We all go to school as children. When we start school or where we go to school is different between people. Some children like school and some children dread school, but most are somewhere in between. School can be good at teaching things, while other school may have a bad teaching environment, all depending on how much funding the schools get or how much the parents of the students are involved. Then there are the differences of schools between countries and continents, which can vary greatly. Of this I can speak of very well, because of my own personal experience as a boy in the 1970’s and the 1980’s.
In the beginning of September 1979 when I was 7 years old, my family moved with haste from Iceland to Switzerland. My father was a professor and had gotten a sudden call to go to Zurich to work with an international research team of scientists at the University of Zurich. It was a large group of scientists from all over the globe and we all lived at an apartment building close to the University. This move had happened so suddenly that neither I or my big sister, who was 9 years old at the time, had not gotten any lessons in German at all. That did not stop our parents to send us to the local school. So my sister and I went to this school, not knowing the language and not knowing anyone. For me the situation was worse than my sister, because I had not yet learned to read and write. So I had to learn to read and write first in German, and with a special dialect called “Swiss-German” (Sweitzer Deutsch). Years later I got to learn to read and write in my own mother tongue, Icelandic.
Then in 1982 I went to a English language school in Iceland with my older sister, to prepare us to go to school in the USA on January 1st 1983. When I started this school it seemed that I was better at English than I thought, because after the first lesson, I was moved up two classes. We eventually went to the US and lived in Maryland state, while my father was working for an international heart research team at the FDA in Washington D.C. We lived there for a year, me attending Bells Mills Elementary school in Potomac County. I really only made one real friend while I was there, because the Americans are friendly on the surface but real friendship comes later, if at all.
