DUMBING IT DOWN

Chapter 5

Three Months Behind

The first warning that high school might not be built around my convenience did not arrive before I started, because life rarely has the decency to organise its warnings in a useful order. I was there on day one, standing on the quadrangle with the rest of them, bag in hand, trying to look as though I belonged somewhere I had never been before. I had commenced the journey, as they say, which is a grand phrase for a boy who was really just standing in a new uniform, watching adults move about with purpose, and hoping somebody would soon explain what the purpose was. There are easier ways to enter a larger world than by pretending confidence while privately wondering whether looking too interested might be socially fatal.

There were sixty-four of us, give or take the nervous shifting of feet, waiting for somebody to tell us what high school was supposed to be. We had come out of our various little primary school ponds and been tipped into something larger, joining the town kids in their school, a Central School with kindergarten to Year 12 under one roof. It felt deeper, noisier and far less considerate than the classrooms I had known, and it had the added advantage of looking as if it had already been there forever and we were the temporary inconvenience. The new principal, Geoff Williams, paced the paths of knowledge with the air of a man who had inherited a problem rather than a school intake, moving about the quadrangle as if the answer might be written somewhere between the buildings.

We watched him because that is what children do when an adult appears to be in charge, even if the adult’s body language is not making the strongest possible case for certainty. He paced, stopped, looked, gathered himself, and paced again, while sixty-four new students waited in that strange half-silence created by fear, curiosity and the unwillingness of any child to be the first one to look foolish. There was something almost comic about it now that I am old enough to have watched committees, boards, clients and governments do much the same thing with greater budgets and less excuse. At the time, though, it felt less comic than unsettling, because I had arrived expecting high school to know what to do with me and found high school apparently still negotiating with itself.

The confusion did eventually harden into structure, which is what institutions are very good at doing. They take a group of children milling about like sheep at a broken gate and turn them into lines, rolls, classes, rooms, timetables and categories. We were sorted, named, divided and pointed in the general direction of education, which is not the same thing as being understood, but it looks more efficient from a distance. Somewhere in that sorting, the democratic promise of secondary schooling became something older, more familiar and quietly tribal, because the two classes were split, in effect, into townies and country kids.

I do not know whether anyone called it that officially, and I doubt there was a staff meeting where someone moved that the children be divided according to paddock dust, bus routes and the faint smell of distance, with the motion carried unanimously after morning tea and a plate of Sao biscuits. But that is how it felt. The town kids, now in 1X, had a kind of home-ground advantage before a book had even been opened, because they knew the streets, the older brothers and sisters, the shortcuts, the names, the shops and the casual arrangements of the place. They belonged to the town before they had to belong to the school, and that is no small advantage when the rest of us were still working out which building was likely to swallow us next.

We country kids arrived from further out, brought in by buses, family cars and the long habit of distance. We were now 1Y, although in my mind it could easily have been written as 1 “Why?” Why were we there, why did we need another room, why did we need another teacher, and why had all these out-of-town children arrived at once carrying lunchboxes, dust, ability, uncertainty and the administrative inconvenience of needing to be educated too? It may not have been intended that way, and I do not want to place more malice into the arrangement than it deserves. But names have a habit of collecting meaning, especially when a child is already trying to work out whether he has been placed in a class, a category, or a question someone forgot to answer.

There was something slightly comic in it if looked at from a safe distance, which of course I was not. 1X sounded clean and definite, as if it belonged on a timetable without explanation, while 1Y sounded like a small bureaucratic sigh. We were not rejects, and I do not want to pretend we were treated as such, because that would be too simple and probably unfair. Still, we did feel like a second arrangement, a necessary addition, a class made out of distance and bus routes, as though the town had produced its own students first and the rest of us had arrived afterwards asking to be fitted in somewhere.

