Things I Learnt At Secondary School
This is a collaborative post
Time, as always, marches on and we find ourselves starting to book visits to primary schools as Austin will be going from next September. It’s made me reflect a little on my school experiences. I went to a local primary school and had a pretty happy time there. Once I turned 11, I was off into the big wide world of secondary schools. As we live in Kent, I was eligible to sit the Kent test to see whether I would be going to a grammar school or not. Luckily I was one of the ones that passed this test and chose a grammar school just a few miles from my parents’ home.
I learnt a lot of things at my secondary school. It was a great school with a varied, but academic focused curriculum. We did all the normal things like maths, English, sciences and languages but we also had some more interesting topics like psychology and Latin. I had access to lots of interesting teachers with lots of knowledge.
On some of our less academic days, once I was in the latter years of school, we also took part in some valuable life lesson workshops. These have stuck with me. I recall there being a whole session on procrastination, which still to this day I can remember being fascinated by this term and what it meant. Bizarre eh! We also learn how to apply for a mortgage and how to wire a plug. We were asked to create an awareness campaign to encourage people to wear sun cream. One day we documented the facilities for disabled people in our local town centre.
In addition to this, we did Young Enterprise where we started a small business. I also worked in the school bank where people could come and open their first bank accounts. We learnt how to use the internet (where we wasted many hours chatting to random Americans via Yahoo Chat). Our experiences at school were great.
But the most wonderful thing happened to me at school. I met some amazing girls (I went to an all-girls school) and we went on to become friends. My best friends. We grew up together, got our exam results together, had our first boyfriends together, and had sleepovers and shopping trips that lasted all day. We eventually left our school lives behind and went on to university or into employment, but kept in touch. We visited each other all over the country, chatted on the phone for hours, tagged each other in hundreds of photos of our nights out on Facebook, went on holiday together, went to each other’s’ weddings and cuddled each other’s babies.
So it’s been well over 20 years since we were all together at school, but the best lesson I learnt at secondary school wasn’t how to solve an equation or what Shakespeare wrote, it was that friendships for life are made at school and they’ll stand by you for years to come if you make the effort, keep in touch and evolve with your friends. So whether you are at primary school in Edinburgh, looking around secondary schools in Leicester or halfway through your school year in London, you are never too late to make lifelong friends that’ll you’ll appreciate well into the future.
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