I Hated My Secondary School

If you read my other blog on why I hated my primary school, you'll know I put up with a lot of things a child younger than 10 shouldn't put up with because it was either dumb, irrational, or just pointless. Secondary School was another hell hole entirely. It wasn't as deep as a hole but there were twice as many demons, pitch forks, and fire. That much stress shouldn't be put on a year 7 to begin with.

To be honest, I fairly enjoyed year 7. It was a new start with new people and a new opportunity to learn. I really enjoy learning, I really do. It's just school in general that sort of prohibits my motivation to do so.

I think we all know that school isn't a place to learn. Its a place to absorb as much information as possible over five years just to regurgitate it out onto a test and later forget all the information because there will never be a moment in the real world that will come even close to needing to know what you had to. In the words of Rick Sanchez: "School isn't a place for smart people."

But yeah, year 7 wasn't too bad. The worst that came out of it was the bullying. I thought primary school was bad for bullying and I couldn't be more wrong. In primary school, I was teased pretty harmlessly and was able to come home every day without feeling the need to cry my eyes out. Secondary School was like transitioning to a grazed knee to losing the whole leg entirely.

I don't remember a day of secondary school other than year 7 and 11 that I wasn't afraid to turn up or where I didn't come home hating everything around me. I was pushed, tripped, hair pulled, all sorts of insults about my red hair, just any swear word with the word ginger added to it and I guarantee I have been called that and conkers thrown at my head on a daily basis.

One of the saddest parts about that was that there was a student with a physical disability who could have been so easily picked on because of it, looking at how I was treated. He didn't seem to have any ability to move hit arms or even bend his elbow. I'm not really sure what was wrong. I'm not trying to make fun of him for this or think that he should have been bullied... but he was never picked on. He joined the bullies. My red hair was considered as a more disturbing, physical deformity than having no ability to move your arms.

During my teen years, I was never diagnosed with depression or anorexia but I was very sure something was wrong with me. I was bullied at home as well as at school and my home life is another blog for another day. But having negativity coming from both sides of my life was a massive toll on my mental health and I remember often thinking that I just wanted to die. Or trade my life for children living in poverty because I honestly believed they were better off than me.

I never attempted suicide. The closest was deliberately starving myself. I'm actually surprised I didn't, to be honest. I guess I was just terrified of dying.

Through primary school, we were all taught the Christian belief system. It was constantly drilled into our heads so I was taught to believe in God and that Jesus died for our sins on the cross. Secondary school threw my faith out the window so quickly I didn't notice it a first.

Year 8 was known as "the lost year" because you're not really working towards anything. You're just there for, pretty much, the hell of it. In year 7, you're taking in the new environment and learning to wrap your head around how stuff works. In year 9, it't all about weight your options for your GCSEs and getting a taste for GCSE life with a mini science exam at the end that counts towards them a little. Year 10 and 11 are all work, no play. Every day is either an exam, or studying for one to get your overall final GCSE grade that will follow you around for the rest of your life. In year 8, you're just... there. You know how everything works, you know everyone in your year but there's just no end goal. All I remember during that time was being bored, being a kiss-ass to the teachers, and bragging to my younger sisters who were still in primary how much smarter I was than them.

I had a new math teacher every year and more often than not, they were nice people. Until they just had to end on a low note with Miss McAlistar. Before her was Mrs. Dali, an Indian woman who was very kind to me and I missed seeing her leave. Her reason for leaving was understandable. When she first came to the UK, however many years ago, there was a woman who took the role of her mother and taught her British culture. She started developing dementia and Mrs. Dalvi had to leave to school to take care of her.

I was dreading a new teacher because I was so used to Mrs. Dalvi and I didn't want her to be replaced by someone who undid all her hard work to get me engaged in maths. My fears were confirmed when I walked into the room and met Miss McAlistar. You know when you look at someone and the first thing that comes into your head is non child-friendly vocabulary?

She literally looked like she should be teaching maths. She was one of those 4ft tall, older women teachers with painfully short hair and naturally very intimidating. I heard a rumour after I left from my sister that she was fired for throwing a chair at a student. It seems far fetched but knowing her, it may very well be true.

This was our very first day with this woman and the whole class bonded over the common opinion of our new teacher.

We just had a mock exam and as you would expect, no one got ever answer right so Miss McAlistar's solution was to group everyone who got the same answer wrong together and have us figure it out. To put it simply, she picked out everyone who got, for example, question 2 wrong and then told us to sit in a certain area on the class and between us, we were to figure out the answer.

So there we all were in our groups with a question no one knew the answer to solve it on our own. Poor Callum, he was the only one who got question 20 wrong so he was on his own to figure it out. She then wondered why we all needed help.

Most of her lessons were her lecturing to us about how horrible people we are and how we have no respect. She never taught us circle theorems despite them being a large part of our final exams because she assumed we already went over them before she started. I had to teach myself them until I forgot after I finished my exams. The other maths classes were miles ahead because instead of being taught the material, we were getting lectures on why we're never going anywhere in life.

Once, I accidentally left my pencil case in my previous class and I asked the assistant teacher, who was just as terrible of a person, if I can quickly go and get it. It was literally just down the stairs. She said no. So as I sat there with a borrowed pencil, Miss McAlistar asked where my pencil case was. I said that it was in the other classroom.

"Why didn't you go and get it before class?"

"I asked Mrs Tyler but she said no."

"*Sighs and scowls* You can't go blaming it on other people."

