….  Starting Big School

So the day has arrived.

Big school.

We’ve done all the homework we can.  Like any responsible parent, we’re bought the uniform, including a blazer so huge it would swamp an upper-medium sized gorilla in the hope that he’ll grow into it before he wears it out. 

On a boy so small his tie is too baggy for him.

And the shoes.

By God, the shoes!

It seems the boy’s feet grew about a size a week over the summer holidays.

Growing so fast that we completely missed the Linear Footwear Convergence Point, which had so delighted Mrs and Miss Dr Brown a couple of years ago. 

At this point, the girl was happy because she started getting much fancier brand-name trainers for a few months on the agreement that, while she would grow out of them rapidly, it was worth having better ones because Mrs Dr Brown could then happily inherit her 12-year-old daughter’s nearly new hand-me-downs.

And so we drop the boy off.  A mess of elbows and knees, a grin with teeth like a bag of scrabble tiles, and feet the size of a Great Dane puppy, to face the first day at big school.

They were much more organised than I seem to remember my school being.

The kids were shown to the reception area, where they were breezily directed to their classrooms, told their houses and allocated their bully. 

“Welcome, you’ll be in 6J, you’ll be in Betjeman, and your bully will be Smyth in the upper 4^th!”

The house system seems to have been borrowed from a not-unsuccessful series of books about a child wizard. 

I couldn’t help but notice that all the courageous and adventurous kids were allocated to the same house.  The cunning and ambitious to another.  My son was allocated to the house for people who are small, nervous and with a kindly disposition.  I can’t see them winning many trophies this year.

On the way in, I had offered the boy a simple maths lesson. 

“Imagine a normal distribution curve – also known as a bell curve, the boy!” I advised.

“You want to be in the middle.  Not too good, not too bad, but in the Goldilocks zone of mediocrity.  That is where the popular kid are, and that’s what’s most important.  You can be good at stuff later.  This week just don’t be weird!”

And who gets to decide what’s cool?  I clearly never sat on that committee.

Who was it that got to decide that being good at football and snogging (neither of which I did much of at secondary school) should be cooler than chemistry or Dungeons & Dragons (no comment)?

The social capital of being good at sport is just a stronger currency than being OK at drama. Which is a shame because the sixth form all seem to be about the size of the New Zealand All Blacks while the boy is a more suitable size for a cox, mascot or maybe even a trophy.

And unfortunately that’s about as much help as I’m able to be.

Things have changed so much.

When I was at school, I.T. was the single school computer  – a BBC micro (yes, that BBC, kids – inexplicably they made own-brand computers!) being wheeled out on a hostess trolley so the thick kids could play Frogger when the words in the books got too long.

And modern languages.

They rotate the modern languages each year and this year they’re doing Italian. 

Italian!  At an age where any self-respecting heterosexual peri-pubescent boy should be letching over Chantal from La Rochelle in the “Tricolore” French textbook.

We can’t help him with Italian.

Mrs Dr Brown has never done Italian, but has studied a lot of music theory.  So while she can’t ask for directions to the station, she can walk there “in a sprightly way” (allegretto, if you must know).

I did Latin, so I could maybe ask for directions to the station, could have told you that that is where Caecilius is, but would have then had a two thousand year wait for trains to be invented.

We’re rubbish.

In fairness, we’re not as rubbish as his big sister whose defence is currently “I’m going to be an actress so don’t need to be good at maths.” Or, seemingly, chemistry, history, geography, Spanish, R.E. or netball. 

Disappointingly, she’s probably right.

So what’s the lesson?

What’s the secret to negotiating big school and preparing for life beyond?

Well, if I ever find out, I’ll tell you.