St Fintan's High School is my alma mater. Between the years of 1999 and 2005, I attended from 9.15 to 4.00 Monday to Thursday and off at 3.15 on Fridays.
I wasn't absolutely crazy about the place. Now I'm not one of those sensitive souls who are isolated and withdrawn in school but then take a degree in the humanities and blossom in college, nothing like that. It was just really strict, and not strict in a kind of conducive to scholarly atmosphere way, but in loads of stupid little ways.
Let me illustrate this with an example. You couldn't wear your hair long. What were they worried about, if we grew our hair long that the place would turn into some sort of radical free-love commune? As you can witness from my profile pictures, the first thing that I did upon leaving school was to grow my hair like a good thing, and I haven't turned into a depraved, debauched... Well, I'm not sure the long hair played any sort of decisive factor, anyway.
And although you couldn't grow your hair long, you couldn't have it too short, either. What was that in aid of? They had all sorts of petty rules like that.
And the school has a reputation for being very good academically, but i go six year and still no write good.
Seriously though, the place was only OK-ish, nothing really to write home about.
Still, there are the fond memories of scraped knees and spelling bees and all that, but if I had a couple of spotty adolescent sons, I wouldn't be sending them to Fintan's. read more