I remember really hating elementary school. I disliked pre-maternelle, they were always trying to tell me what to do -- for instance one time I tried to paint a rooster and they told me the assignment was to paint a christmas tree and that I had to do the assignment, with the result that somewhere in my parents' basement there is a green roster with a trunk instead of feet. I thought they were idiots - who cares if I draw a christmas tree or a rooster? I disliked maternelle, too, which was at the same school as my elementary, Ecole Nouvelle Querbes. But I hated grades one through five.
1) The other kids scared me. They were intimidating and it seemed like you could always say the wrong things.
2) Though I really liked Yves, my grade one teacher, he went on burnout leave and never came back, so for grades two and three we had a series of medium-term subs, none of whose names I remember. Is that weird, that I don't remember their names? They were there for months, and there were probably only three of them in total. I characterized them as temporary, though, and didn't think much of them. This is a guess.
3) I had no friends. I was conscious of this and as a fact about myself I think it bugged me. I don't think I thought enough about the reality of these things to consider what having a friend in class would have meant, so I can't say that the lack of friendship was in itself actively upsetting, but the fact of it disturbed me. I did have one friend from when I was four, Edith, who was at Querbes, and she was tough and got along well with the other kids, bu she was in another group and I didn't see her much. In grade 5 I became somewhat friendly with a girl called Sarah Pépin, but she couldn't invite me to her birthday party because her best friend Miriame said she wouldn't go if I did (I had caught Miriame cheating at a board game a year earlier, perhaps these were related?) As consolation, Sarah invited me to her grandparents' cottage for the weekend.
4) In everyone else's defence, I definitely was a weird kid. I didn't brush my hair for a year because it hurt too much to brush it once a week. I wore jogging pants to school (not always). In grade 5 there was a girl called Daphné who announced one lunchtime she would be organizing a fun project for a group of kids, which turned out to buy a shopping trip to get me some more acceptable clothing. Daphné asked how much money I could get from my parents and I offered a guess of $20.00, at which point she said forget it and went back to ignoring me. I was bothered by all this. For one thing I had this feeling maybe the whole thing was a ruse to steal from me. From what I can remember, which isn't much, I didn't care enough about clothes to even feel insulted on that account.
5) I didn't understand anything very well. I understood books, though, but somehow couldn't really translate their narratives into what real life was about. The world was a source of frustration all the time. The 4-5-6 teacher -- a fairly unpleasant person named Ruth -- was a mystery, my own feelings were a mystery, communication with other kids, clearly, a mystery. What they did when they left school, what their lives were like, was quite a preoccupying and befuddling mystery.
6) I believe I craved some kind of order or purpose. The alternative-school model works well for some kids, maybe it's better for happier children? Or ... I don't know. I am not a very conventional person, and I wasn't conventional then, and maybe would have hated rows of desks facing a preachy adult just as much or more. I remember feeling quite stupid, and perhaps discovering that I was smart would have made me happier? I used to think having grades or report cards in elementary school might have led me to seeing that at least in some ways I was smart. I was a very unhappy kid. But I loved reading and there were other things I also loved -- I loved the ocean, when we went to it one summer for a few days.
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