The odd thing was that there was promise in that group, and probably more than the room knew what to do with at the time. Country kids were not short of capacity, even if we sometimes arrived with less polish and more weather on us. We knew distance, work, silence, chores, early mornings, family expectations and the peculiar independence that comes from living beyond easy rescue. There were minds in that class, and talents, and stubbornness, and all sorts of possibilities that would not have looked out of place in any room, but potential does not always protect you from being made to feel like an extra chair dragged in after the table has already been set.

That was one of the first collisions, although I would not have had the words for it then. The mind might have been ready, or at least capable of being ready, but the room had already arranged itself into categories before I had been there long enough to become a person. Town and country, 1X and 1Y, those who seemed to know where they were going and those of us still working out whether the question mark belonged after the class name or after ourselves. Before I had a chance to define myself by what I could do, how I thought, or whether I might be worth knowing, I had become part of a group, and the group carried a meaning I had not chosen.

So I was there at the beginning, at least in the technical sense, and that technicality became important later because it made the loss stranger. I saw Geoff Williams pacing, the teachers gathering, the children pretending not to be nervous, and the first rough lines of belonging being drawn before any of us had been there long enough to deserve them. I saw confusion become structure, and structure become a quiet version of them and us, with the country kids placed where the system could manage us. Then, by the end of that first week, just as the machinery had started to clank into motion and 1Y had begun becoming whatever 1Y was going to be, I succumbed to mumps.

There are grander ways to begin secondary education, I imagine, but mine came with swollen glands, a face that felt as if someone had packed it from the inside, and the general appearance of a child storing emergency supplies in his cheeks. Mumps was one of those old-fashioned illnesses that sounded faintly ridiculous until you had it, like something from a medical textbook written by a committee that had run out of menacing words. It did not sound dangerous enough to earn sympathy for long, but it was quite capable of removing you from the world at the exact moment the world had decided to reorganise itself without you. I had taken one step into high school, seen enough to know the place had rules I did not yet understand, and then found the journey brought to a screaming halt by a disease whose name sounded almost too silly to justify the damage.

That was the vagary of the whole incident, and vagary is a polite word for the kind of timing that makes you wonder whether the universe has a dry sense of humour. Had I been sick before the first day, I might have entered later as a complete outsider and at least known I had missed the start. Had I lasted the term, I might have learned the rhythm before being removed from it, and rhythm matters more to a child than adults often realise. Instead, I was given just enough of high school to see that everything had changed, and then the door closed, leaving me at home with a face like a poorly made balloon and no real understanding of what was being lost.

I had spent years in primary school learning how a classroom worked, what a teacher wanted, what an answer looked like, and how to move through the small machinery of school without too much mystery. Then, just as the machinery changed completely, I was taken out of it. The old certainty did not even have the decency to fail gradually, which would have given me time to notice its departure and perhaps prepare some sort of defence. It was there one week, or close enough to feel familiar, and gone the next, while the new certainty, if such a thing existed, was being formed in my absence.

That was the bit nobody could explain to a sick child lying around at home. I did not yet understand that absence has a social cost as well as an academic one, and I certainly did not understand that the social cost can sometimes be harder to repay. Adults could talk about missed lessons, missed exercises, missed pages in textbooks and the need to catch up, as though education was a paddock with a few fence posts missing. Put them back in, tighten the wire, and off you go, except the part I missed was not only on paper.

It was in the first awkward days, the first nervous jokes, the first naming of teachers, and the first discovery of who sat where. It was in the slow identification of who mattered, who was funny, who was dangerous, who got picked on, who could be trusted, and who had already worked out the rules nobody had bothered to write down. A class is not made only by a roll book and a timetable, although schools often behave as if those things do most of the heavy lifting. A class is made by glances, accidents, shared confusion, small cruelties, rescue, laughter and the way children begin arranging themselves into safety before any adult thinks to ask how the arrangement feels.

