English Speech

When I was in kindergarten, I had a swing. It wasn’t legally mine, it was the kindergartens, but everyone knew that it belonged to me during lunchtime. It was a black plastic barrel that was hollowed out and had a little window on the front of it. It was apart of the swing set in the playground and was my go-to place to eat my lunch, I would specifically go there to eat my lunch, and everyone knew that it was mine to eat lunch in, except the new kid. 

On one particularly cold day, he was in my swing and I had wanted to eat my lunch in peace, in my swing. But the new kid was sitting in there instead. I had politely asked him to move because that was my swing and he just stared at me like I was the one who was being rude and told me to go away. So I asked him again and again, multiple times and waited for him to move, it was kinda awkward.

But he didn’t move, so naturally, I climbed into the swing and pushed him out the other side. He fell onto the ground and ran away crying saying that he was going to tell the teacher on me, but I had gotten heaps of telling offs due to ‘being bossy’, so I wasn’t concerned about the teacher. 

I ate my lunch per usual and went back inside.  Once back inside the teacher pulled me to the side of the room and told me that it wasn’t nice to push kids off swings. Now normally I would say sorry to the teacher and then go and apologise to the poor kid I had ‘been bossy towards’ but this time I didn’t say sorry because he was in my swing and obviously no one else had told him the social hierarchy of kindy. That wasn’t my fault.

At the end of the day, I wasn’t allowed to go to the barrel swing as my punishment, and as a little kid in school, you have to obey the teacher otherwise you have to go in the time out corner. And I didn’t want to spend any time in the time out corner. So I went over to the other girls to play ‘house’.

Just in case you don’t know what ‘house’ is, its when there is a wooden kitchen and a few beds that mimick what a house looks and feels like, that we clean and pretend cook and make the beds. So basically the stereotypical housewife set up that the little girls at kindy would play in. To me, this was boring, and I abandoned the idea of cooking plastic eggs to go over to the paint station, where the other half of my precious time at kindy was spent, and I decided to paint a masterpiece.

Something that I would like to point out is that when I got told off by the teacher for pushing the kid out of my swing, the other kid didn’t have to apologise to me for not moving or even speaking to me properly about the problem. Apparently, in schools, children are taught to sort out problems with words, not physical solutions, I had asked the kid to move politely, then not so politely, and when that didn’t work I pushed him out. But why was taking action discouraged when it happens but encouraged in-class time? The boy wasn’t told to apologise for not moving, but I was for asking him to move out of my swing multiple times. Just because I pushed him, I was made to apologise, but he was the one not moving.

Overall girls are told to not take action to get what they want, to be complacent and polite, from a young age this is drilled into girls. That they have to act a certain way and be ladylike and feminine. This was what I ignored in kindergarten and primary school, but what was really sad, was that this way of teaching manners still went on when I started high school and even more so then because I went to an all-girls school. Usually, it’s the girls that have to apologise for being ‘bossy’ and wanting to take control, but when a boy acts like that, he’s encouraged for having leadership skills.

I got told off for taking action against a negative response from a kid that didn’t move when I asked. I was four, what was I supposed to do? In this society we are not equal, people say that equality is possible, but from what has happened in the last few years,  it hasn’t shown enough change to create a truly equal society.

Girls are still told to back down to let others go first, to be complacent and to not be ambitious. Gender stereotypes exist and instead of encouraging it – intentionally or unintentionally – we should be teaching children to actively challenge gender inequality from young ages. I don’t remember that poor random kid, but to this day I still dislike him.