Girly swot
2002-06-26 || 5:06 p.m.

A snapshot of a day. The story of my life.

Today was the final day of my five day numeracy course at Canterbury University. During the five days I made friends with two other teachers called Steph and Louise. I fortuitously sat next to them on the first day. Steph was a fellow vegetarian and she also liked the same music as me. The three of us got on really well. They said to me that I had the misfortune to be sitting next to the two biggest bitches in the world. And boy did they make me laugh. We sat at the back the whole time giggling away, the things we were saying to each other got more and more outrageous and it was hilarious. Steph even said that when she first started teaching she was smoking a lot of dope and teaching fractions used to strike her as really funny - an eighth, a sixteenth etc. You don't get many people saying things like that out loud. Anyway they left early today and it was only a short while later that my cover as the trouble maker at the back was blown.

It was the second to last session of the day. We had been asked to bring our plans in to share ideas with others. So I get mine out. I write in pencil. I love the sound, the feel, the texture of pencil. One of the course organisers pounces on my plans. She goes into raptures over my use of pencil. How wonderful it is. What a good 'working document', how I can easily alter, amend and annotate etc. A few minutes later, two of them descend on me. They ask me would I mind talking to the group (of 60!) for a few minutes explaining my reasons and strategies.

Why does this always happen? There I am again. Desperate to be cool but yet again exposed as the class swot that I really am.

Bollocks.

I said to the girl next to me. "Great. How I love to be the class boffin, I mean, its not as tho' I would rather be popular or anything is it!"

Other people see me in a way totally different to the way I see myself.