First week of school is sorted!

A full week has passed since our arrival in St. Andrews, and we are getting settled in. It took us some back-and-forth with the school to enroll Leah and set her up in a classroom, so we filled our first few days of the week with more walks through town. Leah is a fan of the beaches, but my favorite spot in town is the Lade Braes, which is a walking path along a small creek that heads out of St. Andrews for almost two miles. The phrase Lade Braes is one of those terms that you can’t make sense of regardless of the number of times you hear it unless you know what is being discussed, but once you see one of the signs for the path around town, often recessed into a stone wall, it all makes sense. And once you take the path and see the water moving towards the town and pass the ruins of two water wheels, you understand why it’s there. The “Lade” means “lead” in that the stream was created to lead water into town, from a pond above a water mill, and the “Braes” refers to a Scottish word for high ground near a river. So: a stream bringing water down into town. Local reference books say the path was built to bring water to St. Andrews priory, and that was founded in 1140, but it’s possible that the stream existed before that, and was used for washing clothes and cleaning fish. You don’t see any of that today, fortunately—it’s filled with dog walkers, joggers and school children taking a short cut home. And now that I’m here, I will be among the throngs daily, looking for blooming bulbs and other signs of spring on my daily walk.

Leah on a Lade Braes walk

 

We managed to have Leah enrolled in school on Wednesday and her first day was Thursday. She’s in Primary 6 (P6), which is the equivalent of fifth grade in the US. (The year that we call Kindergarten is P1 here, accounting for the numbering shift). The school is Greyfriars, a Catholic school that is state-funded (not uncommon here) and provides education to students in a specific “catchment.” Because it overlaps with the University, it’s a very diverse student population, and university kiddos’ comings-and-goings are relatively common. As a result, none of the teachers batted an eye when the head teacher took us around to introduce Leah and announce that she was beginning at the school the next day. She also reviewed the uniform requirements with Leah (tie and formal collared shirt are required under the school jumper, but no crest-emblazoned blazer for her, as was not the case for Emma and John when they attended secondary school here a few years ago) and explained that the school doesn’t allow any outdoor shoes so she would need some black plimsoles. Fortunately, we had secured some of those the weekend before in Dundee, along with a gym kit that is supposed to be left at the school for the term (another difference from the secondary school! Yuck!).

 

Leah was incredibly nervous on our walk to the school on the first day, though I had hoped that her position as one of the older students at the school would help somewhat. Her school in the US is pre-K to 12, so she regularly walks in the front doors of the school alongside kids with facial hair carrying to-go coffees. But, the little kids jostling around us on their way into the building, as if we were two rocks in the middle of a swiftly moving river, didn’t help her and she wanted me to come into the building with her. I left her with the head teacher, and waited for hours to hear the report. It was mostly positive, and her stories made it sound as if the other students were very welcoming. She is a combined class of students in P5 and P6, created because there are too many students in each grade alone, so is one of only 4 P6 students in the class. This is a bit concerning to us, as we hope this doesn’t cause her to fall behind the rest of her fifth-grade class in the US. We know from previous experience that she is going to have to work on her own at home on math, as the Scottish schools seem to move much more slowly in “maths” here. Her new P6 teacher said they would focus on money, graphs and shapes, whereas her fifth-grade class in the US is working on operations with mixed fractions. On the other hand, previous experience tells us that they will be much more advanced in history and geography and they cover literacy in a different way as well. Leah said they were discussing Shakespeare on her first day and on Friday she had a spelling test with quite advanced words (all ending in -ion, thankfully…the week in which they do the -our suffix is going to cause her some issues with her American-style spelling!), and over the weekend her homework was to memorize a Robert Burns poem. She said they haven’t discussed geography yet, though she said she wasn’t able to accurately convey where she was from to the teacher. The teacher asked where she was from in the US and Leah said New York, so of course she assumed Leah was from the city. When Leah corrected her and added that she lived pretty far outside the city, the teacher said, “Oh, like the Hamptons then? I would LOVE to visit the Hamptons!” I don’t think Leah really knows where the Hamptons are, except to know that we don’t live there either, but I think she just left it at that and didn’t correct her. I pointed out that she could tell the students that she lives as far from New York City as Edinburgh is from Ullapool on the far northwest coast of Scotland!