I blush to hear it!
Nov. 3rd, 2007 07:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12A conversation I was having with Raphael reminded me of this rather bizarre, and yet entirely idiosyncratic event from my childhood. For some weird reason, I can remember the first time I ever felt embarassed. It was when I was nine.
We were having a PE class at school. I don't think any of you went to Forrest Primary School in the 90s, but at that time, we had this incredibly volatile, easily-angered PE teacher. He would punish the entire class if one student mucked up. His favourite punishment was making us lie on the gymnastics mats and count the number of holes in the tile-like material that covered the ceiling. Apparently one class actually managed to do this, by counting the number of tiles, and the number of holes per tile...but I digress.
Anyway, the only PE classes I liked were the ones where we did gymnastics, and, as my luck would have it, those were generally the times when other kids would muck up. I suppose gymnastics offered more opportunities to behave like an idiot: diving headfirst off the stage onto a crash mat, climbing up the ropes onto the beams in the roof, etc. Anyway, on this particular class, someone did something to make this PE teacher snap. He lined us all up on the floor and started yelling. There was a lot of angry muttering, and then someone said 'We should all be really good to convince him not to make us count the dots on the ceiling. Everyone be quiet.'
She said something else. 'And everyone should tuck their shirts in.'
The thing is, *I* tucked my shirt in as a matter of course. The instant this girl said to the class to tuck their shirts in, I realised that doing so was an absolute marker of extreme dorkishness. (I don't say nerdiness, because I like nerds). In that instant, I felt profound embarassment and mortification.
But, being me, I also thought, 'So, this is embarassment. Now I understand what all those writers meant when they said "so and so was embarassed".'
So for me, that was my innocence-to-experience moment, the moment when I became self-aware.
(Philip Pullman mentions a similar occurrence he witnessed in his many years of teaching: that younger children draw constantly and without any awareness that their pictures are really quite 'bad' (that is, not 'neat'), and all of a sudden, they realise that their drawings are 'bad' and become very self-conscious about drawing.)
I suppose I was lucky to have had nine embarassment-free years.
We were having a PE class at school. I don't think any of you went to Forrest Primary School in the 90s, but at that time, we had this incredibly volatile, easily-angered PE teacher. He would punish the entire class if one student mucked up. His favourite punishment was making us lie on the gymnastics mats and count the number of holes in the tile-like material that covered the ceiling. Apparently one class actually managed to do this, by counting the number of tiles, and the number of holes per tile...but I digress.
Anyway, the only PE classes I liked were the ones where we did gymnastics, and, as my luck would have it, those were generally the times when other kids would muck up. I suppose gymnastics offered more opportunities to behave like an idiot: diving headfirst off the stage onto a crash mat, climbing up the ropes onto the beams in the roof, etc. Anyway, on this particular class, someone did something to make this PE teacher snap. He lined us all up on the floor and started yelling. There was a lot of angry muttering, and then someone said 'We should all be really good to convince him not to make us count the dots on the ceiling. Everyone be quiet.'
She said something else. 'And everyone should tuck their shirts in.'
The thing is, *I* tucked my shirt in as a matter of course. The instant this girl said to the class to tuck their shirts in, I realised that doing so was an absolute marker of extreme dorkishness. (I don't say nerdiness, because I like nerds). In that instant, I felt profound embarassment and mortification.
But, being me, I also thought, 'So, this is embarassment. Now I understand what all those writers meant when they said "so and so was embarassed".'
So for me, that was my innocence-to-experience moment, the moment when I became self-aware.
(Philip Pullman mentions a similar occurrence he witnessed in his many years of teaching: that younger children draw constantly and without any awareness that their pictures are really quite 'bad' (that is, not 'neat'), and all of a sudden, they realise that their drawings are 'bad' and become very self-conscious about drawing.)
I suppose I was lucky to have had nine embarassment-free years.
