This is an extended, long-form version, of something I mentioned in passing on Threads. Just in case you think I keep repeating myself.
Despite the awfully silent 2025, for reasons I explained previously, I’ve been writing this blog for over 20 years. Almost all of that is in English (though the original posts were in Italian), almost all of that is in long-form (though there were a few short, near-microblogging posts, from the time before Twitter), and very little of it being stream of consciousness (the early Italian posts were so.) This would suggest I’m quite comfortable with writing prose, and I even enjoy it to a point, right? But if you had known me since I was in junior high (say, when I was twelve), you would be extremely surprised by this result.
Indeed, in school I neither achieved good marks, nor enjoyed the essay-writing in our Italian class. While I could always end up with a good average at the end of the year thanks to the grammar tests (I have always been a bit of a stickler for grammar), my essays were always hovering just below the passing grade. For the three years of junior high, my only good mark on an essay was on the topic of The school of the future, where the provided prompt was to describe what we would think school would look like a certain number of years in our future — I have to admit I forgot what the time horizon here was. For the first time ever I felt like I had something to write about, and fantasised on how computers would make school both more interesting and important.
That might sound a bit strange to say, given how we’re already talking about late ’90s here, and computers have been used in school in many countries well before that, but either Italy or my local town were backward enough that we had maybe a couple of Commodore 128s hidden somewhere, but I never managed to use one. I’m not even sure if the staff had access to a computer, given how I was tasked with designing the flyer for our end-of-school musical number.
I regret to this day letting myself be dragged in for that. I was meant to be calling attention to the special track added for that year, which was My Heart Will Go On, and I made the mistake of referring to it as “by” Céline Dion. Our music teacher berated me for the mistake, and since I couldn’t fix it by the next day – having screwed up my Windows 98 install for a cough less than legit copy of Windows NT 4.0 and being left without a working printer – she decided that instead of masking the mistake and photo-copying the flyer as originally planned, she would blame me in front of the whole school, and request my school mate copy the list of tracks to bring home to their parents. Yes, I’m still holding a grudge to that.
This didn’t particularly improve in high school at first: for the first two years, my only half-decent grade for an essay was one in which I managed to shoehorn Star Wars into (knowing that my Italian professor was a fan, and having watched the original trilogy from recorded VHS many times by that point — this was the year Episode 1 was released, but much as I wanted, I had no chance to watch it in the movie theatres.) When we reshuffled the class again, the new (to me) professor had a lot more leniency on me since I had good grammar – if no particular predisposition to write – in a class where most of the students failed an elementary school level test.
Eventually, I got decent, but not full, marks for my final essay at the State Exam at the end of high school — an improvement from junior high, but still not great. But what I think is more interesting, particularly as it only dawned on me last year, is how my “second test” went. You see, when I went through the State Exam in Italy, in 2004, it was composed of three tests, all provided by the ministry: an Italian essay on a ministry-provided topic (the same theme across all types of schools, technical and humanities alike), a second test based on a subject of the specific school type (changing every year), and a third test which was a multiple-answer test, covering all of the other subjects. And that year, the second exam turned out to be networking (well, technically “Information Systems” as the subject is named, but it was a networking exam at the end), and while the question was to design a solution for networking together a bunch of labs in a high school building, it was effectively a technical essay — I don’t remember any diagram being involved, though some calculations and tables were. But most of it was descriptive — the type of technical writing that this blog became my primary outlet for in the intervening 22 years.
What I’m trying to express is the sadness (with a tang of regret) for having accepted the impression, given by my junior high teachers in particular, that not just I didn’t enjoy writing essays, but that I was not good at it. Instead, I can now see how I never really got into the topics we were supposed to write about, and whenever I wasn’t interested in them, I just did the literal minimum that was expected of me, leading to the results I experienced.
For what it’s worth, the same that was the case about writing was the case about reading. I never liked the books in the class library in elementary school, preferring reading comics and storybooks. I picked up Agatha Christie and a bunch of other mystery books (including The Cat Who) by junior high, but again mostly ignored the class library until the Italian teacher brought in Fahrenheit 451, which I finished at once. It wasn’t until the first year of high school that I stared reading Fantasy novels, starting from Lord Of The Rings, for which I won a bet with my then Italian professor, who was certain I wouldn’t be able to finish the book, so uninterested in literature I looked at the time. I finished it over the Christmas break, he gifted me The Hobbit as the prize.
At least at my time, in my schools, we never “crossed the streams” — we didn’t get to write essays about science, or technology. If my memory serves me correctly, we did have essays about the topics we studied in history, and possibly geography (but I can’t be sure of that.) And if this is still expected in junior high, the fact that my last three years of high school, in a technical school that was supposed to prepare me for going straight into the workforce, had spent no time preparing us for writing design documents, usage instructions, or any other technical documentation that a programmer should very much learn to write before throwing around terms like “software engineering.”
I sure hope things have improved since — despite having friends who are teachers and junior high professors, the topic of education rarely comes up — and having no kids means I don’t even know how education works in England. But that doesn’t mean I would want to pass on these horrible experience onto the next generation. I had it bad, I hope the new generations have it better.
