My school years

I started talking about the educational institutions I attended, and I think it’s time to pick up that theme. This post covers where I went to school from June 1983 onwards; I’ll leave talk of university for another day.

[Update: see the Education category for more posts about education.]

I went to Maitland Area School from June 1983 to November 1995. I remember seeing the green exterior of the junior primary building for the first time, and thinking it was a really weird colour for a school. I also remember that on the first day of class, we were instructed to write about our holidays. To which I asked, “Which holidays”, and the teacher replied, “The holidays you’ve just had”. Given that I’d moved house from Scotland to Australia and had never been to that school before, it was rather hard for me to relate the word “holiday” to anything I’d been doing!

Maitland Area originally followed the traditional division of classes into Junior Primary (the first two years, starting in the year the student turns six), Primary (the next five years) and Secondary (the final five years of school). Sometime during the later years of my attendence, however, the school adapted to a more modern division into Junior School (the first five years), Middle School (the next four years) and Senior School (the final three years). It was explained to us that the change was informed by scientific studies into how different learning conditions suit children of different age groups.

The school’s motto was (and is) the old cliche, carpe diem, which is easily ignored, but what I detested was the school hymn, which was sung at various special events. Stupid thing. “Oh God to thee our thanks we raise“, etc, etc. I hated it especially for reinforcing a cliche: namely, the cliche that your average hymn as sung in your average church is still full of “thee”s and “thy”s. The cliche is not true; in my experience, people in church use straightforward modern English almost all the time, but if the only hymn a lot of people are exposed to happens to be one with “thee” in it, what assumption are they going to draw about all the others? It’s bound to reinforce the destructive stereotype that religion equals conservatism.

Maitland Area School has a website now, but that didn’t exist when I was there, and there have been lots of changes on the grounds since I left (not least a change of Principal). Below is my own photograph of the school, taken over Christmas 2006 and originally posted to this blog in February 2007. From this angle, the school looks more or less unchanged since I was there, notwithstanding some changes to vegetation.

In my final year, I took Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, Geography and Computer Technology. In 1996 I moved to Adelaide and re-did some classes at a different school, Eynesbury College. Eynesbury specialises in teaching senior students who intend to go to university, and fosters a unique learning environment that’s intended to bridge the gap between the two types of institution. Meanwhile, I lived at the Bible College of South Australia, an institution whose primary role is to teach theological subjects, but which also offers accomodation on a more general basis (it was here that I met my friend Gabby). I continued living at the college for a while after starting university, but eventually moved out in order to shorten my transit times.