but the bitch struck again. after the period ended and i went to walk out the gate she stepped in front of me and goes, ‘u, my girl, are quite a fussy and self-centred young lady. whenever u don’t like something u just give up.’ grrrrr … i was getting so angry then i said (which is true cos i do luv tennis) ‘but ms brown, i luv tennis, i was feeling sick. i really didn’t wanna spew all over the courts exactly,’ and she goes, ‘still u do get very picky with certain things …’ i pushed past her and walked off.
the things i’m picky with is when we’re playing cricket (the most senseless boring sport in the world) she asked me to bowl and i didn’t want to coz i can’t bowl properly. and when we were playing baseball she put me as catcher and gave me this jumbo sized mask that didn’t fit and covered my eyes and the eye holes were over my mouth, so the pitcher threw the ball, the batter missed and i missed the ball coz i couldn’t even see it. and ms brown goes, ‘emma, concentrate more u silly girl, u weren’t even watching the ball.’ and i went ‘ms brown, that’s coz i can’t even see the ball and i can only see things out the side and nothing in the centre coz this helmet doesn’t fit and it’s making me feel dizzy.’ ms brown replied ‘stop complaining and just watch the ball. u can’t always have everything u want ur way.’
grrrrrrrr rrrr. pig-faced bitch. she always gives me the hardest time.
So what was Emma supposed to do, apart from sound off to me in her email? There are always lots of things that can be done in these circumstances.
Emma could’ve shrugged off the experience and been optimistic that the next time she plays tennis it will be 20 degrees and she won’t feel sick, or she could’ve told someone how she felt (she did, through an email) because at least it would’ve got it out of her system and she probably felt a bit better.
She could’ve talked to her friends and they could’ve decided not to play because it was too hot, and then they could’ve told the sports teacher their joint decision. (Mind you, she still could’ve made them play anyway, but at least they would’ve been assertive and therefore felt better). And next time, Emma could prepare for the hot day’s tennis by bringing cool drinks and a hat.
Often you have to do yucky things in school, especially in science and biology classes, like dissect dead rats and frogs or hack up sheep’s eyeballs. Here’s an email from Jessica, who felt bad when the teacher brought a dead baby in a jar to class:
>From: Jessica
>To: Margaret
>Date:
In science today our teacher brought in a dead baby, like one that was about 15 weeks old when it died, called a fetus or something like that. She said if we opened the jar the baby would disintegrate because it had been preserved for a long time. Some of the boys said its head looked like the aliens from Mars Attacks and I thought that was a gross thing to say. This had been an alive human! I couldn’t help it. It was so sad. You see my mum lost a fetus when she had a miscarriage only to me it wasn’t a fetus it was going to be my baby sister. And I thought that this baby in the jar might have been someone’s sister too. So in front of everyone I burst into tears and I yelled at the boys that they were heartless beastly cannibals.
This was a hard email for me to answer. On the one hand the school curriculum sets out guidelines for science teachers, and unless everyone examines a real foetus, or a plastic foetus, or the teacher shows videos, how is the class going to know what a foetus looks like?
On the other hand, seeing a dead baby in a jar can really affect some people, especially this girl who had lost a foetus sister.
The big problem is that schools are full of individual people with individual feelings and individual secrets, and unless this science teacher also had a baby sister who miscarried as a foetus or was stillborn (born at the full term of nine months, but dead) or lost a baby of his or her own, the teacher wouldn’t realise the possible effect that seeing the foetus could have on some students.
You see, another student could have lost a foetus brother or sister and think, ‘Well, something must have been wrong with it anyway, so I’ll put it aside and get on with my life’. Seeing a foetus in a jar mightn’t upset that student. Also it mightn’t be a secret — that person might have told all his or her friends about the loss.
Two things are important here. Firstly, sometimes you might get upset at school because teachers or other students do something to hurt your feelings. It could be intentional or unintentional. If you’re upset, tell someone. You don’t have to yell and scream about it. Tell a friend, the school chaplain, or a teacher, so that they understand why you’re upset. Or find that listener in the mall or library or wherever.
Secondly, if you don’t say something and keep it a secret, then no one can understand how you’re feeling and no one can help you to feel better. And more importantly, you only need to reveal as much as you want to; you don’t have to bare your soul and, as my granny used to say, ‘Air all your dirty linen in public’.
Remember, lots of people are sharing secrets on the email or internet and it can cause big problems if someone else reads it or the recipient sends it to someone else. So be careful what you write on the net!
A girl called Sheridan, age fourteen from Melbourne, wrote about the argument she’d had with her best friend in school and poured out her heart to this guy called Jack in Brisbane on chat channel. It’s a little bit like the situation with Amy J, only Sheridan and her friend Rachel were arguing about copied homework. The email she sent me included this conversation with Jack:
>From: Sheridan
>To: Margaret
>Date:
here’s an email i got from Jack after i poured out my heart to him. the bits he wrote back have an arrow next to them so you know who’s Jack.