The townies and the country kids, once separated, did not simply sit in different rooms. They began to become different rooms, each with its own small weather, loyalties, cruelties, humour and hierarchy. While I was away, those things kept moving, because childhood society does not pause to accommodate swollen glands, no matter how impressive those glands may be to the person carrying them. Nobody was going to stop the formation of Year 7 because one boy from out of town had been taken out of circulation, and the world is rarely that considerate anyway, with schools being even less inclined to suspend operations for personal inconvenience.

By the time I arrived properly, the room had already become a room without me. That is a strange thing for a child to feel, because you do not yet have the language for being present and absent at the same time. You only know that everyone else seems to have started a conversation weeks earlier and you have walked in just as they are laughing at something you did not hear. You stand there with your bag, your books, your recovered face and your swollen sense of being late, and you realise the roll has your name on it, but the room does not.

Mr Paige had already imposed order on the place, and I do not blame him for that. Teachers need systems, especially when confronted with a room full of new high school students still wearing the bewildered expression of children recently released from smaller cages. His particular system was alphabetical, which helped him remember names, or at least gave him a fighting chance of appearing to remember them before we all became fully formed nuisances. The class had been arranged around the room by surname, each child placed like a labelled specimen in the correct part of the educational cabinet, and there was method in it, perhaps even sanity, except that I had not been there when the method was applied.

So I walked into a room that had already solved the problem of me by leaving me out of it. The desks had their rhythm, the bodies had their locations, and the hierarchy, quiet as it was, had begun to settle. Everyone knew where they sat, which meant everyone knew where everyone else sat, and into that arrangement came Banks, late, pale, behind, and apparently determined to undo civilisation by needing a desk. I had not yet said anything of consequence, but the simple fact of my arrival required the room to admit it had organised itself without allowing properly for my existence.

It sounds a small thing now, a missing place in an alphabetical seating plan. At the time it felt much larger, because children understand territory long before they understand administration. A seat is never just a seat in a classroom, because it is position, safety, visibility, status, proximity to trouble, distance from authority, nearness to friends, and sometimes the difference between being noticed and surviving unnoticed. I had arrived without a place, and that meant somebody else’s place had to be disturbed, which is not the best way to announce yourself to a room already unsure what to do with you.

That somebody, as I remember it, was Ian Downey. I do not think Ian had done anything wrong, and I certainly had not set out to inconvenience him. But the alphabet, that grand impartial instrument of order, suddenly required a correction, because Banks belonged before Downey, or near enough to cause trouble in Mr Paige’s carefully arranged geography. Ian, who had been properly installed in the room before illness and biology dragged me back into it, was suddenly required to shift in the interests of alphabetical justice.

There was consternation, which is a fine word for the sort of fuss adults and children can make when a small system is exposed as being less permanent than it appeared ten minutes earlier. Mr Paige had the teacher’s irritation of a man whose orderly arrangement had been interrupted by a late-arriving variable. Ian had the student’s irritation of a boy who had not asked to be part of anyone else’s re-entry into education. I had the embarrassment of someone who had not meant to cause anything but had somehow walked in carrying disruption like contraband.

That was one of my first lessons in the larger room, and like many lessons that matter, nobody wrote it on the board. You can create chaos without intending to create it, and you can offend a system merely by arriving after it has finished making room for you. I had not spoken out of turn, challenged authority, shown off, or tried to gain an advantage, because even I was not ambitious enough to imagine mumps as a tactical device. Yet for a few awkward moments it felt as if I had turned up with a private plan to rearrange the class for my own benefit, using late arrival, alphabetical privilege and swollen glands in some cunning act of educational sabotage.

There is dry humour in that now, although it did not feel especially funny from inside the room. A boy with missed lessons and a recently distorted head is not usually an agent of strategic classroom upheaval. But the feeling mattered, because it taught me something I would keep learning in different forms. Rooms like their order, and when you arrive late, think too quickly, ask the question not yet permitted, or see the flaw in the arrangement before anyone has decided flaws are open for discussion, the room can treat your mere presence as provocation.

