This week, we have been the happy recipients of a gorgeous week of beautiful weather. Every day so far has been full of sunshine, and the crocuses are coming up all along the Lade Braes path from our house into town. I have been to West Sands Beach each morning for a run, and the water is a lovely blue (though the reflection of the sun off the water is bright enough to sear my corneas…). Yesterday morning, my friend Ailsa picked me up for a fun morning of badminton (I do recognize that the word “fun” has never before been matched in a sentence with the word “badminton” by the way…) with a group of women who have children in the various St. Andrews primary schools, and who meet every Thursday in the drafty old town hall in Strathkiness, just down the road a bit. Ailsa introduced me and explained that I was an American, then quickly added, “as I’m sure you can tell by her accent.” I was polite enough not to point out that I was the only one in the room without an accent, actually, thank you! I had never played badminton before, which was quickly obvious to the other women when I kept trying to hit the netty-part of the little bally-thing, then confirmed as I apologized for “hitting the netty-part of the little bally-thing.” “A shuttlecock, you mean,” said a woman named Claire, as she deftly served it back to me. “Yes, shuttlecock,” I agreed as I missed it, noticing that the word sounded much less vulgar in her Scottish accent than in mine.
We played a few rounds, then packed up, and I quickly realized that the whole point of a wee game of badminton is actually to go to one of the women’s houses after the game for a wee chat and a wee coffee. So the nine of us met up again at Sharon’s house, who actually just lives down the road from me. The wee chat, which lasted for almost two hours, was all about the different schools and the method of allocation for rooms at the upcoming overnight school trip for P7 to Disneyland Paris. Apparently, one of the women whose children goes to Lawhead was upset that her “mild-mannered” son had been placed in a room of rowdy boys, and would inevitably be reprimanded many times on the trip as a result. “A cannie mind wit to tell him,” she said,” jes to kip his head doon and ignore the slaters, eh?” Then another woman suggested she speak to the headmistress, to which she said something indecipherable to me but which made all the other women laugh uproariously. I smiled in a way that I hope was sort of knowing, but my heart wasn’t really into it. I was just relieved when they moved on to a discussion of the logistics surrounding an upcoming Zumba fundraiser for the PTA!
Emma has had a bit of a rough week at school because of another kind of allocation: this is the week where the families of kids in P7 chose where to send their students to secondary school. In St. Andrews there are two choices: Madras, which is a state-funded school and therefore “free” (as a parent will allow only after a lengthy discussion of property taxes…) or St. Leonard’s, which is not state-funded and therefore quite expensive. Many of the kids have known for a while where they will attend, especially those with older siblings at one of the schools, but this week, the ones destined for St. Leonard’s begin to discuss the entrance exam. That discussion effectively separates the St. Leonard’s kids from the Madras kids, and since Emma won’t be here in the fall, a few of her friends who are going to St. Leonard’s seemed to file her into the “not going to St. Leonard’s” group and are not as friendly to her as a result. She returned from school on Monday and Tuesday a bit dejected, and said that she didn’t have anyone to sit with at lunch (which to a primary school kid is the social equivalent of having your debit card rejected in a crowded grocery-store checkout line…as I imagine that might feel…if it were to have ever happened to me…which it of course has not…). On Wednesday, she returned home with a birthday party invitation, however, and seemed relieved to have once again found her place. And yesterday, she returned home with more stories of her friends in class, though their names are now Anna and Rebecca instead of Maddy and Poppy. The good news is that she seems to really like her new group of friends, and since there are many more girls going to Madras than to St. Leonard’s, and all of them are going to the birthday party on Sunday, I think she still has a good chance of making some good friends while we are here.
John still has a few complaints about the school as well: on the way to the bus stop in the morning, he regularly points out that a lot of things need to be changed, though he admits that the biggest problem is “its hardness,” and adds “and I guess we can’t change that” in his newly-developed Scottish lilt. He seems happy with the reading, but not as happy with “maths” where they expect him to multiply a bunch of numbers together then divide them back up again. “Of course, I don’t know how to do that,” he says. Though he likes his teacher, he has several complaints about a teacher’s aide named Mrs. Humphrey, and he’s not even very fond of the school’s lollipop man. (A lollipop man in the UK, by the way, is not a man that distributes junk food, as I initially thought. Apparently, that’s what they call crossing guards here, who are armed with a huge UK-style yellow and black stop sign that’s on a long pole.) He also thinks that Greyfriars has no money, or at least not nearly as much as the schools in New York, but I think he believes that mostly because the Greyfriars gymnasium is very small and the computer lab is full of Dells instead of Macs. I think his biggest complaint, though, is that he’s the only boy at his table, which didn’t bother him until his mate Everett whispered one day in his ear, “You do know that all the girls in this class fancy American boys, don’t you?” Now he’s a bit distressed at sitting amongst a group full of girls!
No comments:
Post a Comment