>From: Jack
>To: Sheridan
>Date:
well, i’m sorry i had a fight with rachel and i shouldn’t have nicked her homework but i ended up telling mr rawlings and so she got the B+ and i got a fail. i told u that.
> i think you should be sorry.
i’m crying now
>ha
please understand why i did it. i’m no good at english and sumerising books. and rachel won’t talk to me and it makes me feel unhappy. and unwanted.
>you unwanted? so don’t steal homework from your best friend. no wonder she h8s u.
i guess i’m a fuct up bitch for doing it
>amen to that.
i feel so bad about rachel and my hands are shaking. i’m not smart and she is. and i’m not the sort of person who can get good marks
>maybe you should try harder.
i think it’s her fault now that she can’t forgive and forget and be friends
>blame, blame, shame, shame
it’s hard to have a friend who’s real brainy
>oh stop feeling sorry for yourself and get a tutor or something.
i’m still crying. i h8 being dumb. i’ve got snot running down my face now
>that’s feral
u are making me feel dumb too
>well well, you sound like a bimbo but u can change. get a brain transplant. ha. get a life, Sheridan. good luck. Jack the man
As you can see by reading this email, Jack wasn’t the kindest or most helpful person to be sharing this secret with. Sheridan would done been better to approach the English teacher and discuss her feelings of inadequacy, and also to tell Rachel that her braininess was causing this jealous feeling, and together they could work it out.
When one friend is brainer than the other person, or is better looking than the other, or has a more out-going personality than the other, it’s important to realise that often the brainy/better-looking/out-going person is anxious deep down inside about only being liked for high achievement or looks or personality. The person might never tell you this. It’s their secret. And so, you see, we never know how people feel, even our best friends.
Dear Diary,
I hate being brainy. Like, boys don’t want to know a girl who wears glasses,
braces on her teeth and who is brainy. I try to act dumb round boys. But I like to get top marks. I usually giggle and talk in science and Mr Thomson thinks I’m an idiot. A week after we’d done our science exam we were all in the science room waiting for him to read out our results and he goes, ‘Two people have got equal top marks. David Wise … and Margaret Heard. Could you please come out the front?’ And when I stood up, cos he didn’t even know who I was till then except the giggling Gertie up the back, he looked stunned. And shocked. And all these boys kind of gave this groan and someone sniggered. It was awful.
I’d rather be dumb. And I can’t tell anyone, even Ally and Jan and Yvonne because they’re in Commercial and I’m in Professional (which is supposed to be brainy) and part of me wants to be in Commercial with my friends. Ally usually fails even though she’s quite clever because she freezes during exams, she goes brain dead.
When I went to school the clever top ten per cent were put in the ‘professional’ stream which meant they did Latin, Maths 1, algebra and science, and the ‘commercial’ stream did typing, shorthand, maths 2 (which we called vegie maths) and business practices instead.
But sometimes true friendships go through big traumas because one person has to move to another town or city. Here’s part of an email from Annabel age fifteen:
>From: Annabel
>To: Margaret
>Date:
‘Will you join in our crusade, who will be strong and stand with me?
Somewhere beyond the barricade is there a world you long to see.’
Sorry, my dag of a music teacher was forcing us to sing the theme song from Les Mis, not that I have anything against Les Mis, it’s now on my brain, and just hearing her sing the high notes was a major turn-off. Her name is Miss Romanos and she is a 200 year old moth who hibernates during lunch breaks and who is in love with our 800 year old science teacher Mr Wilson. ERK.
Today I realised that most of my class have best friends who are so close to each other, they know every detail about each other’s lives and they wouldn’t dare put down or insult their best buddy.
How will I get another close friend like Sharni in this hole of a school? We were sooo close. Sharni’s had to move to another city and even though we phone every night, I feel like part of me is dead. We were never separated. We were in the same classes at school. We did everything together. I trusted her with everything.
Tania’s trying to be my friend now. She’s okay I guess. But I don’t want to have someone like Tania to laugh at things together like a coupla horses, she’s a bit shallow. I don’t think I could trust her. I want someone I can really trust. I think one of the major things in a best friendship is trust. I will always be Sharni’s best friend even though she’s not here any more. Tania might put me down. She’s good at that. She’s very critical. All the other girls have got special friends. And there’s me. On my own. Without Sharni. What will I do? Will I take up with Tania just to have someone?
I think one of the most devastating things that can happen when you’re a teenager is for your best friend to move away to live somewhere else, or for you to move away.
Luckily, I lived in Geelong all my life except when I went to teachers college in Melbourne, and I only went to one primary school and one secondary school. So I’m no expert on what it’s like to lose a friend to the tyranny of distance.
