I Got Kicked Out of School

It was the happiest day of my life

Photo by Stephen Andrews on Unsplash

I am not kidding.

It felt liberating. I finally had a smile on my face that day.

I was 4 years old and was studying in Nursery.

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A little background on how the schooling system works in India:

Nursery and kindergarten were present in Indian schools. The concept of “play-based learning” wasn’t.

I had to go through Nursery 1 and Nursery 2 (because apparently, one year of Nursery wasn’t enough torture) and then KG before beginning Standard 1.

Back in the day, these classes weren’t about gently introducing kids to school and teaching the basics. No, no. We had full-on classes with so many exams! It has changed a lot now, thankfully. We have 12 standards, which makes it 14–16 years of schooling, with some schools having only one level of Nursery and some schools with two levels of KG.

(Who decided this system was okay? I’ll haunt you after I poof away. 😭)

Anyhoo, back to the story.

Every day I would wake up with this insane fear of going to school. I loathed it. We had a very, very scary teacher. She didn’t just look scary- she was scary incarnate. She talked scary…