The Blog

   There were reasons why James is my first boyfriend...

Namely that as a general rule, the girls at my school were scared of the boys school down the road. And the teachers were too. They went to great lengths to ensure that we started school earlier than the boys, and finished earlier too, so that the girls wouldn't have to meet the boys at the train station. As far as I can remember, the only in-school contact we had with them was our debating teams meeting once a year (at our school), and we didn't do anything with them in music or drama, even though it would have been easier than having girls singing on the edges of their range and playing all the male roles in the school plays (yes, I played a bloke in a school play. I also played the mother of a girl three years older than me. Drama was fun).

When I tell people at uni that I never knew any teenage boys other than my brother and his friends they are surprised. They don't quite get what I mean by the local boys attending a bad school; in general they all seem to think that "bad schools" mean that the average UAI (the final school result, used to get into university) is low.

This series of articles, while being as sensationalist as the Herald can be, reminded me of all the reasons why I avoided boys in high school. I'm sure there were nice kids at the school, but all the girls (who didn't have brothers there) ever knew were the stories of the fights (some with knives, but I'm sure if guns were easily available Birrong Boys would be the place for a school shooting), of learner drivers who drove drunk, of the kids who died because of injuries incurred while trying to graffiti a moving train.

I'm not sure what the point of this post was. I guess I just wanted to point out that this is where I grew up, and if I sometimes still show some rough edges, that's why. Maybe someday we'll be able to fix up Birrong Boys, to bring in new ways of teaching and guiding the boys and turn it into a truly good school, and maybe someday the Birrong Girls will stop being scared of the boys down the road. Because the segregation is just sad.

Labels: birrong, high school, love my boy, snacky's law