I took my place, wherever the alphabet finally allowed me to land, but it did not feel like belonging. It felt like insertion, as though I had not joined the class so much as been spliced into it after the first draft had already been approved. The others had begun becoming themselves in that room, while I had entered as an adjustment to the seating plan, a small administrative correction with a schoolbag. The roll had my name on it, certainly, but the room had already learned its own order without me, and my first act on returning was to disturb it.

Primary school had trained me in a particular kind of certainty, and I had not known how much I depended on it until it was gone. There was a question, there was an answer, and if you had listened carefully enough or remembered faithfully enough, you could usually supply what was required. That suited me because I was good at taking in information, holding it, arranging it, and handing it back in the approved shape. It was not that I understood the world, because no child does, but I understood that system well enough to be rewarded by it, and rewards can easily be mistaken for belonging when you are young.

There was comfort in one teacher, even when the teacher was not especially comforting. One teacher meant one set of moods, one handwriting style, one rhythm, one collection of expectations, and one authority figure who seemed to know where the whole day was going. The teacher might have been wrong, unfair, tired, brisk, kind, impatient or distracted, but at least the weather came from the same sky. You could learn the signs and read the room because the room stayed roughly the same shape, and for a boy who liked to know the pattern before stepping too far into it, that mattered more than I could have explained.

High school did not stay the same shape for five minutes. There were different rooms, different teachers, different subjects, different bells, different books, different corridors, and different forms of humiliation waiting around corners like poorly supervised dogs. One teacher wanted neat working, another wanted explanation, another wanted silence, another wanted participation, and another seemed to want obedience before breathing. Each had a small kingdom, each kingdom had its own customs, and I had arrived late to the map with the confidence of someone who had only recently mastered the previous country.

The move from rote learning to thinking learning should have suited me, at least in theory. A mind that ran ahead of itself ought to have welcomed the invitation to think rather than simply repeat. But theory is a wonderful thing when it is not standing in a school corridor wondering where the next class is, what book should be carried, and whether the other boys have already decided you are an oddity. Thinking learning was not presented as freedom to me at first; it arrived as complication, and complication is much easier to enjoy when you have not missed the first set of instructions.

In primary school, if the question asked for the capital of something, I knew the capital. I did not have to wonder whether the teacher wanted a sentence, a paragraph, an opinion, a diagram, or some sort of personal response involving coloured pencils and self-discovery. There was a clean little transaction between question and answer, and while it did not ask much of the soul, it did offer a dependable return. I had become a reliable beast in that paddock, rewarded for memory, order and speed, without ever having to question whether those strengths would travel intact into a larger field.

High school began to ask different things, and it did so with the calm cruelty of a system that assumes everyone has received the same briefing. It wanted reasons, steps, working, justification, interpretation, comparison, discussion, analysis and explanation. Those words sound harmless now, the sort of words adults put in curriculum documents and nod over approvingly, but at the time they were small traps laid across the page. I could often see more than the question seemed to be asking, and that became its own problem, because I had to decide whether to answer the simple question, the question behind it, or the question I suspected the teacher thought had been asked.

That was one of the earliest versions of the brick wall, although I did not know it then. I was beginning to learn that the mind could run forward and still hit something solid, not because the mind was wrong, but because the room had not invited it to go that far. In primary school, speed had been mostly useful, because if you knew the answer quickly, you could put it down and enjoy the small satisfaction of being right. In high school, speed could carry you beyond the place where the room was prepared to meet you, and arriving first is not always an advantage if everyone else thinks you have left the path.

The first weeks I missed mattered because everyone else had been learning more than lessons. They had been learning how to be Year 7 students, which teacher could be distracted, how much cheek was safe, which older boys to avoid, which jokes would follow you for weeks, and where to stand so you looked as if you belonged. They had been learning the social timetable beneath the school timetable, and that was the timetable I struggled most to read. I could catch up a page, copy notes, ask for an exercise, and work through missed material, but there was no workbook for becoming part of a class that had already begun deciding itself.

