Gender affected me particularly in primary school, mainly due to my choice of friends because, to the disgust of many of the girls in my class, my first best friend was in fact a boy. My female classmates didn’t seem to accept that, they acted as if it was wrong or like it was against the unwritten rules of society even at the ages of four or five.

In the early years of primary school it almost felt like teachers were brainwashing us to act in a certain way according to our gender, I was frequently told to “sit like a lady” in school, mainly by the older teachers. This may have been due to their old fashioned approach to what actually defines gender. Another clear memory that  stuck in my mind regarding gender was that boys seemed to always get in more trouble than girls for doing the exact same thing. It’s almost as if young boys were expected to behave badly and so the teachers lacked patience when they misbehaved.

I certainly do feel  that gender greatly influenced my time at primary school. As I moved further up the school in to primary four and even in primary five I no longer had male friends. There was always this idea that “boys were smelly” and I think this was mainly due to the fact that primary four was roughly when boys and girls started “fancying” each other.

Finally, gender also had an influence over my time in high school mainly through gender separated PE classes but I can confidently say that this was not in any way a negative influence and I was completely thankful of it.