Have you ever been in trouble?
I was once sent to the headteacher’s office, but the story surrounding it is quite ridiculous. It was back in primary school, and I must have been 5 or 6 at the time. It now dawns on me that the whole school was quite ridiculous.
For instance, at the end of playtime, the teachers or dinner ladies would blow a whistle to mark the time to go inside – but you weren’t just allowed to walk to your class. No, you had to stand perfectly still wherever you were. The person in charge would then look around the whole playground to make sure that no one had moved an inch. Then, another whistle would sound and you would line up with the rest of your class, and you would be led inside by your teacher when everyone was finally standing straight enough. Not everyone did stand still however, and fairly often a fellow pupil would be caught moving, and they would be sent to the headteacher’s office for a quick telling off. Yes, it was that ridiculous.
You have probably guessed why I was sent to the headteacher’s office when you read the title of this post. I should really learn to choose better titles in order to create a bit of suspense.
One fine summer’s lunch time, I was up on the grass running around and enjoying myself. There were some trees dotted around, and a few friends and I were jumping up to try and grab leaves off the trees so that we could play with them. If I remember, we weren’t even successful, but we were happy. The dinner ladies, on the other hand, were not. We were spotted, rounded up and then marched to the headteacher’s office where we were quite strongly told off.
But you know what? I didn’t think I had done anything wrong. I still don’t think I did anything wrong that lunchtime. And even if what we did was wrong, how were we supposed to know? I’m not bitter about it, but there was no school rule which said “Thou shalt not swing on trees”, even though that’s not what we were doing. How can they expect us to abide by rules which we don’t even know of? It truly was ridiculous. Crazy.
The final bit of ridiculousness – I had to take a letter home with a huge sad face on it, with my conviction written across it: CAUGHT SWINGING ON TREES. I want to get that letter framed.
And what did I learn from that? Some people are just dicks.
Swinging on trees wasn’t the only swinging Wolf Wolson got up to that summer.
I did the same thing at primary school!
Except the branch snapped (it was already pretty much broken before me and some friends were swinging on it, unfortunately for me it broke off whilst I was swinging on it).
I remember the headteacher telling me off for that one quite well.