I remember year 8 well… for all the wrong reasons!

I was an absolute turd of a kid, always getting into trouble and once got kicked out of class 8 times in 8 periods for my poor behaviour. When I was 20 I actually threw out all of my lower school reports because they were so terrible, but somehow this one slipped thru my grasp and dad gave it to me yesterday.

The good news was that I got 3 ‘A’s and a ‘B’… but funnily enough my folks still weren’t real impressed with the report. These were the first 4 pages, but it didn’t get any better…

“fooling around during class’ Me?!…

watch mausoleum in divx

‘A dismal semester’s work…’ What? I got a B!!

I just didn’t like school that much… in fact as much as I enjoyed the social component I hated the work and wanted out. Year 8 & 9 were fairly similar in that I mucked up heaps, got good grades, but was the bane of every teacher’s life. By year 10 I was growing up a little and by year 11 & 12 I was actually semi-human.

In that fateful year 8 I once wagged a whole week of school – Monday to Friday – in year 8 and didn’t get caught. The two guys I was with did get found out by their dad. He rang our home, spoke to me and asked me if I was with them for the whole week… Needless to say I was crapping myself. ‘Um… yep…’

That was all he wanted to know. He never did tell my parents. What a guy!!

When your school has ocean views and the surf is pumping its pretty hard to hang in. If I wasn’t at school I could usually be found at the beach.

I remember in year 10 my dad shoved me into taking business principles (bookkeeping etc) an one of my ‘options’. (“It’ll be good for you…”) So while everyone else was off doing woodwork, metalwork etc I was stuck in a classroom with the girls doing ledgers and accounts…

That class was held on the infamous ‘last two on Friday’ so it was always a 50/50 shot as to whether I would hang around after lunch just to get bored to tears. It was also very funny seeing Mrs Partridge’s face (her real name) when I did front… As something of a visitor and occasional attendee I am not sure she knew what to do with me. Needless I say I now don’t know much about accounting…

My favourite wag was the day Mohammad Ali fought Joe Frazier – the ‘rumble in the jungle’. The fight was scheduled for periods 4 & 5 , the session between recess and lunch. It would have been a nice clean break except that on the day we had metalwork periods 3 & 4…

We weren’t missing the fight for anything so it just meant that Mr Vaughn’s metalwork class had 30 people in period 3 and only 4 or 5 in period 4 as 25 of us shot off to a friend’s house to watch the fight. The beauty of it all was that no teacher could be bothered busting all 25 of us so it was a ‘stern warning’ (actually not that stern because I think Ross Munro thought it pretty amusing too) and then back to business as usual.

I rarely got caught wagging and never once forged a note.

My dumbest wag was in year 12 when I had just got my license and took dad’s XT Falcon to school. I skipped a class and shot off down to the beachfront in the days when the pinball parlours were still in vogue (crikey that is a long time ago…) and proceeded to lock the keys in car. As if that wasn’t bad enough I also left the motor running… Thanks God for quarter panel windows and brute force!

Ironically this was the school I later returned to teach at, a school that has now been carved up into some of the best real estate in the Scarborough area.

As much as I didn’t like school I had some great times there and was very sad to see the old place get bulldozed. School days the best days of your life?…

Hmmm… maybe!