One of the stories I wanted to tell is the story of the “repetenti” or “corijenti” in our primary school. Each class had a few of them, more or less equally distributed among the “good classes” and we were all supposed to do our best to “pass” them – i.e., help them graduate, in what today seems like Finland educational equalitarianism.

As told before, in the Romanian school system I grew up in, we would all spend our time in roughly the same classroom, we had breaks of about 10 minutes, and teachers would come to us, rather than us to their classroom (as is the custom here in Canadian high-school). The only time we’d leave that classroom was for the PhysEd classes, which took place usually outside or in the “sports room” and various classes involving labs, such as chemistry, biology and physics.

We did not have any lockers and most of us had a more or less permanent spot in the classroom, in one of the class rows. There were three: one next to the entrance door wall, which also had hooks on which we’d hang our jackets, the middle row, right in front of the teacher’s desk, and the row next to the windows (the “window row”). Each row of student desks had pairs, as you were paired with a classmate sitting next to you (your “colleague”). Each student desk had a space underneath where you could leave your “school rucksack” (ghiozdan).

This photo shows a classroom similar to ours, although our class had slightly different, “old style” student desks and hooks for jackets on the right hand hall. Also, the chairs were “foldable” – i.e., you had to press them down in order to sit, otherwise they’d be in an upright position and would hurt your bum or rip a hole through your pants which would often get stuck in the screws.

My class, Tufa’s “C”, was quite good and all of us graduated to the next year. Perhaps that is why, sometime in the 6th or 7th grade, we got 2-3 students who were repeating their year: Mihai Daniel, a short, wimpy and limpy fellow, a quiet dude whose name escapes me, and Culea. Their arrival was met with hostility not only by us, the kids, but seemingly also by the teachers, who were expected to enforce the rules and curriculum, but also help them pass the year – something that always happens in Finland, but not so much in Romania. They were all placed in the far side of the window row. I was seated in the far side of the middle row, roughly where the photo above was taken from.

Because of his limp, lisp, short stature and the somewhat handicapped appearance, Mihai Daniel, though a nice guy and generally happy child, was cruising under the radar. The second dude, the one whose name escapes me, was relatively tall and wore a “souped-up” uniform. Whereas we, the male students, were forced to wear a school uniform that looked very much like what Mao was wearing (only black – see more in photo in VCR), with a button all the way up, many of the “repeaters” had somehow managed to get and wear, in defiance of the existing rules (histo-regulament), a school uniform with slim fit pants and draped suit. It seemed as if their uniform was custom-tailored, although the investment may have been worthwhile for them, as they were spending more years in school than the average pupil.

You can see in the photo (muzeu-uniforma) an example of this uniform suit, although here the pants have the regular cut (not slim-fit, as it was cool back in the 80s). Obviously, the “model” in the photo looked nothing like the repeater of my wonder years. I remember asking diriga if I could wear something like that and being told, unequivocally, NO. Perhaps the repeaters never asked for permission, or they were simply breaking too many rules and, much like a central bank that has pushed the interest rate all the way to zero, the school rulers had run out of punishments and leverage to enforce rules with these guys.

Only these days have I found a more or less “scientific explanation” as to why I liked it so much back then (at-fashion).

The repeater most pregnant in my memory is Culea-matriCulea-Moulea, the dirty blond gorilla.

Sources / More info: inbo-finland, coti-sport, histo-regulament, at-fashion