I came from a smaller pool, and in a smaller pool even a reasonably strange fish can look like part of the scenery after a while. People know your family, your history, your habits, your strengths and your peculiarities, which does not mean they understand you, but at least their judgement has some background information attached. Country communities were not short of judgement, and anyone who thinks small places are automatically kinder has probably never lived in one long enough to be measured by the wrong conversation. Still, there is a kind of containment in being known, and high school was a bigger pool that did not care what I had been before I got there.

That is one of the crueller shocks of growing up. You arrive with a private record of achievement, effort, belonging, embarrassment, praise, punishment and survival, only to find that the new room has not read any of it. You may have been good at school yesterday, but yesterday belongs to a different building. You may have known how to be useful in one setting, but usefulness does not transfer neatly when nobody has yet decided what you are for, or whether being useful is even the safest thing to be.

I was not entering high school as a blank page, but I was being treated like one. That should have been exciting perhaps, in the way adults like to describe new beginnings after they have forgotten the terror of having no standing. It felt more like being rubbed out and asked to rewrite myself in a hurry, while trying to guess the handwriting style preferred by several teachers and the social spelling accepted by a room full of children. There is panic in that, especially for a child who has relied on being able to understand the system before moving too far inside it.

The mumps gave me an excuse for being behind, but an excuse does not put you back where you should have been. Teachers could be told I had been sick, and they could be told I had missed work. They could even be told I was capable, which is one of those helpful comments adults make without realising they have just increased the pressure. Capable means you should catch up, capable means you should not need too much help, and capable means your confusion is temporary, inconvenient and perhaps slightly disappointing.

I did not want to be disappointing, and that was another early lesson that travelled with me far longer than it should have. I wanted to be seen as able because being able had become one of my safer forms of existence. If I could not be naturally at ease, I could at least be competent, and if I could not always belong, I could at least produce. If I could not understand the room immediately, perhaps I could earn a place in it by getting the work right, which is a decent enough strategy until the room starts judging things that cannot be marked in red pen.

The work itself had changed shape, and that made the old bargain harder to keep. There were subjects now, not just school, and each subject seemed to come with its own furniture, smell, tone and idea of what a student should be. Mathematics was one room, English was another, and science had its own equipment and its own quiet implication that the world was made of smaller and stranger parts than anyone had previously admitted. History, geography, technical subjects, physical education and whatever else the timetable threw at us all came with different expectations, so the day was no longer one continuous lesson under the rule of a single adult but a series of small migrations.

I was not naturally good at migration. I liked knowing where I stood, even if I did not always like the place. High school made standing still impossible, because you were always moving, shifting, adjusting, packing up, unpacking, finding books, losing pencils, checking the timetable, pretending you knew where you were going, and trying not to look like the sort of boy who could be safely laughed at. That is a lot of performance for a child who has already missed the opening scenes and is trying to look as if he has read the script.

Being laughed at is not always terrible, especially if you are in on the joke. I have always enjoyed humour, and sometimes the drier the better, because a dry joke lets you keep your dignity while quietly admitting the absurdity of the situation. But being treated as a joke is different. That is when the room takes possession of you, decides what you are before you have had a chance to decide how much of yourself to show, and reduces you to something easier for others to manage.

So I watched, because watching was one of the few tools I had. I watched teachers, boys, older students, the way groups formed and closed, the way some voices rose easily and others disappeared, and the way confidence could pass for intelligence while noise could pass for belonging. I watched for danger, not dramatic danger perhaps, but the ordinary danger of being exposed before you understood the rules. There is a tiredness in that kind of watching, although I would not have called it tiredness then, because to me it was simply what the day required.

