Going halfway across town to school.

As I said before,I naively thought that I would go to the closes Middle School, and o meet up with Dean and Paul. However, someone decided that my house wasin a catchment area for a school quite some distance away, but of course, close enough that I wouldn't qualify for free transport to it. So, off I set to get across town, almost getting lost on the way there, to my new school, aged 9.

Unfortunately, due to the catchment area, I ended up moving to the school with the kids who bullied me at the previous school, and this did continue.

More kids came to this school, and so I made some new friends, which was nice, although I had my first experience of falling out with friends. That was quite a strange thing, as I felt like no-one liked me at all. Luckily, that was all sorted out though, and whilst I still got bullied by others, I had a set of close friends to hang out with.

This was the school that got me interested in some subjects. We started having defined lessons. The two that seemed to be the biggest focus were English and Humanities. I switched off these quite quickly. English, as I was a very good speller, and still continued to read more interesting books at home, without the need to do the comprehension. My grammar might not be great for it, but I can read and write well.

Humanities was a new subject, and promised to be interesting, however, there is only so much you can do on the Romans, Saxons and Normans over 2 years, so it just got samey.

We started French, and I found this exciting at this time. Learning a new language was different, but I still found other things more interesting.

Science. After a few months, we started having the lessons in a lab, actually doing experiments, and this probably changed my life. I found it great, performing experiments, writing up what happened, trying to predict things. It took me into a world of learning that I loved. Alongside maths, which I seemed to have a bit of a knack with, it was just everything my brain seemed to be tuned to.
I don't think that you are supposed to focus on a particular subject area so young, but I didn't care. Just give me more.

I also very quickly switched off physical excersize, PE. It is a requirement that all schools provide 2 hours of PE for pupils a week. However, to cope with this, schools need to make it quite prescribed, and this I hated. I used to cycle to school most days, so I had a reasonable amount of excersize, and I found that I was pretty rubbish at contact sports, and I hated Rugby. I didn't mind track sports, although not great at them, but most of the year seemed to be contact sports. And because of this, when we had swimming lessons, the teacher just assumed I would be rubbish at that, and so put me in the bottom group, which just made me more disaffected. I was too much of a goody-two-shoes not to be participate, but I did the most I could not to do too much.

Music was also more formalised now. Again, something I didn't really understand. As I didn't already play an instrument, composition, structure, rythmn were all concepts I didn't really know, and didn't have much wish to. Much like Comprehension in English, I either liked the music or didn't. Why did you need to go more in depth? I tried to learn to play a keyboard, but found the co-ordination hard to maintain the speed the music should be played at. Oh, and I found music completely unreadable.

Whilst at this school, I learnt a lot, and would say that it was an important step in my life, although I do wish that it had been a little more open in some of the subjects, so that I didn't switch off some that I think I could have enjoyed more.

tbc..