A good child
“Conscientiousness in a child is a virtue above all else”.
Mr Jamieson would come once a week and make us recite poetry and look words up in the dictionary and see who could find them first. I remember ‘conscientious’ distinctly because it was the first big word I remembered- it being a quality to strive for to make me better liked, and all.
The more I tried to be conscientious, the more I did things like not do my homework, or throw things at people who were annoying me. One time I accidentally kicked a girl in the face and she was epileptic and she had a fit a few hours later which may or may not have been my fault. One time I was at a concert in my school uniform and was so happy that I wanted to run around. The next day at school Mr Jamieson called me into his office, having seen me in my school uniform behaving in a way that did not represent the school well. Detention for being happy.
A few weeks later, Mrs Leisk- that evil witch of a woman who made Colin Mackie cry- forced me to give a speech unprepared (I’d been off with tonsillitis) and stand in front of the class for the full five minutes with nothing to say while people giggled. I tried very hard to be conscientious and think of things to say about skiing but all I could think about was how I wished I was doing a slalom race instead of standing there and I spent the entire five minutes picturing the wind whipping my hair around my face as I left everyone in the room in a snowy cloud.
Then I dyed my hair purple because I liked the colour and was suspended until I represented the school better. Breaking in to another school to visit a friend, completely unaware that this was breaking and entering got another series of detentions. And after that I gave up on being conscientious and decided that my days were better spent wandering around town than at school. I never got caught. It seems that it’s only in trying to be good that one fails at being good, and when in relaxing a bit one never gets caught. And if one is never caught then no moral judgement is cast and so the jury is still out on whether I am good or not.
