📙 Part 2: Describe your first day at school

This episode's vocabulary

Vagueness (noun) - the quality of not being clearly expressed, known, described, or decided.

Anxious (adj.) - worried and nervous.

Overwhelming (adj.) - feeling sudden strong emotion.

To overtake (verb) - to go past something by being a greater amount or degree.

Blur (noun) - something that you cannot remember or understand clearly.

Wind up (phrasal verb) - to find yourself in an unexpected and usually unpleasant situation, especially as a result of what you do.

Ironic (adj.) - interesting, strange, or funny because of being very different from what you would usually expect.

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Questions and Answers

R: This will be a little bit difficult to answer, since I had my first day at school about 25 years ago. So there'll be a lot of vagueness and gaps and knowledge and gaps in my memory as well, now that I think about it. However, I can at least provide some basic details. Like I said before, my first school was just up the road from where I lived, though we still drove there. Perhaps to save time because my parents basically took us to school and then drove straight to work in the mornings. I remember feeling anxious the whole time, since it was a pretty big step going from my home to the school, even though it was so close by, I would be without my parents and have to meet all these new people. So it was rather overwhelming actually, now that I think about it. As for what exactly happened that day, I remember being told to take a tray. They were like these long boxes without any lids, where we would keep all of our school things. So I took one, but it wasn't one with my name on it. They left that part out of the instructions. So there was a whole issue overtaking the things out and putting them back and what have you. Aside from that, the rest of the time there was a blur and the finer details escaped me now. I just remember really hating it and never wanting to go back. And of course, I wound up going there for the next 12 years of my life. It was the start of a long and problematic relationship with educational establishments and institutions. Well, large institutions in general, to be honest, I'm not a big fan of. It's maybe a shame because if that first day hadn't been so rubbish and perhaps I'd been a little bit better prepared for it, things might have been very different. However, my life seems to have turned out quite positively in the end, regardless. It's all rather ironic because I'm a teacher now, although, admittedly, I'm a teacher that hates going to school. So make of that what you will.

M: And have your friends had similar experiences?

R: To be honest with you, I haven't actually asked them.

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