First Day Back at School – 2 September 2010

Sorry, nothing like as interesting as the blog yesterday about the iPod Touches and other revamped Apple products, released at their ‘September 1 Special Event’ keynote presentation.

So anyway, as the title suggests, today was our first day back at school. Strange, perhaps, as it’s a Thursday, but I think this is nice to ease us into the new term.

The new Year 7s’ uniform was immaculate, and for the first time since I was in their position, mine was pretty ship-shape too! How long these “little darlings'” uniforms continue to be as neat as today will yet to be seen. Like my own, many of their shirts were becoming untucked towards the end of the day!

Some changes in the actual structure of the buildings; with a geography classroom turned into a great new science lab, an extension to the external geog terrapin to make up for it, and some other refurbishment work (most notably in the food tech rooms).

Year 10 seems like a scary idea. A teacher called for her “Year 10 class” this morning, and I looked around to see who she was asking for. With the only other children of Year 8 age, I remembered that now WE are the Year 10’s. That is all too Scary Mary.

I had both a laugh, and a pleasant surprise, at my first GCSE results. I failed a French writing paper (which I’d written mainly in ‘Gernglish’, having studied a year of German and forgotten much of the French), and did badly in the Biology paper. However, I was always expecting to have done badly in these (my very first real GCSE’s). The other two sciences were good though, and at the risk of sounding immodest, I got two A*s in Chemistry and Physics.

Looking forward to the academic year of 2010/2011, I realised that by the end of it, it will be less than a year until the start of the 2012 London Olympics. Right now that feels like a very long time in the future, but actually it’s scarily close…

Where is my childhood disappearing to, eh?!

Andrew Burdett

Andrew Burdett is a twenty-something from Maidenhead in Berkshire, working for ITV News.