Next week my five-year-old girl will begin school and my 17-year-old will embark on her final, HSC year. These looming milestones have caused me to reflect on my own education and formative years, and how things have surely changed since I walked out of the school gate for the last time in 1986.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
I have to be very careful here because I sure don't want my three daughters (my youngest gal is in pre-school) to know the complete, ugly truth about the maniac boy their dad used to be. But the truth is I was a terrible, mischievous student.
A skinny, erratic, tooth-grinding, hyperactive little lad, I developed into a wilful, wantonly disobedient, highly rebellious, trouble-making teenager. A sobering contrast to my relatively stable and studious older brother Oid, I put my parents through multiple levels of hell.
I'm sure mum and dad would've taken little comfort from the fact that they were not alone; disturbingly half the boys - and plenty of the girls - in my school year were as much of a "challenge" to raise as I was.
Oid used to put it down to the fact the kids in my form were mostly born in 1968 - the Chinese Year of the Monkey; the naughtiest creature of that zodiac, they reckon. Sometimes, when I was in serious strife for wagging/smoking/drinking or whatever misdemeanour was added to my lengthy high school rap-sheet, Oid would catch my eye and make like a monkey, scratching under his armpits.
There were signs early on. I still remember the sweet, peppery aroma of the yellow carbon-copy school report booklets that never masked the stink of the results within. Cs and Ds were accompanied by comments that included, verbatim, "Craig likes to play the fool in class" and "Craig's behaviour distracts other students".
I don't remember this but my mum was called to collect me from school one day in 1974 because I decided I'd be taking no further part in Year 1. Apparently I turned my chair around to face the back wall and refused to reconsider.
In high school the hits kept on coming. "If Craig put as much effort into his studies as he does into acting the goat he would achieve much better results." And this zinger from my Year 9 geography teacher, "Craig is lazy and smart-mouthed. He is wasting his time and mine. I don't know what Craig thinks school is for."
On an intellectual plane I knew school was for pursuing an education but on a more potent, base, animal-instinct level I felt a deep compulsion to have as much "fun" as possible during my teenage years.
Although school didn't quite fit into that short-sighted world view, it was also partly the cause of it and very much the scene of it. What do authorities expect when they throw 150-odd pubescent boys and girls together for a couple of hundred days every year? What if they're monkeys?
At our 20th anniversary reunion, I wasn't at all surprised to learn from the handful of teachers who turned up that our form - the class of 1986 - was still spoken about in hushed tones by the educators who survived it. We knew at the time we were naughtier than the average lot.
I remember there being virtually no discipline to combat the anarchy and, later, I learned the school's informal position had been "Just get them though to Year 12 without them winding up in the newspapers".
A couple of the more seriously wayward chaps did indeed make the news but, by and large, the monkeys managed to scramble across the finish line despite debauchery, absenteeism and misbehaviour on an epic scale.
I won't go into too many details because my littlest girls may come across this column one day and, well, y'know ...
But imagine a Year 8 science class held one afternoon every week in the audio-visual room (basically a classroom with a TV and VHS player). Our teacher would sit at the front, his eyes glued to the nature documentary. At the back of the room, half a dozen or so 14-year-olds would relax in plastic orange chairs for 45 minutes, silently sipping on cold twist-tops gathered from home at lunchtime and secreted in schoolbags for "beer class".
Several years later we'd occasionally break into the same AV classroom on weekends to hold "video nights" - usually teen horror flicks or taped episodes of The Young Ones. Empty beer bottles, pizza boxes, ciggy butts etc would greet the first staff member on Monday morning.
That was the relatively minor stuff.
As a result my HSC mark out of 500 was, well, I'm ashamed to mention it; suffice to say I failed English because the only study I ever did was to read a Keats poem 20 minutes before I sat my final exam. Oh, and I wagged 42 days in Year 12 but they still gave me my HSC ... somehow.
Fortunately for me I got my foot in the media door through old-fashioned nepotism; my dad was a kick-arse press photographer. Once a copyboy, though, I worked very hard to earn a cadetship and succeed as a journalist.
But every year that has passed I have felt growing regret for blowing it at school - mostly because now as a parent, I can't argue for commitment from higher ground.
I say none of it as a boast - more of a confession. I look back and marvel that my school days were as crazy-chaotic as they were and it seems incomprehensible that twits like me would be tolerated nowadays. I certainly wouldn't put up with it, and if my children acted up even remotely like me on my mildest day, there would be hell to pay (#hypocrite).
So it's with a great sense of pride that I watch my eldest gear up to tackle the HSC in 2016. She's an amazingly mature, level-headed, intelligent student who reminds me of the clever girls in my form who cast looks of pitiful disdain as the monkeys set another garbage bin on fire.
As for Little Miss Primary School, I have a good feeling. I checked her Chinese horoscope and, like her big sister, she's a tiger; brave, competitive and fond of a challenge, they say. So, hopefully no monkey business.