My daily bus commute here in Berlin has been bringing back memories of school - the last time I regularly caught a bus.  And the debacle that is Megaupload / Kim Schmitz has got me thinking about making rational decisions to break the rules.

I was in trouble a lot when I was at school.  I spent great deal of time in detention, on report cards, suspended and then eventually expelled.  Generally I wasn’t particularly badly behaved - I’d get caught on the odd minor criminal escapade but for the most part I was in detention for either being late, not turning up at all, or not doing homework.  I also slept through a huge number of classes, but I don’t recall being punished for this.

The system worked like this: getting a Wednesday meant staying behind from (if I remember correctly) 3.30 to 4.30.  It’s incredible to think this was only an hour - it felt like an eternity.  The biggest pain with a Wednesday was missing the bus home with everyone else at the end of the day.  The journey home was often the best part of the day.  That was mitigated by the fact that often the people I most had fun with were also in detention, so we just went home at 4.30 instead.

A Saturday was 10am to 1pm on a Saturday morning.  This was a much more serious punishment and I remember it felt like a room full of real miscreants as opposed to just disorganised people.  Some kids hid detention from their parents, but this was much harder with a Saturday - one had to wear uniform.  I don’t recall particularly caring - although I couldn’t go to the computer fair at Bowlers if I had a Saturday.

Saturdays dragged.  Big time.  An important part of my survival technique was to buy a bag of crisps (Seabrook Crinkle-Cut), crush them up into little bits, and then pour them loose into my blazer pocket.  This avoided both the crunch of eating big crisps and the rustle of the bag.  Hygiene wasn’t really an issue - I had two and half hours to find absolutely every last crumb in there.

When I had a Minidisc player, I would trail an earphone up my sleeve and listen to music while pretending to rest my head.  Detentions were in silence so I was always paranoid about the volume.

I can’t particularly remember what we did in detention - I think it was generally up to the teacher who was rostered to take it.  Sometimes we were just to do homework, others we were given punishment essay titles.  I think some of these essays were probably my finest work at school - sadly I never saw them afterwards, or got any feedback.

I remember two detentions farily vividly.  Mr Swales, a bear of a man with a huge personality who taught Religious Studies, spent one Wednesday explaining the mechanics of farting.  I seem to remember the gist of it was that the heavier, more toxic fart particles took much longer to reach a recipient’s nose than the light smelly ones.  I think the discussion was brought on by him farting exceptionally loudly.

There was also a relatively young teacher who had prepared a questionnaire for us all to complete on why we were there, what we thought of detention and so on.  It was an easy detention and also I remember feeling like someone actually cared about what I thought.

Detentions were a deterrent for me for a while - when I was young I didn’t like being stuck in an empty school with the older troublemakers.  As I got older I didn’t really have anything to fear and they became an inconvenience.  In the end though, I just had so many that they became a fixture in my life.

There was a system whereby being given three Wednesday detentions in a single week would result in a Saturday detention, and three Saturday detentions in a term would lead to a suspension.  I got caught under both of these.  Eventually I had to be suspended.

Being suspended didn’t bother me in the slightest, though I recognised that it put in about the worst 1% of the school - my mum was furious but I didn’t really care.  I can’t remember if I even actually got the time off school - I probably did.  It was three days - and I had to come back at the start of the holidays to make it up.  That was fairly gruelling.  And there were probably only five or six of us there from the whole school.  Three memories from these days stick in my mind - the porters getting us to move the assembly chairs around, and a kid climbing out of a window onto the fifth-floor roof of the New Building.

The third memory saddens me, both in its nature and my failure to do anything.

Mr NP Dunn, a design teacher and house master, was supervising.  For some reason, we moved from our usual room across the school grounds to another building.  One of the kids, whose name I still remember and who was even more hapless than me, was told to carry a box of Dunn’s papers.  Somehow, and I’m certain it wasn’t deliberate, he dropped some of the papers off the box and onto the wet ground.  Dunn was furious, shouted at him, and slapped him hard across the face.  I remember it vividly, it shocked me to the core.  I believe these were exam papers that he was marking, but it was wholly unacceptable - it was a slap of revenge and fury, rather than justice or punishment.  I did nothing, and I don’t recall ever mentioning it.

One of the things I appreciated at my school was that teachers enjoyed more freedom than was the case at other schools.  I remember a PE teacher picking someone up by his ears, another teacher who casually threw rocks around and quite happily gripped people.  I was grateful for this, and never wanted to be the sort of whinging ninny who would kick up a fuss about health and safety bullshit.  But Dunn’s actions were different and I didn’t recognise it at the time.

What do I think about detentions?  Well they worked with the vast bulk of kids - probably most never even served one.  And to an extent they worked with me - I didn’t want to go in, but once any sense of fear, embarrassment and inconvenience was gone, I didn’t care any more.

They were certainly a missed opportunity to get to grips with some of us.  The kids in detention were some of the wittiest, wiliest and sharpest around.  I think something positive could have been done with the bulk of us in such small groups.

What they did though, was taught me that it’s easy to make a rational decision to break the rules when the punishment is already clear.  Should I do this homework for two hours tonight, or serve one hour on Wednesday night?  That’s a hugely important lesson, and one that I think a lot of people never learn - and luckily for society, I guess.