There is a particular kind of intelligence that is not about knowing answers. It is about reading threat, mood, timing, status and the distance between what a person says and what the room will allow to be said back. It is about knowing when to speak, when to stay quiet, when to laugh, when to pretend the comment did not land, and when to let someone else be wrong because correcting them will cost more than the mistake is worth. I did not call it intelligence then, because that would have sounded far too grand for a boy just trying to get through the day, but it became one of the quiet skills I carried.

That was where the dumbing down began to change form. In primary school, it had mostly meant keeping answers inside the fence, not overcomplicating, not wandering off into why, and not answering the question behind the question unless somebody had actually invited me there. In high school, it became more social and therefore more dangerous, because it was not only the answer that had to be edited but the person delivering it. Do not look too keen, do not sound too certain, do not show that you have seen the pattern before everyone else has even found the page, and do not mistake being right for being safe.

This is not a noble confession, and I would distrust it if it were. I did not always manage the editing, and there were times I spoke too quickly, answered too fully, or let irritation flicker across my face before I had the sense to hide it. A fast mind is not always a generous mind, especially when it is frightened, and I am sure there were moments when I mistook confusion for stupidity, in myself and in others. Sometimes I felt the private rage of being slowed down by a room that had not caught up, while also knowing, in some awkward and humiliating corner of myself, that I had not caught up with the room either.

That is a hard contradiction for a child to carry. Academically, I could feel the old machine still there, waiting to be fed, and if someone gave me the work, the structure and the information, I would try to master it. Socially, I was scrambling, because I had missed the first act and was being asked to perform in the second without knowing who the characters were or which lines had already become jokes. It is one thing to be behind on fractions or grammar, and quite another to be behind on belonging.

The teachers did not form a single opinion of me, and that was another shock. In primary school, I had been largely contained within one adult’s view, even when that view was imperfect. In high school, I became a different boy in different rooms, capable but behind to one teacher, quiet to another, inattentive to another, promising to another, and perhaps just another country kid trying to find his way through a system that had no particular reason to slow down for him. I had to carry the whole version of myself while everyone else saw fragments, and at that age fragments can begin to feel like evidence against you.

That multiplicity unsettled me because I had liked the idea that school knew who I was. It turns out school had only known who I was while the room stayed small enough to keep me in focus. Once there were more teachers, more subjects, more students and more invisible rankings, I became harder to hold in one piece. The old certainty of being known did not travel with me, and I had not yet learned how to be unknown without feeling as if I had somehow failed to explain myself.

There is loneliness in that, though not always the dramatic loneliness of nobody speaking to you. It is more the loneliness of being unrecognised in motion, present but not placed, capable but not settled, surrounded but not included in the rhythm. I do not want to turn every childhood discomfort into a wound, because children are remarkably good at surviving awkwardness and remarkably bad at understanding it while it is happening. But repeated small dislocations do accumulate, and they teach a child to carry himself carefully, as if too much of him might make the room shift again.

Sport helped later, as it often did, because sport has a simpler honesty about it. You can either catch, run, hit, kick, tackle, chase, or you cannot, and while there is still politics in sport, because human beings can turn anything into a committee if left unsupervised, the body at least gives evidence quickly. In those early weeks, though, even sport was part of the larger uncertainty, because I had not yet found the approved doorway into belonging. I was still standing somewhere near the edge of the pool, knowing I could swim in the old water and not yet knowing whether that mattered here.

The academic side should have been the easier doorway, but being good at school had become more complicated. In a small room, achievement can be seen as useful or admirable, particularly when people have had time to get used to you and your odd little habits of answering too quickly. In a larger room, achievement can become a label before it becomes a connection, and labels are useful to everyone except the person wearing them. Nobody wanted to be the boy who tried too hard, answered everything, or became a convenient target for the simple crime of knowing something.

