Recollections from Primary School

What is school like in Ireland? I don't think I was conscious

I mostly just don’t think I was really conscious as a kid.

I talk somewhat about my experiences of primary school here, different to many, but my readership skews towards people for whom this is maybe not that strange?

For the most part, school systems in different countries are surprising to the degree they are mostly pretty similar. You go and get classes for most of the day, and at the end there are exams, and there is some vague stages of school, and often you go to university afterwards.

But school systems also seem to differ a lot too, and people sometimes find some of the things surprising.

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Some background information on the irish schooling system

In Ireland, school looks something like:

• pre-school or montessori (optional)

• primary school for ages 5-12, for 8 years

• secondary school for ages 13-18

One typically has continuous primary school, followed by one continuous secondary school.

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My primary school experiences

I am slightly unusual. While I am Irish born and raised, and my naturally orange catgirl hair may lead you to believe I am a long-term native, both of my parents were immigrants who came to Ireland to leave 1990s Russia. Thus I didn’t quite grow up going to the same school my parents and such went to.

In fact, I ended up being in three different primary schools for various reasons.

I started off by going to a fee-paying primary school. And of course, I was a normal, well-adjusted, highly sociable child? Well, I my memories are quite fuzzy…

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I do remember some early things from school. I would go to class, we would wake up and I would put on a uniform and go sit in the classroom of our designated teacher. She would give us lessons throughout the day, with a bell at intervals to remember when to move on from one subject to the next, as well as to designate when it would be time to go to break.

I barely remember being conscious to be honest, I guess I mostly just listened to the teacher giving the lesson and followed along. I didn’t really talk in class much at all, to the point that teachers would comment on it often at parent teacher meetings. I mostly just consumed and followed instructions and didn’t really know any better.

For break time, we would go outside. There were some games that other people would play, and I would join if it was a game that I liked, like hide-and-seek or similar, but I would not really join in on games that I didn’t find interesting.

More commonly, I would just sit and play with the leaves. One thing I did do sometimes was just get sticks and long stringy waxy leaves and just make creations from this. I have recollections of making these and bringing them home sometimes.

I did have a few friends in school, and would just play games, sometimes outdoor games, but my preference was usually to play video games indoors. I guess I feel like I was pretty bad at initiative or choosing to want to do things, or having ideas, and instead would just kind of default to joining what others would want to do. We would watch movies and stuff, and they would discuss what board games they got and what reading they had been doing, and I would very happily listen.

Most of my childhood I was very much a passive responder or observer though, and I was pretty happily doing this. It mostly just never came to mind that there was any other way. I didn’t really critical think that much either, and was kinda gullible and would just believe things, even when people obviously meant things in sarcastic ways.

I was in many ways a book-smart kid, but I also just like didn’t read much. I recall reading all of the harry potter books, but mostly just not remembering anything. Reading words on a page, to me, felt somewhat similar to when you are reading things out loud to an audience, where you can say and understand the words, but where your attention is mostly in speaking the words so you don’t really remember any of it. I would reread passages sometimes because I didn’t remember them, but I only really had a small context window where I remembered anything, and didn’t really think about what was happening in the book other than just observing.

I did like drawing things sometimes or doodling, but often repetitively. I remember playing “the sims 2 castaway” on PS2 a lot of times and mostly drawing the same scenes from the game many times.

At home I would just complete the homework pretty quickly, I liked math and occasionally would ask to get some more questions from my parents, but it wasn’t super common.

Mostly I also just spent a lot of time playing flash games, I especially recall a good site called funny-games.biz which had many fun games.

I didn’t really get bullied, I did have some friends, but I guess I don’t feel like I really was much of a talker. I mostly just saw them if my parents organized a play date, since most people were not really a walk-able distance from where I lived.

I was at some point a friend with one of the neighbor who was a bit more rowdy and outdoorsy in ways, and I would join them to do things sometimes too. But they only lived nearby for a short time. I feel like I was generally pretty socially malleable.

But to be honest, for the most part, these are just like very thin fragments of memories that I can barely remember. I never really thought about my day or anything, I kinda just did whatever was in front of me, and didn’t think about anything beyond that.

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At some point, around in 2009, I ended up moving school.

Back then in Ireland, they were still one of a few countries where religious discrimination for schools was a thing, so I was baptised so that I could move school.

It was pretty last-minute. I remember leaving on like day 4 of school, and my friend announcing at role call that I had moved school and relaying this to me.

In my new school, it was mostly pretty similar overall. I guess I remember the two main things that were worse, was that my old school had hot food provided to us, while my new school I had to bring a packed lunch every day. Additionally, the music classes were much worse, we just ended up doing the same beginner’s recorder lessons each year.

I had some friends in this school too to some extent. I met a couple of people who also quite liked video games, and we talked about games a lot. They kind of liked different games to me for a while so I would usually just end up listening, but then sometimes I would play with them, and eventually I did learn of a game called “minecraft” which I loved.

For the most part though, I would just go home and do homework then play video games, just as before, though now maybe different games, and occasionally with school friends.

I recall one time there was some incident where people started telling me “oh no it’s so mean of them to say that to you”, and I just did not recall what someone had said to me. I was generally very oblivious of my environment, and supposedly someone had said some hurtful things to me, but I didn’t really notice. It’s nice that the norms were to shame people who try to say hurtful things, and comfort those that were supposedly hurt, I guess most were not so lucky as me.

I do remember a few times we did some interesting artsy/sciencey projects in school, one where we insulated a water bottle, another where we tried to reflect sunlight to heat up some food. I generally kind of liked art.

I also remember needing to walk up a large hill most days to get home. (People who have visited my home know that it is a very steep hill, often it is one of the largest complaints people have when visiting me. I didn’t like it either, I was like 10 years old and with a backpack full of heavy books, but I just did it anyway it was fine idk. I guess it “builds character” or something)

There was after school chess once a week at some points, and I quite enjoyed that, probably mostly because I was relatively OK at it. Though it wasn’t because I put any time into studying how to play well, nor did I really learn that much how to get better.

I also was, by my parents, brought once a week to learn Russian classes. I didn’t really like the classes that much, and often we were assigned homework which involved reading, and I just didn’t read it tbh. I was lazy. But there was an art class after that I did enjoy.

For the most part I just never complained about things, because I didn’t really feel like an agent that had the ability to shape my environment. Sometimes my mum would cook us food I didn’t like, I particularly remember having fried liver sometimes served and I just really hated it so much, but I just like ate it, felt the slight desire to vomit, and just swallowed it and ate the next piece. I wasn’t particularly forced to, it just never occurred to me to complain.

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I also moved to a different school again after

In the summer times, I would often go to Russia to go see my grandparents and relatives. My mum would fly us out, make us drive many hours to the town they live, and we would stay there for a period of over a month sometimes. We would mostly live in the country side ans do things there.

I will talk about that in another post some time though

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