Opinion
How a Q&A appearance revealed why some of my school teachers hated my guts
Parnell Palme McGuinness
Columnist and communications adviserNothing in this life is certain, Benjamin Franklin said, but death and taxes. I’d add school reunions and columns about school reunions. This column about high school, inspired by an upcoming reunion, owes something to Franklin. The draftsman of the American Declaration of Independence understood that freedom has to be earned by challenging unreasonable authority.
If I were to stick to the highlights of high school, it would be a very short column. Around the time I entered year 9, some insufferable school-captain type (she’s now a PhD in gender studies, so still obedient to the prevailing fashions) came to give a talk at our school assembly. One of my very few attempts at keeping a diary reminds me never to let my memory become so distorted that I start to believe the hokey “best days of your life, girls!” cliche she rolled out.
Pick the ‘Little Miss’.
“If this is as good as it gets, life will be pretty damn depressing,” I pondered. “I must never succumb to that kind of lazy thinking.”
I have heeded the warning from my younger self. But perhaps I scrubbed too much from memory. It turns out that some of my hijinks were quite memorable, at least to others.
Most recently, a story was dredged up because I was due to join the ABC Q&A panel. My careers adviser – who may or may not have forgiven me for refusing to consider doing law at Oxford “because I want to be a Balmain basket-weaver” – posted the promo for Q&A to a Sydney Girls High School “old girls” page. One teacher commented about me with words to the effect: “I can’t stand her.” “She always was a Little Miss,” an English-history teacher tut-tutted. “Remember her Wuthering Heights fiasco?”
Now, I will not dispute that I was indeed a “Little Miss”. I hope life has been kind to the teachers who had to bear me at that age because they have earned some rest. But I have no memory of this Wuthering Heights fiasco. To be clear, the combination of words sounds plausible. I had a weird obsession with Emily Bronte’s intense, gothic novel in those teenage years. And fiasco? Well, if I didn’t have too many names already, I’d own its place slap-bang in the middle – Parnell Fiasco Palme McGuinness. But I drew a blank.
I became consumed with curiosity about what I had done to become the talk of the English and history staff room. In a private chat, the former teacher finally agreed to tell me the story.
So this is it. This is the great Wuthering Heights fiasco. I wrote an essay, just not the one they wanted. That’s all. It was probably a good essay, too, given how well I knew my subject.
I do remember that I was annoyed to have been assigned to an English class with a teacher who chose not to teach my favourite novel. I was irked by the quality of some of the selections. There was some overly self-conscious feminist novel in which water was a metaphor. (Years later, I still use “damp” as an insult for a limp kind of feminism.)
And so, it seems, I took it upon myself to turn in an assignment on Wuthering Heights, a book which, while part of the national syllabus, I had most definitely not been assigned.
Parnell Fiasco Palme McGuinness.
Did I mention I was a terrible child? No doubt about it. Many readers would argue the girl has become the woman.
My rogue assignment caused quite a kerfuffle among staff already frazzled by my antics and general disposition. It came a bit after I’d insisted I couldn’t be penalised for forgetting to bring my book for reading time in class because I was “reading in my head”. When challenged, I recited poetry from the book that wasn’t there by heart, amusing that teacher enough to avoid a detention.
And it probably preceded the King Lear debacle, when I had the temerity to write what I thought, not what I’d been taught, about the play. Namely, that Lear was a terrible shit, whose behaviour when facing the consequences of his folly showed a character that Shakespeare had deliberately marked as flawed. Anyway, that essay – backed up with quotes, like the one in which he wishes his elder daughter barren – netted me a doughnut, a solid zero out of 100. This teacher’s tantrum at my insubordination to her conventional ideas gave me insight into ways in which unearned and unreasoned authority tries to assert itself. Call it an early lesson in cancel culture.
About this time, I quit wearing the school uniform skirt in favour of trousers. To their credit, my parents paid for the uniform-coloured pants but left it up to me to fight that battle without their interference. In the heat of the argument over whether I could and should be disciplined for flouting the outdated sartorial tradition, the principal told me I’d never amount to much.
This was a useful lesson in how thwarted authority tries to discredit its challengers just before it fails. Fortunately, my final mark turned out quite all right; whether I’ve amounted to anything since is very much a matter of individual opinion.
Trousers are now a uniform option at my former school. Turns out a lot of people these days agree with me on the merits of old man Lear; recent interpretations lean rather in my favour. And the Wuthering Heights fiasco? The former teacher later admitted that students who read too widely and keenly should be the least of a confident teacher’s many problems.
In the end, while the school years haven’t been the best years of my life, they turned out well enough: I got used to taking unpopular positions, confident in the knowledge that if my reasoning was sound, people would come around in their own sweet time. High school taught me to bear the cost, if the price of freedom is a bit of intellectual fiasco.
There’s just enough nostalgia in that to get me along to another reunion.
Parnell Palme McGuinness is managing director at campaigns firm Agenda C. She has done work for the Liberal Party and the German Greens.