I Fell Off My Stool Six Times

_{(i had a lot of fun)}



Year Eleven, for all Americans or adults or American adults(or other people, like latvian babies, but i figured this was a little less specific), is the last year of Secondary School for the English. This is the year in which you take your GCSEs - the qualifications you need to get into college or Sixth Form, and get pretty much any job. Even MacDonald's has started asking for GCSEs now, which is very unfortunate for S-am, whose life ambition was to work there.
I have already done three and a bit GCSEs, because I'm a fricking genius some courses extend over several years; in Year Nine I took the first part of RE and Biology and the Maths Foundation, and in Year Ten I took the second halves of RE and Biology, and the first part of French - this means that this year, I will have the Maths Higher, both halves of Chemistry and Physics, Geography, Art, English, five more parts of French, and... Oh, no, wait, that's it. Don't worry, it's only thirteen exams - I'm not really worried. The people who haven't already done RE, or failed their Biology, will have to do, like, sixteen.

I have a slight confession to make about my exams, which I feel very bad about, and it is this:
I find them easy.
Of course I revise, and of course I try hard, and of course I'm a fricking genius I worry about them(the night before, at least) - but I often feel bad because I don't think I revise or try or worry as much as some people. I am naturally clever. I'm starting to think it's something of a personal fault.
It's just that, somehow, under test conditions, I am impossibly able to completely hold my own - in the same way, perhaps, that I can easily do so when in other stressful scenarios, like being interviewed on the radio or forgetting lines in the middle of a production. I get a kind of high off it - and the worst part is, I find exams fun. This, to me, feels like cheating. Exams are supposed to be terrifying and horrific and make you feel sick and be incredibly awkward and the bane of everyone's life. But when I'm sat in that hall, and my paper gets put in front of me, I just know exactly what I have to write, and the ease of it fills me with impossible joy. I finished my French Writing within the first fifteen minutes, and had another hour and a quarter left - and when everyone else was scribbling away, perspiration and the stink of terror filling the air, I felt amazing. Enjoyment is not what exams are there for. I feel as if I'm letting down teenage-kind by enjoying them, like some kind of personal betrayal. Doesn't stop me having fun, though.



We are supposed to have the same Form teacher throughout our five years at school, but I don't actually think anyone's managed that by the time we reach our last year, because the school keeps messing them about. With pretty much everyone else on their second, third or in poor J-sh's case fifth Form teacher by the end of last year, I actually thought that Mrs. Eden had managed it and broken the record.
It turned out she hadn't.
I will admit that, lovely as she is, Mrs. Eden indeed did not teach us very much last year - if you added all of the times we actually saw her together, you might estimate that she spent a cumulative total of about two hours with us.
Finally deciding that she couldn't cope, we were demoted down to another teacher, Mr. Patel. I had Mr. Patel for half a term in Year Seven, before we were set, for Science, and found him to be quite enjoyable company. Unfortunately, I have changed a lot since Year Seven, so it was awkward being treated the same way I was then. Not as awkward, however, as when I was stood outside the room in the morning, as because it is a lab pupils are not allowed in unattended, which has never happened before because Mrs. Eden's room was a Language room, and there's no bunsen burners in a Language room. Or at least, not that one. Not sure what Miss Conner gets up to in hers, mind.* But, because there are bunsen burners in labs and Mr. Patel's room is a lab, we were not allowed in - so I stood outside with S-eb and J-sh and T-om, who are the only people I find even mildly agreeable in my Form, and H-ah, who is now next door. As we stood there, discussing results, we were suddenly set upon by a lab technician to whom I have never been properly introduced, but who seemed immediately and gleefully to know me. "Oh, you must be [Rao]!" she cried, which was mostly worrying because she knew what I looked like. "Mrs. Eden talks about you all the time - heard you've been getting into fights with J-ke, eh?"
Indignant, I responded, "I only sprayed air freshener around him once because he kept coming in stinking of cigarette smoke!"
"Oh," she said; "I hadn't heard about that one."
This was even more worrying.

Then we were let in and it was all all right again.

_{*last year, miss conner single-handedly managed to have the entire of a-block evacuated three times in one week because her burning toast set the fire alarms off. in the end, they disconnected her classroom from the rest of the school system.}



