BEING A TEENAGER wasn’t the easiest thing to go through. Your hormones are all over the place, your parents don’t understand you and all you want is to get the shift and get through the Leaving Cert.

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So imagine having to cope with all of these things and also attend Saturday school? Yep, I was unfortunate enough to attend a school in Dublin which had school on a Saturday and I attended Saturday school for a grand total of 5 years.

It was hell.

The way it worked is that we’d have full school days Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday and then have half days on Wednesdays and Saturdays, finishing at 1pm. Grand says you, sure you’re getting a half day on Wednesday. Except where I went to school you were expected to play sport which was played on both Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

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There were a number of drawbacks to Saturday school. Firstly (and most obviously) attending school at the weekend was utter shite. It was bad enough having to study chemistry or physics during the week but imagine turning up for a class at 9am on a Saturday morning when the rest of your mates were having a lie in?

Secondly, you were tired all the damn time.

You’d get up 6 days a week and come mid-term or the Christmas holidays you wouldn’t be able to do anything except sleep. This would piss off your parents who were wondering why you didn’t to do anything. It was a never-ending cycle.

You also missed out on loads of Friday night parties with the worst excuse ever of ‘Sorry I have school tomorrow’ to your friends who were wide-eyed wondering if you’d been transported back to 1840. It was a sad and lonely place.

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When asked why we had to school on Saturday, we were simply told it was ‘tradition’ which as we all know is code for ‘We don’t know, stop asking questions’. And yes you might ask ‘Rachel why did you choose to go to a school that had Saturday school?’. The answer is ‘It was the only way to avoid going to an all-girls school’. It was the lesser of two evils.

I should have picked the all-girls school.

Towards the end of my fifth year, an announcement was made in Chapel (yeah ok I know, I’m posh alright). Our principal got up and announced that Saturday school was to come to an end at the end of the year. The roar that came out of the entire assembly permanently damaged my eardrums because it meant that we were free.

Well except us who had our Leaving Cert the next year and so couldn’t go out at the weekends anyway.

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I still get the odd nightmare that I’m back in secondary school and have to be in school in 15 mins or else I’ll fail my Irish oral or whatever. Saturday TOTALLY didn’t leave a permanent scar or anything like that.

At least it prepared me for working on weekends..

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