While our palms and knees are still ingrained with dirt from sitting and kneeling on the earth, but we are beginning to look over, beyond the wide perimeters of the playground, we are sent to college. We are poured into page 14 classrooms which are bare of decoration except for maybe a map or a diagram, we are shuffled between bare classrooms and fed fragments and fag-ends. And we get bored. Because we have been living lives of adventure and passion in the playground we become bored, stunned, restless, mean. Don't they know who we are? We have been children. We have played better than anyone has played. They can't be serious. They are serious. You are at secondary school. There is a process which goes on in hidden rooms between the making and the getting of knowledge. And the process is dissection.

To leave behind the hopscotch, the four-square, the bulltag. The pinetrees the manuka forts the small square yellow dental clinic and the bike shed. To move out of reach of the immediate, the direct, the original. To leave primary, the raw colourful loud silent oneness of primary for the fragmented bewildering unquiet boredom of secondary. To lose the keen whole-hearted head-on promise of the day, to take your eye off the ball, your body off the grass, to be one step removed from the sun, the snow, is to be taught to take a pulse instead of to feel it.