2025
My problem with My Education
I have always had a problem with education. Not, learning, I love learning. I love being self-taught for sure, it’s formal education that worries me.
Or perhaps it’s teachers that worry me, they are a special breed.
Teachers always put me through a difficult time. I started school when I was four and I was told off soon after for not “knowing my sums”. I still don’t “know my sums”. The teacher had us doing sums and mine was crap. She takes me and another boy to the teachers room and measures our heights. “See, you are taller than him and he is better at sums.”
I’d never battled with sums before, I was four! I’d barely written “HERE” in capitals, hiding behind a chair at home with a pencil and paper. I was proud of “HERE”.
I basically battled through school and couldn’t wait to leave. I left with some poor CSEs (yes, GCSE came out the year after I left). I went to sixth form and did some O-levels and a GCSE in history. I came away from that year with an improved grade in history by 1 point. I think I went from a D to a C.
Pretty thick huh?
All my school years I was self-educating on computers. My mum’s work had an Apple 2 computer that the boss let me use. From 1977 to 1987 I farted around with the Apple and I also was bought a Spectrum for my birthday. They had BBC micros at school but they wouldn’t let me study computers at school as my “maths wasn’t good enough”… sums to do computers?
My struggle was dyslexia and the computers helped me through that.
After sixth form I got a job as a draughtsman through the YTS (Youth Training Scheme). This was where the employer could have a worker for slave labour. I used to get £20 a week in 1997. One day was college doing a BTEC. Despite getting distinctions in IT and technical drawing, I failed the whole BTEC on my maths module. The only reason they made me do the maths module was because I didn’t have a maths CSE or GCSE.
Wind on a few years and I tried my hand at Uni. I’d always had a hankering to goto Uni but after school I’d wanted to work. I was out of work in 1996/7 and did an Access to Social Sciences. Something didn’t sit right and I got to the last part and everything fell apart. The teachers didn’t help. I hated the idea of a loan to go to Uni and really, social sciences wasn’t for me.
In all that time I did do a few evening classes and got a few more GCSEs.
Why I went to university at the age of 45 is a long story. I guess also I had to prove to myself I could do it.
I did an Access to Writing course in Norwich in 2014. I got an upper 2.1
Then in London 2015 at the UEL (University of East London), I did a Creative and Professional Writing BA for which I got… an upper 2.1
Later I did a masters degree via the Middlesex University in Novel Writing, for which I got… an upper 2.1
I’m not sure what any of the university stuff means, other than it was an experience, and they say university changes your life. Well, it did.
If I’d gone to university at 16 or 17 I’d have struggled greatly, and, at the end of the day, I didn’t have the qualifications to get in anyway. I also had no idea what I wanted to study. It took a lot of time to know that, and even that it was available. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have needed a loan back then and maybe the degree back then was “more real” than the ones these days… not sure. The main thing I did with the BA and MA was write a lot of essays, so if that makes an “academic” degree, then I did do that. One of my primary reasons to study the degrees was for my formal writing to be taken more seriously… but that is actually, a long story.