Task 1 Sam Newton

What you are reading is a recount of my first two weeks of school in year seven.

I am writing this paragraph on the first day of the third week of school which, I will point out here, is the school’s Valentine’s Day celebration and I would like to say that the next year nine girl who tries to kiss me is going to get it in the kidneys!  Now that I have cleared up the dates I will begin to tell you about my first two weeks at school.

I would like to say that I was looking forward to the first day of school and I was looking forward to a new year, but I think I will be honest.  Going back to school after the holidays, especially the Christmas holidays is very stressful.  Around the second last week of the holidays my mother will say ominously,  “It is time to prepare for school.” This means going to the uniform shop (I won’t express my views about the uniform shop because I would probably get expelled) and then sorting through the new equipment like a man looking for a needle in a haystack.  When this is done the remaining days of the holidays have passed and it’s time to go to school.

You can imagine my excitement when I was told that in the high school there is a reward for winning the house competition so when I learned that my team, Bennelong, had won the swimming carnival I was pretty excited.  Another reason I liked the swimming carnival was that I made two new friends although, because I’m not the greatest swimmer, I only went in the participation races. This is a race where you swim simultaneously with many other people.  The objective, to the casual observer, seems to be to inflict head injuries on the other swimmers, but it is not that.  All you have to do is get to the other side of the pool as many times as possible before the time runs out.

I will now turn my attention to my experiences at camp.  I loved the activities at camp. There is something I enjoy about being able to fit through opening in caving and climbing under ledges in rock climbing while everyone else falls or gets stuck.  It seems like the objective of these activities is to make unfit kids look very disheveled, like they have been left outside in acid rain.  I enjoyed the camp until I learned that the cabins were basically asylums.  I should not have been surprised; in the past I have not been in a single cabin where everyone did what was sensible – go to sleep.  As far as I can tell, no-one at camp sleeps. The crazy people are awake because they think knocking the doors of the sensible people down is more important than sleep, the sensible people are awake because of the crazy people and the teachers are awake because they are trying to make the crazy people go to bed.   I got my own back at caving.  When I saw the tired faces of these people after we had gone through a particularly small and dusty opening in the cave they looked like mobile sand dunes.  The giant swing was fun, but I didn’t like pulling people up to the top. If I had made it I would have added a winch.  Challenge Valley was everything you want from an outdoor adventure: fun, exciting and… muddy.  The hardest part was crawling through pipes half filled with muddy water.  It was just my luck to get the pipe that sloped downwards so you had to swim under water for the last metre while being terribly afraid that you would come up too early and hit your head on a pipe or come up too late and hit your head on the bank.  Don’t try to tell me about living life on the edge!  I will remember Challenge Valley long after I get this mud out of my ears, and if I take enough showers, people might start sharing elevators with me again.

There’s not much to tell about my second week at school. I was trying to think of something to put here when I realized I was just about running out of space.  So I will finish by saying that even though I have poked some fun at the school system in these few paragraphs I am looking forward to the year.