Childhood memories are usually dominated by cloudless summer days, scraped knees from falling of your bike and burning ants alive using a magnifying glass and the sun. Mine are also dominated by the mornings when I’d come downstairs to find my school report had arrived.
Throughout the term I’d assured my parents that I’d been working hard, and that the small explosion in the Chemistry Lab had nothing to do with me. But there, in the report, was solid, irrefutable proof that I hadn’t been working hard at all.
Even today, 30 years later, I can recite, verbatim, the comments from a Math teacher Mr. Sonnen. “Usually I would write Could Do Better but unfortunately Mr and Mrs. Heald…I do not think that this will be possible.
