Must Try Harder

I don’t have many artifacts from my school days; no writing or art, no photos of me in my uniform or with my friends at the time. About all I have is my exam certificates and two school reports, one from the Upper Sixth and the one above from the Fifth year.

The grades in the two columns are for “Standard of Work” and “Attitude To Work” but I don’t remember what the percentages refer to. They make no sense anyway. I’ve no idea how my English score of 65% got me a double-A when 67% in Maths only got me a D and C. I didn’t care about those low grades because by that stage I hated Maths. The teacher was boring and there were some thugs at the back of the class who liked picking on me, but mostly because I was terrible at it and couldn’t see the point of it beyond a certain level. It’s been over 35 years since I left school and I still have had no need for Logarithms or Algebra.

My best (and favourite) subjects were Art and English. In the latter I had the best teacher I ever had in Miss Thomson, a very brassy Scottish woman whose hot temper and vicious sarcasm scared the shit out of us when we were nervous newbies at the school but who we came to appreciate as a sharp, funny woman as we got older. A few of us even got invited to her house for a party when school finished. I remember her telling us she personally thought Tennyson was boring but we had to study his poems because he was on the curriculum, and that she couldn’t take Othello seriously as a tragedy because the main character was such a gullible idiot. A view which colors my opinion of the play to this day.

The general theme running through both of the reports (and all the other ones I remember) is pretty much the same: Lee is a bright boy but he must try harder. Quotes like “It is evident he has not worked as dilligently as he might have in certain subjects” and “While he should, and will, achieve good grades, he may not reach his full potential” sum up my life really. I’ve never been an ambitious, go-getting striver, studying all night to achieve lofty goals. My parents didn’t push me and I was happy just being “clever” because being brilliant is too much bloody work.

I only took two A-Levels in the Sixth Form (Art and English Lit) which gave me plenty of free time to hang around the Common Room or the local park (where I started smoking), but I still got to the point near exam time when I was sick of studying. I remember being at Fulham Library revising for my English A-Level, going through Othello for the millionth time trying to memorize quotes, when my brain just couldn’t do it anymore and I gave up. I closed up my books, went home, and put them in my bedroom closet thinking I didn’t give a shit if I passed or not. It’s the sort of impulsive gesture you make when you’re 17, but I was so relieved to have that stress off me — fuck the future. Luckily I was aiming for art school instead of University which only required five O-Levels minimum to get in and I already had those. I finished the final English paper (there were three) a half hour before time was up and the supervising teacher told me I wouldn’t pass if I left that early. Surprisingly I did pass (but only just) which upset my grand, punk-rock gesture a bit.

Maths might have been pointless but studying English Lit turned out to be the most useful thing I ever did — way more than Art — because it taught me to think critically. Though even in that I was a shirker according to this line from my Sixth Form report about my English work: “There is a warning for Lee to avoid flippancy because it can lead to superficiality in written work.” I got a chuckle out of that because you could pretty much apply it to my blog writing today.

Download: Everybody’s Got To Learn Sometime – The Korgis (mp3)