So the editing began, not all at once and not in some clear heroic moment where I chose survival over authenticity while the orchestra warmed up behind me. It was more ordinary than that, and therefore more powerful. I softened answers, held back questions, watched faces before finishing thoughts, and learned that being right was not enough. You had to be right in a form the room could tolerate, and sometimes that meant reducing the thought until it no longer looked much like the thought that had first arrived in your head.

That lesson would follow me into accounting offices, client meetings, boardrooms, family conversations and all the other places where people claim they want honesty until honesty arrives wearing work boots. But in Year 7 it was still raw and unnamed, and I only knew that the old certainty had failed to travel with me. I had gone from a world where one teacher usually knew enough of me to keep me whole, into a world where each teacher saw a sliver and judged accordingly. The danger was not only that they might misunderstand me, but that I might start reducing myself to whichever sliver caused the least trouble.

The humiliation was not spectacular, which is why it is easy to miss from a distance. It was not the sort that makes a neat story with a villain, a speech and a satisfying comeback. It was the small humiliation of not knowing what everyone else seemed to know, of asking where to go when others had stopped needing to ask, and of opening a book to find work already underway, jokes already formed and expectations already settled. It was not enough to break you in one clean motion, but it was enough to teach you to hide confusion quickly.

That kind of humiliation becomes its own schooling. You learn to look busy while lost, to nod as if the instruction has landed properly, and to copy the movements of those around you, trusting that if they open the blue book, you should probably open the blue book too. You learn that confidence can be borrowed for a few minutes if you move at the same time as everyone else. It is not education in the formal sense, but it is powerful, and some of its lessons last longer than anything written in an exercise book.

I sometimes wonder how much of later competence was built on that panic. There is usefulness in learning to orient yourself quickly, to read systems, spot patterns, identify who holds authority, and work out what is being asked beneath what is being said. Those skills served me well later, especially in accounting, where people often brought in the visible mess and expected you to reconstruct the invisible decisions that created it. But a skill can still begin as a wound, and just because something becomes useful does not mean it arrived kindly.

The mumps did not cause all of that, of course. It would be absurd to blame swollen glands for a lifetime of mental collision, though I have blamed less worthy things on bad luck when the mood suited me. The illness simply exaggerated the shift and made visible what might otherwise have taken longer to feel. I was not just entering high school; I was entering late, behind, uncertain, and slightly out of phase with everyone else.

That phrase feels right to me now, because out of phase is different from simply being behind. The bell rang for everyone, but not quite for me, and the lesson moved while I was still trying to locate the beginning. The boys laughed, but I was hearing only the echo, and the teachers explained while I was still translating the system itself. I had not only missed work; I had missed rhythm, and rhythm is what tells you when to move before anybody has to say so.

By the end of that first term, I was no longer the child who had simply supplied what was wanted in primary school. I had not become someone else yet, and I certainly had not become comfortable, but the old method had begun to crack. Rote learning had made me a reliable little beast in a small paddock, rewarded for remembering the right gate and trotting through it when asked. High school had opened the gate, shifted the fences, multiplied the handlers, and expected me to trot out with confidence as if I had been bred for the show ring.

I had missed too much of the start to believe the start did not matter. The groups had formed, the teachers had established themselves, the lessons had moved on, and the invisible rules were already doing their quiet work. I was trying to catch up on pages, but the pages were only part of it, because what I was really trying to catch was rhythm. The old room had rewarded the boy who could remember, but this new room was already asking the boy to think, adjust, perform and belong before he had worked out where his desk was.

That was the confused state I carried at the end of Term 1 in Year 7. I had moved from one teacher who seemed to know all, or at least enough to keep the world contained, into a system of multiple teachers, multiple disciplines, multiple rooms and multiple versions of myself. The boy trained by rote learning had been dropped into a larger pool and told to swim before he had worked out the current. I was not drowning, but I was no longer certain I knew what swimming was supposed to look like, and that uncertainty was perhaps the real beginning of the education high school was going to provide.