I use this as a subtitle because it was perhaps the most significant thing I learnt all day.
I had never been in this room before, and we were not assigned a seating plan, so I did not know where to sit - so I let S-eb do his Sheldon-style assessment of the ideal seating position for his cross-winds and observations and distance from the register, and then sat in the second-best seat next to him.
Then I fell off it.
This was because it was a plastic stool with a sloped front, which is what all of the Science stools are like at our school; usually, because of the way I sit on chairs, I tend to slide backwards onto these and perch on the slope, using my feet for support on the cross-bar between the legs. When I tried to slide backwards onto this one, however, it too slid backwards, however a lot faster than I did, so that I fell straight down, and almost re-broke my coccyx on the floor.
J-sh laughed, so I hit him.
Then I tried again; I hooked the stool back, stood up with all the dignity a cocky sh*t like me confident young woman can muster, and sat down again.
Then I fell off it in the exact same way.
J-sh and T-om laughed, so I hit them both.
This time, when I sat down on the stool, I did so tactfully; rather than shoving myself roughly backwards, I manipulated myself sideways, which worked perfectly, until I shuffled forward to resume my usual position and it skidded out from under me again.
J-sh and T-om and S-eb laughed, so I hit all three of them.
My fourth attempt to sit on the stool was more successful; I carefully manoeuvred until I hovered over it, then, holding onto the edge of the desk for support, lowered myself down until I sat square on it, then hugged the sides of the thing for dear life and didn't move for the next five minutes. Had I been allowed, I would have never moved off the stool again for the rest of the day, however unfortunately we were required at this point to get out some equipment to fill out our planners with; obediently, I reached for my bad sideways, and promptly over-balanced, and toppled off my stool.
J-sh and T-om and S-eb and Mr. Patel laughed, so I hit the three of them and glared pointedly at him.
With my pencil case now clutched firmly to my chest, I edged my way elegantly onto the stool, positioning, hovering, and lowering with absolute care and devotion.
Then J-sh pushed me off, and I hit him so hard he fell off his stool as well, and T-om and S-eb laughed at both of us and we both hit both of them and then each other(as you can see, were are a very peaceful, mutually understanding group of companions).
Finally, with just a few minutes left of Form left and with me having failed to spend more than thirty seconds successfully sat on my stool in one go, I mastered it. I moved to the other side of S-eb so that J-sh could not push me, put my back on the desk in front of me, positioned, hovered, lowered, and sat completely still, clutching the edge of the stool for support and not letting go until my knuckles turned white and my face blue. Just as I began to gain confidence in my new-found skill at sitting, the first bell went, and everyone got up to move on - leaving me with the biggest dilemma so far. I had not yet successfully managed to get off the stool without falling. Could I do it now? Of course: I am, after all, the most cocky confident person to grace the walls of the school since the teacher who got three students pregnant in the '80s. So, working in absolute reverse order, I unpicked my fingers from the edge of the stool one by one, lifted myself up by my arms for support, moved my weight over the front - and completely forgot that I still had my feet on the crossbar.
The stool skittered backwards, and in a desperate attempt to save myself I grabbed hold of the desk in front of me - my ankle, however, remained tangled in the stool. Thus I was left hanging, acting as a human bridge between stool and desk, dangling by my hands and feet and stretched to my full length between them.
Everyone laughed, and they were so busy laughing that none of them came to help me, so I just swore loudly at them and waited for someone to help.
After about ten minutes, I just gave up and let go.



When debating about whether or not to bother with all the homework I had failed to do over the six weeks the night before we went back to school, I decided to calculate the probability of me having any of the lessons for which I needed the homework on the one day. I did this by using the number of lessons in a day, the number of days in a school-week, and the number of those particular subject lessons in a week, and adding them together to create the likelihood of me having Art or English. Rounded and approximate, these came back as a ⁷/₈ chance that I would have English, and a ¹/₄ chance I would have Art. Overall, this meant that I had a ⁴/₅ chance of having one of these, and a ¹/₂ chance of having both.
I did all of the homework.
As it turned out, however, all of my probabilities were wrong, which was annoying: I did not have English or Art, a possibility the odds of which I had not even begun to work out. In fact, as it happened, I did not have any lessons at all.
Instead, we had workshops.

The first workshop in the morning was Career Advice. This was awkward, because my chosen path in life is more than slightly peculiar - in brief, we were given a short questionnaire to see how well we were prepared to leave school at the end of this year, and to determine whether a one-on-one meeting was needed. Although I elaborated more on the actual form, here was the equivalent to what I wrote:

WHAT DO YOU WISH TO DO AS A CAREER?
Falconry.
DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU NEED TO DO IN ORDER TO FOLLOW THIS CAREER?
Yes. I have already done it.
DO YOU KNOW WHERE YOU CAN DO THIS?
Yes. I already did it.
HOW LONG WILL IT TAKE YOU TO ACHIEVE THIS?
I already did.
WHAT IS YOUR NEXT STEP?
Go to college anyway.

... I cannot express how awkward it is to explain repeatedly to the eighteen different teachers who came up to me and asked about it that I am already, technically, a qualified falconer, therefore I do not need to go to college, Sixth Form or university to follow this career path. I would like to, however, because, as previously mentioned, I find exams perversely enjoyable, and it's always good to have something to fall back on.
Besides which, being at school is an excellent excuse to put off having to actually do stuff in life.
The longer, I say, the better.

