School Years

I was thinking recently about the baggage we carry out of our school experiences. It’s usually a mixed experience. There are some good things and there are always some bad things to remember. For me the good things started to happen when I entered the 5th grade. In the Soviet Union it was moving from one teacher for all subjects to a whole bunch of teachers different for each subject even though we physically stayed in the same building. In the United States the movement from “elementary school” to a “middle school” is also accompanied with the physical movement to another building. So using the American terminology my “good” school years started in my middle school and continued through the rest of the school years up until the senior year when everything fell apart and left me extremely disappointed and unsatisfied. So I never went back, never visited the building, never met my teachers. I still don’t have any will for that. I did free myself of this baggage by the age of 35 or 40 :) but until then my school years experience affected the way I dealt with people a lot. I do know people who believe that the school years were the best time in their lives, I also know people who forgot those years like they never happened. I want us to compare our experiences, discuss what happened then and how it shaped our personalities. Maybe, if we open this jar of worms our kids will have it easier.