Page 23 - Real English 2024 Book 8

DIGITAL RESOURCES

What I Wish I Knew 1

about School

Children spend most of their formative years in school. Do you like going to school? Why or why not? What kind
of relationships do you have with your teachers and classmates?

In this lesson, Marty Wilson writes about what he should have learnt back in his school days, but didn’t.

Knowledge of facts and figures may get you top marks at school, but
it is everything else we learn from school that determines the report
card we get from life. Here are a few things I wish I had realized
earlier in school (and life for that matter).

1. Working hard is cool.

‘Marty is doing well at school with an
absolute minimum of effort. He tends to
disrupt others.’ They could have photocopied
my kindergarten report card and used it for
the next 12 years. I was incredibly lucky

to be born with a stupidly high IQ. When
they tested us, I got a better score than my
teacher – I know, I am a freak. Consequently,
1
I was that annoyingly smug class idiot who
thought it was beneath him to study hard,

and ‘way cool’ to mock anyone who did. But
people I never gave a chance at school turned
out to be great people.
Unfortunately for me, being able to
sail through these formative years left me
thinking my whole life would be the same. It took some big fat fail

grades at the pharmacy degree and my early bosses in advertising
patiently kicking my lazy back for me to realize that getting pass
marks – without any effort at all – doesn’t get you the education you
need. There is this other report card, called your character, where
you get an A only if you work to the absolute limits of your ability, having excessive pride in
1.
purely for the satisfaction of being able to say: ‘I did my best.’ one’s achievements

01