After this was an incredibly awkward internet safety workshop, about child exploitation. Two-hundred teenagers were sat in a hall and made to watch a video from the '80s on a massive screen, about a girl who falls in love with an older man. They sit on the sofa and grin stupidly at each other, and then he drives behind her on the way to school and around town, and then they shout at each other, and then the door closes and there's a lot of really awkward noises.
I complained to S-eb during this video that all of the educational clips have a stupid teenage girl in, and that's it's incredibly sexist because sexual predators are just as likely to be homosexual as heterosexual, so girls are statistically no more at risk. Then he pointed out that it's always a man in his mid-twenties that is the sexual predator, so it was the men who were worse-off by the videos, and then we debated about which was worse to be stereotyped as, sexual predator or sexual prey, until someone told us to shut up.

The best - the absolute best - workshop of the day, however, came in the form of a session entitled Relaxation and Staying Calm.
Which, with me, S-eb and J-sh, was destined for disaster.
The session was held in the library, which over the summer seemed to have been transformed in anticipation of this event into a gift-shop of scented candles, incense sticks and whale music. Soothing pictures of beaches and sunny fields had been pinned to the walls, and the projector screen was covered in a large powerpoint slide with the aforementioned title scrawled across it in a calm, relaxing font.
First, we were required to come up with one thing that annoyed or frustrated us. Without thought, hesitation or communication, all three of us turned in the silence which followed and said, exactly in-time, "T-om." The next question came as how we could get rid of this problem. We looked at each other, and then back at T-om. As one, we agreed, "Kill him." Seeing that this was not going so well, and keen to move on and possibly save T-om, the guest hastily skipped the next several questions, offering instead that we should come up with a list of things which could be done to de-stress. Our list, I thought, was quite good - it read: "Suicide; homicide; kill T-om."
We did not win the prize for best list.
The final activity of this sadly rather unsuccessful session was some sort of meditation technique; we were required to take a piece of chocolate and place it in our mouths, then hold it there and allow it to melt without swallowing or chewing, while we tensed and relaxed the individual muscles in our bodies. I hold no shame whatsoever in saying that the three of us spent the whole time doubled-over, snorting with laughter and spitting half-melted chocolate on each other, however given that this was possibly the greatest of my Happy Places that we were directed to find, I figured that was okay. At the end of the session, we were required to write down three techniques we had learnt that day for keeping calm and de-stressing on a small slip of paper, then give them back to the guest speaker for feedback and constructive advice. On my slip of paper, I unashamedly wrote the following:

Ways I have found to de-stress are...
1. Do not eat chocolate;
2. Melt chocolate in mouth;
3. Eat chocolate anyway.

We are never ever ever allowed back in that session ever ever ever again.

Although even if my probabilities for the lessons I would have were completely incorrect, however, I did get one thing right:
As predicted, yesterday was absolutely and 1.0 definitely a school day.



Just as it was the first day of the last year of school for us, so it was also, coincidentally, the first day of the first year of Secondary for the Year Sevens(funny, that, kids from the same school starting on the same day... what a coincidence...).
One must pity the Year Sevens, for I, too, remember being that small. I remember the abject fear of the dreaded black-blazers, the desperate sanctuary found in the Year Seven-only toilets, and those panicked moments of having to deliver a message to a teacher with a class of Year Tens or Elevens. What I remember most distinctly is how much the black-blazers terrorised and terrified us - which is why I have taken it as my stalwart duty to ensure that the exact same thing happens to them.
What? Need to beat some sense into the little bleeders - get too cocky without it...

What I also, remember, is wanting so desperately to be the person that I am quite confident I am today. And why? Because the person I am is the confident, unafraid, friendly big kid able to instil the same confidence in the younger ones, just as it was given to me.
Thus, when a four-foot tall, trembling little Year Seven was handed over to me in the corridor with the information that she had become lost, I rallied and fell back into my most comforting and friendly persona. It took several minutes to coax out of her that she needed to be in Rm 5, by which time the corridors had began to fill and flood, as they would, and which she had damn well better get used to given that on Monday there's going to be three times the people there were then. As we walked toward Rm 5, me carefully leading her and guiding the way through the small masses which lined the corridors, I explained about the structure of the school, asked her about her day, and made jokes. She ignored my information, did not answer my questions, and disregarded my humour.
This was not the greatest offence, however - oh no, far from it. That came when we reached Reception; from here, Rm 5 could be reached by going along the corridor, turning left at the second exit, and going about halfway down the hallway. I started to explain this to the girl, got as far as "Rm 5 is just through here--" and then was interrupted as she bolted.
When I say that she ran away, I do not mean that she walked away. Nor do I mean that she hurried away.
I literally mean that we were in Reception, and as I was in the middle of a sentence she hoisted her back onto her shoulder, ducked her head, and sprinted as fast as she could possibly run away from me.
I was dumbfounded.



I went home.