Primary School

There's an old saying about school days being the best days of one's life. I'm sure he or she was referring to primary school, seeing my high school days were at times quite stressful and complicated.

My old school, Hillview Public, was in walking distance from our house in Nancy Street. We used to have a short cut, a gate that was in the fence of this old couple's car port, where we would sneak through, and cut through the yard beyond it. The old couple grizzled a bit when we did it, but didn't really complain, and we were on good terms with the people whose yard we were cutting through to get to our house. Not all good things last though, seeing the neighbours moved out towards the end of primary school and the next family that moved in weren't too keen on us sneaking through their yard, so we had to take the long way round after that.

There were a lot of things I still remember, like the autistic kid that was in my kindergarten class (who died a year or so later – he fell off a boat and drowned). Then there was my nickname of “fire engine” by my first grade teacher (my report card said that I was “easily upset”, so draw your own conclusions). In second grade our class had a pet rat, which was called Mrs Rat (not real imaginative, weren't we?). That's her being nursed in the front row. Me? Try the back row, third on the right.

In third grade I remember being in a school play about pirates, and I played the lead part of Redbeard, with a red bandanna dangling from my chin to represent the beard! Then there were comments about my colouring in, with one of my pictures done entirely in brown. By fourth grade I was a very keen reader, and had been “paraded” around the other classes to demonstrate my ability. Either that, or I was being disruptive in class and the teacher wanted to get rid of me for an hour or so! One of teachers rewarded me with a sultana.

Another subject which I was excelling in was Maths. I was ahead of my grade, doing sixth grade material whilst I was in fifth. I did well in history, English, and could spell pretty well, but had problems with my pronunciation. For some time I had trouble with any word that had a “th” in it. I even got special recognition at a presentation day for my progress in overcoming this little difficulty.

In sixth grade, I was responsible for marking the Newcomball court (a game similar to volleyball) and manning the reel to reel player when we were singing along with the ABC song books, which were pretty popular at the time. We also put on puppet plays, created our own library for rainy days, and the teacher marked our work with a points value system of stamps, I think an echidna was worth ten points. At the end of the term our teacher, Mr Oloman, would get us to add up the value of their books, plus extra credit for other tasks, and the winning students would get boxes of lollies.

There's a lot of things coming back to me about primary school now, so I'd better stop before I go on about it for too long.