My (not so brilliant) report card

I’ve had a lot of catching up to do last week, chief among which, the quest to dig out my secondary school report.

I spent a whole morning in the attic, also known as my mother’s washroom, unearthing boxes full of stuff which we were all convinced had been thrown away.

But what do you know? Tucked away in the bottom of one dog-eared cardboard box, wedged between old letters to Santa, was the report card. And other scary stuff. Such as, photos dating back to the late 1980s. Lord help me.

I’d love to say that oh, it was a lovely trip down memory lane, instead, I’m mulling over the thought of suing Franco Debono for getting us all in this frenzy and for reminding me what I looked like at 12. (Oh God, forget this sentence, it makes me nervous that he might not get the joke and phone me up).

So, back to my marks. My Form II Tulips report card was not as brilliant as Dr Debono’s. I certainly did not get 100 in religion. I got 64 in English, 69 in Maltese and 67 in French. Clearly, languages were not my forte. Either that or as a child, I did not take things seriously enough, tut-tut. Redemption lay in other subjects: 85 in maths and 96 in science.

The report doesn’t mention anywhere that my teachers were duly impressed by my hard work or by my brilliance as a student.

However, at Parents’ Day the form teacher did tell my parents that I had a career in science. It’s a good thing they didn’t pin their hopes on having a mini Stephen Hawking, because as it turned out, my scientific career flopped before it ever took off.

Languages, ahem, beckoned. For a time I even worked as a translator, translating complex French documents to Maltese. Don’t be terribly impressed: I took lots of little breaks in between one paragraph and another, dozing off on the computer and waking up with keyboard marks on my cheeks whenever someone darted in my office (to discuss some finer point of lexicon: “Should it be Brussel? Brusell or Brussell?” For goodness sake, let me nap!)

I’m looking at this hand-written school report – no computers back then – and am guessing that probably not one of my classmates ever gave this old report card a thought since we left school. Why should we have? It’s not that we were particularly enamoured of our school. It was not bad, just, well, very nun-ishly run, the kind where petticoats were de rigeur.

But I suppose it’s different with boys’ schools. Particularly St Aloysius. Several of my male friends are Aloysians and though I love them to bits, hand on heart I can say that they do have a slight tendency to think that they are God’s gift to women/employees/everyone in general. (Which possibly explains Joseph Muscat’s perpetual smirk).

However, there’s another thing: males are bound to their school for life. They stick up for each other and give each other extra thumps on the back if they’ve been to the same school. They reminisce over their secondary school days, even on their 67th birthday. So perhaps there is a tendency that until they leave the nest (and their girlfriend/wife/partner chucks everything away), males will treasure their school certificates and egg-and-spoon race trophies.

Notwithstanding, once we hit our 30s we all know that certificates and reports are just pieces of memorabilia that don’t mean a thing. I have now in front of me a whole array of certificates acquired over the years: basketball, swimming, art, pottery… What do they say about me as a child? Zilch. All these interests fell by the wayside.

What matters mostly is the stuff we do in between the certificates: selling my granny’s bigilla at a Lejla Maltija stand was a lesson in how quality sells better than quantity, selling chunky gold jewellery to men with tattoos, a lesson in how you should not judge a book by its cover, and so on so forth.

And that is why a parent’s or child’s obsession with school reports is unhealthy. Play is as much, if not more, important than study, because it teaches you that it’s all about what you make of life. Look at George Orwell – for all his linguistic genius – he ended up homeless in Paris, but then got a book out of that. And now I’m jabbing my finger at these photos of 12-year-old me. God, the ghastly clothes. And the hair: why is it hanging above my ears in the shape of a jagged isosceles triangle?

No top marks for aesthetics, that’s for sure.