opinion across then it will just be taken as rudeness.
Right, I know. This is a pathetic and long and uninteresting rant which reveals just how much of a teenager I am. And I know there are bigger and more important things to get angry about, but these are all things in my world. These are a big deal to me. The teachers act like they're a big deal, so I complain about them like they're a big deal. If the school treated these rules with the respect they deserved...
I'm absolutely certain that I will look back and read this entry and groan at how spoilt and petty I sound. Yeah.
Right, for this to make sense to people, you all have to take into account that my school is actually ridiculously fascist. All the time. Going there is like being on house arrest: you leave your house, go straight to school, go straight home. No going to shops, no meeting boys, nothing. In addition to this, we have all these stupid little rules that are completely and utterly unnecessary. Like, you can only wear scarves that are black, grey, white, navy blue or maroon 'Queen Ann crimson'. If it's the Wrong Colour, it gets confiscated. Same goes for hairbands, though a lot of the time you can get away with it. No jewellery, except a cross/crucifix which must be out of sight inside your shirt. You're not even allowed to wear WWJD bands. But then again, maybe all Church of England foundation schools make students hide the expressions of their faith.
Yeah, that's it. Perhaps I'm looking at this from the entirely wrong perspective. I mean, if students start wearing the wrong coloured socks to PE, the spirit of anarchy might spread to other parts of the school. Girls might start wearing rainbow hairclips, and the next thing you know, there'll be year 11s on the roof with machine guns.
Anyway, on with the story.
One of the deputy heads is called Ms. Lecky. She is annoying, tedious and self-absorbed. Yesterday my year was treated to a ten minute lecture on how the sixth form a few years ago was in a complete mess until she took over and sorted it out (single-handedly rescuing the school) and how it was really difficult because some students always refused to co-operate. (So... we got told off because a group of sixth formers from before we even came to the school misbehaved? Riiight...) She then went on to warn us that should we misbehave, they would not accept us into the school's sixth form. Brilliant. It was a pre-emptive telling-off. That's GCH school down to a T.
Yeah, so today she stood up and gave us what was pretty much exactly the same lecture again - only she called it a 'pep-talk'. HA. Whatever. Only this time she included the fact that she was 'aware that there are a lot of restrictions and rules in this school' and that 'perhaps the school motto about "raising independant women of the 21st century" is perhaps not being fulfilled'. I was feeling quite hopeful at this point, whatever I thought of Lecky. I thought that maybe the school had come to its senses, maybe they realised how irrational they were. Ha. What Lecky said went like this:
"The school motto says that one of our aims is to turn you all into independant 21st century women. And perhaps this isn't actually being fulfilled. We're considering changing the school motto."
Yep, that's it. They want to change the motto. Brilliant. Fantastic. They're changing the school motto instead of trying to change the school's policies. Does anyone else feel a little sceptical about this?
Also, the school trustees have bought up one of the residential houses behind the school to turn into offices and 'seminar rooms'. This makes me ask two questions:
1. Wouldn't it make more sense to turn the houses into somewhere for the students to eat, since at the moment we all have to sit on the floor on the stairwell because we have no where to sit down and eat?
2. How come the school can afford to buy houses in SW1 but we still have to use history textbooks from 1979?
So after school, as we were heading out of school, my friend Amy happened to be wearing a scarf, in school colours. And Ms. Pickard, ex-PE teacher bitch, built like a tank and with about the same amout of human emotion as one, came up to her and kept saying about how Amy shouldn't be wearing it in the building. Amy said she only had it on because she was just about to walk out the door. Pickard kept going on about how bad Amy was making her feel (POT. KETTLE. BLACK.) and Amy goes, "Miss, you're making me feel bad too" and then "I just don't think that the whole scarf thing is very important." And Pickard dragged her off to her office, where she and two other members of senior management shouted at Amy, who came out crying.
In the meantime, while we were waiting for her we were told off twice by teachers for having the audacity to be in the school foyer twenty minutes after the end of school, rather waiting outside where it was about 5 degrees.
Okay, okay. I know how whoever is reading this is feeling. You think I'm making a bit deal of this, that I'm blowing this all out of proportion and acting like a child. But the thing is, I've had to put up with this crap for the last five years. That's five years of blanket punishments, and stupid rules and irrational teachers and the thing is: my friends aren't even the Bad People in the school. We're good. We don't answer back, we don't do anything. But expressing your opinion in a perfectly polite way appears to count as answering back now. We're good.
I don't think that it's what actually happened today that made me so angry. That's just stuff. That's not really it. I think what it actually is that makes me so angry is that all this unfair and illogical stuff is going on around me and I can't stop it. I hate people being illogical, it's infuriating. But there's actually absolutely no way I can get my opinion across to teachers. It's like there's a huge gaping chasm between us, which I can't get across and the teachers seem to have no motivation to build a bridge. And if I shout my opinion across then it will just be taken as rudeness.
Right, I know. This is a pathetic and long and uninteresting rant which reveals just how much of a teenager I am. And I know there are bigger and more important things to get angry about, but these are all things in my world. These are a big deal to me. The teachers act like they're a big deal, so I complain about them like they're a big deal. If the school treated these rules with the respect they deserved...
I'm absolutely certain that I will look back and read this entry and groan at how spoilt and petty I sound. Yeah.