Dear Diary,
Fay and I were in school and this bald bloke in a pin-striped suit came in from the Education Department and talked to all the Professional kids. He said anyone who wants to be a teacher could put up their hands, so Fay and I did. He gave us forms to take home. If we get chosen we have to live in Melbourne next year and we’ll only be sixteen and a half cos they’re desperate for primary teachers, but at least there’ll be the two of us. No Ally or Jan or Yvonne but Fay’s okay, she’s in my little group.
I get letters and emails from teenagers who’ve moved schools four or five times, even more. Parents seem to shift around in different jobs from state to state and marriages and partnerships seem to break up more than they did when I was growing up.
But sometimes friendships can be one-sided, and maybe it’s a good thing that this next school friendship did break up, although it’s sad for sixteen-year-old Victoria to feel this way. Victoria wrote in her letter:
The only trust that Rebecca had in me was that I would always be her friend no matter what she did to me, no matter how she spoke to me. That was one of the worst things. She basically had no respect for me. And all the times she insulted me or put me down in school I just tried to ignore it and pushed it aside, not thinking it was such a major issue and someday she’d stop criticising me. But for the past year I’ve been thinking that never to say it out loud to her, just silently swallowing her insults, was bad for me and bad for our friendship. So I was telling her she made me feel like shit, and she said it was my own fault, and she was only bagging me and criticising me for my own good. Then she dumped me and won’t even bother to talk to me. And suddenly I’ve just realised that she didn’t really care for me at all as a friend. All that time, years, just gone. And I feel like a big, enormous, huge, massive, gigantic lump of nothing.
So here I am, a girl you don’t even know, crapping on about her social problems that Grade One kids have. I guess I’ve never graduated from Grade One friendship. Which brings me back to – nothing.
Victoria deserved a more worthy friend. I wrote to her for a while and listened to her stories, and then she stopped writing. One of her letters came back marked ‘address unknown’ so maybe she moved to another town. I hope something terrible didn’t happen to her. I’d like to think she’s moved and found some new friends who are really nice. The thing about school is that you can think you know someone really well and yet you don’t. I often get sent poetry by young people, and one girl called Rachael sent me a collection of her poems. I am sharing this particular poem called ‘Today I’m Tasha’ because I think it explains a lot about school, personality and feelings.
Today I’m Tasha
She’s noticed today.
With an air of grace about her.
This display
is not like her.
I know this,
because she’s me.
It’s a perfect day
and that means
that
today I’m Tasha.
Tasha is elegant
adopting the speech
of English old.
She approves not
of isolation
and fragmentation.
She makes
my mind think clearly,
work properly.
I wish I could
be Tasha
everyday.
She’s perfect.
It’s not always like that.
Anger is Ellie,
ready to grudge
or kill
at the slightest provocation.
Fear is Rachel.
Hiding,
trying to be
invisible.
The usual front, a mask of hate
and
necessary lies.
Academic achievement is Emma,
never used,
still in the box,
traded for something
more interesting,
perhaps.
Not sure.
Haven’t checked.
Confidence is Victoria.
Seldom heard,
whispering quietly,
the answers that
could be right.
Never sought out.
I can just remember
only just
when I was none of these.
Just one person.
Calm and undivided.
From one day
to the next
I’m never sure
who will be ‘I’
for the day.
But it doesn’t matter.
I’m thankful now.
Because
today I’m Tasha.
(Written by Rachael M)
I guess the most important thing to remember about going to school is that rules are meant to make life easier for the general school population (even though in some schools the whole place is regimented so that the people there are easier to control). School is, in a way, a comfort zone for most students because there are rules.
Events happen at specific times and in an orderly fashion. Sometimes we need that organised, timetabled way of life so that we feel secure and safe. My granny always said, ‘There’s safety in numbers’. It’s good to have lots of people round you, with different backgrounds and beliefs.
It’s good to spend time with people around your own age. It’s a herding instinct thing too.
School is actually an institution. Some schools require that the students wear uniforms. Lots of students try to be individual in their uniform by doing something to mangle their uniform, or bend the rules a bit:
Dear Diary,
Mum bought me a new school beret. I hate it. The first thing I did was to chuck it in a puddle then I jumped on it and then pulled it into a sort of pudding-basin shape. We all push our socks down round our ankles and tear holes in the sleeves of our jumpers near our wrists so we can pull our hands through. And of course we hitch our sports tunics up as high as we can. Ms Brown measures them with a ruler. When you’re kneeling the sports tunic must be no shorter than six inches off the ground from knee to hem when she measures it. And in the regular tunic, I always let my petticoat hang a bit below, which drives her into a frenzy.
Despite the rules and the uniformity of school, always remember there is only one you with individual fingerprints, individual DNA, and individual needs, thoughts and feelings. No one can ever replace you.
Years ago, someone wrote a poem on a church wall. It’s called ‘Desiderata’. No one knows who wrote it. And in part of it there’s a line that says, ‘You are a child of the universe,’ and that to me means that everyone is unique and special. At home, out and about. And in school.
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