“Angry, selfish, gifted, weird!”
To this day, I don’t know why I decided to sneak a glimpse at the phys-ed teacher’s notes in Grade 4. The very notion of a clandestine peek at the teacher’s clipboard was, for a rule-obsessed kid like me, tantamount to breaking into the principal’s office on a Mission: Impossible-style heist to rewrite the school curriculum. And yet, there it was – the purple clipboard with the hastily scribbled notes that would form the basis of our end-of-term reports. It was practically whispering, “READ ME”, and I was Alice in Wonderland.
It was 1991 and I’d just moved from a Catholic primary school in Port Melbourne to the state school a few suburbs over. My old school didn’t even have PE class, much less extensive reports: I
