Rules are meant to be broken, they say. An average human has broken more rules than they can count. This is not to say that breaking rules always translates to being a criminal. Rules are relative, and so is breaking them. Sometimes, certain laws are criminal in themselves, so not adhering to them may give you the right image, although relative to that law, you do not have such an image.
Photo by Seth Doyle on Unsplash
Growing up, it is only natural that young folks tend to go against rules set for them by parents or guardians. In as much as the repercussions may be regrettable, it is essential to form the building block of life and its experience.
I had a pretty eventful experience back in secondary school. Coming from a fairly conservative home, my circle of guys opened me up to the world, thankfully, not in a very bad way. It was with the help of some of them that I had my fair share of breaking rules. I attended a private school which was one of the best I had seen that combines both academic and moral education. Emphasis is on the latter.
Fast forward to the rules broken…
Once, we were in our final year of secondary school preparing for our final exams. As any final year in the Nigerian education system is one that is busy, you have to prepare hard to ace all the exams, especially the external ones. So, the school made it compulsory that we attend all tutorials starting as early as 7:30 till around 6 p.m. One other thing was to live in the hostel compulsorily. I have never lived in a boarding house before, and even if I wanted to, not at this point. I wanted the freedom to eat my mother’s food every day. Who won't?
Different weapons were fashioned to ensure we all complied with the new set of rules. As you know, many fell by the way. All but 6 of us didn’t bulge. I did not even bother to tell my parents at home, even when we were told to bring them to see the principal. I still did not mention it at all.
In as much as I knew the school wanted the best for us, youthful thinking got the better of us. I remember we usually have a fellowship on Fridays after school. Due to my love for football then, Fridays were almost the only day you got to play outside school at one ugly-looking field away from prying eyes. I, in conjunction, with my click sometimes evade the watchful eyes of the prefects and teachers in charge. Now, we do that strategically, one after the other we moved to later on converge at the proposed location and have the best time of our lives or so we thought. Funny enough, we always do so through the gate normally. We never jumped over the fence or something of that kind, we were not that bad.
We seldom skip tutorials on other weekdays except Fridays. One peculiar thing was that we were some of the best students in our class but we just sometimes feel we need to have our ways despite what the school says.
However, sometimes we were caught. And scolded orally and with the rod too. That could only deter us for only a couple of days before we went back to our thing. But they all made school fun then, didn't they?