This is by far the worst thing she did and it's a pretty long story so bear with me.

Apparently I wasn't living up to her expectations with maths. No surprise since she never taught hardly anything. So she put me in a compulsory after-school study session along with about seven other students which illegal because you're not supposed to keep kids in work or education for longer than 8 hours a day and that study session went over that limit but whatever.

I was sat at the back of the class, finishing off homework she gave out and some time through the session, this girl called Jordan said she had a doctor's appointment and need to go. Miss McAlistar said no because she didn't have note.

Prior to this, Jordan had brought in work from her private tutor that she needed because Miss McAlistar was crap at her job. Miss McAlistar did not like that, no sir-ee and screamed in her face till she cried. I'm not even exaggerating, she was literally crying.

So after Jordan plucked up the courage to ask if she can go to her doctor's appointment and was irrationally declined, she started crying again and was pretty much on her knees, begging to let her go because her mum was waiting for her outside. But she still said no.

So I had the idea to ask Miss McAlistar for help on a homework question. She walked over to help me and while her back was turned, another student, Sophie was mouthing to Jordan to make a run for it. So she did and Miss McAlistar ran after her and didn't come back with her. Jordan didn't come back for three more days.

As she was thanking me, she explained that the doctor's appointment was actually a counselling session for anorexia. So yeah.

Then there was Mrs. Newnham (I think that's how you spell her name) and she was the original dragon of the school until Miss McAlistar took her place. Basically, nothing was good enough for her. She was a Food Tech and Textiles teacher and no one was brave enough to ask her for help because you'll always be met with eye rolls and being told that we're all stupid.

I took Textiles for a GCSE and I made a cushion with button holes on the back. Making button holes isn't hard at ll. You just set the sewing machine to make a button hole, press the foot down to make the needle work and then just cut the middle part out. All you need is a sewing machine, a working foot and a stitch picker, and you're set.

But she gave me abnormally high praise for doing that which freaked me out a lot.

If I had to pick, I'd say that year 11 was my favourite year in school despite the intense exam pressure, Mrs. Newnham and Miss McAlistar. It was the year where all the bullies had left the school other than the ones in my class who weren't that bad. It's when all my favourite school stories took place.

I never had Miss Hill in year 11, but I had her from year 8 all through to 10 and she was the most boring person I ever met. She was one of those teacher who really couldn't be bothered and just wrote questions up on the board for us to answer for 50 minutes every day. It's like she didn't even care about the soul-tearing ending in Of Mice and Men. To be fair, she had been talking about that book for however many years she was at the school, so I can't blame her for being bored.

She was an English teacher and speaking of English, we were forced to study the play Blood Brothers from year 9 all the way through year 11. I know the play, pretty much, by heart now.

Another thing I want to discuss about my year 11 English class is that at the start of the year, we had this woman called Mrs. Brown who promised she would be present every day of school. She was very adamant about that. She kept her promise for three weeks then we never saw her again. She was replaced with a substitute who taught us every day for 9 months.

I can't remember his name because it was long and had a weird pronunciation but we all liked him. I'm going to call him Phillip for simplicity. The only problem with having him instead of a real teacher is that he couldn't mark our work so we didn't know where we were going wrong or what we could improve on.

This may be my favourite school memory and it took place in my year 11 English classroom. In my year 11 English classroom, the ceiling is very high up. I want to say at least 20ft high off the floor and attached to the ceiling are vertically hanging pens and pencils. Until this day, no one knew how those pens and pencils got up there. It's not like you could stand on the tables to reach.

We found out that this kids called Adam got them up there by sticking either white tac or masking tape to the end of the pen or pencil and just sort threw it up to the ceiling as many times as it took for it to stay there and I'm pretty sure they're still there to this day.

One day, we told him to try a glue stick and that worked for about 2 minutes until it fell back down from its own weight. The pencils and pens on the ceiling phenomenon was still a mystery to Phillip and one day, he needed to go outside the classroom to photocopy some worksheets. While he was gone, Adam flung the glue stick to the ceiling and it stuck there for longer than normal. Long enough or Phillip to come back. As he was talking about the worksheets, we were all focused on the overdue glue stick drop.

As he was reaching half way through his final sentence, the glue stick finally dropped. It landed on a table and then on the floor in front of Phillip and the whole class was silent. Phillip stared at the glue stick on the floor and then slowly looked up to the ceiling where he saw all the pens and pencils hanging on their ends. After a moment he calmly asks:

"Anyone care to explain?" and everyone just starts crying with laughter.

I also took German for a GCSE and what made that class my favourite was just the love everyone had for each other and the class would just feel incomplete if someone was absent.

The two people who made that class come to life, other than the teacher were a boy called Conner and another who I think his name was Jake. Whenever the teacher said something worth a sarcastic comment, sure to God, they will come out with it. And she'll just laugh along with it, it was great.

I should make another blog about all the funny moments in that class. We'll see.

So my secondary school life was comprised of suicidal thoughts and just being miserable overall for about a total of 4/5 years. But then year 11, while still full of stress and knee-deep in homework, but its when I had the most laughs.

Something I never understood about school was that if you're bad at music, art, PE, all the non academic subjects, you weren't looked down upon and were told that it's okay, everyone has different talents. But if you're bad at maths, English, science, a language, or pretty much anything else, then you're stupid and you're never going anywhere in life.

Next comes sixth form which wasn't anywhere near as bad as secondary but was definitely no walk in the park. Especially second year.