Text 1: Lost before registration, by Maya Rahman

An original contemporary blog.

Until September, I had attended a primary school with one corridor and fewer than a hundred pupils. My new secondary school has three buildings, four staircases and room numbers that seem to follow no sensible order.

On my first morning, I followed a group through the nearest entrance and immediately lost them. The printed map showed room 7B beside the library, but it did not show that both were upstairs. After walking around the ground floor twice, I asked at reception and reached my form room ten minutes late.

Lunchtime was worse. My new payment account would not work, so I stood at the front of the queue while everyone waited behind me. A member of staff eventually entered a temporary code, but by then nearly every table was full. I knew nobody and was preparing to eat alone when a girl called Ellie moved her bag and made space for me.

In the afternoon, our English teacher asked us to hand in the work from our homework folders. Nobody had told me that new pupils were meant to collect these folders from the office. The teacher let me use a sheet of paper instead, but I spent the lesson worrying that I had already made a bad impression.

Text 2: My first day at Bell Street School, by Ellen Price

An original diary entry written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this diary entry from 1891, Ellen describes beginning at a town school after her family moved to a new area.

I began at Bell Street School today. The clock in our rented rooms is slow, so the first bell had sounded before I reached the gate. The teacher frowned as I entered and sent me to a desk at the back.

Every child was writing sums on a slate, but the slate given to me had a crack across it. My figures kept disappearing beneath the broken edge. I did not dare interrupt the lesson to ask for another, and so I completed only half the work.

At the next bell, the other pupils hurried away before I could ask where they were going. I followed the youngest children and entered the wrong classroom. Several of them laughed, and another teacher had to lead me back across the yard.

Dinner was a lonely time because all the girls already had companions. I stood beside the wall until a boy named Thomas pointed out an empty place on a bench. He also showed me which door my class used and where I should hang my coat. I was grateful, although I still wished that I were back at my old school.