How to NOT go to School – and help the NHS

Alumni Relations

Monday 20 April 2020

How to NOT go to School – and help the NHS 

Mike Forde (MA 2014) decided to help his primary class to adapt to the ‘big and scary changes happening around them’ as a result of COVID-19 by writing a book – ‘How to NOT go to school’. It has been published on Amazon Kindle, with all sale proceeds are going towards NHS charities.

I arrived in St Andrews in September 2010 as a floppy-fringed, colourful-t-shirt-wearing geek with absolutely atrocious facial hair.

I left four years later with floppy hair, a colourful t-shirt, a 2:1 in Philosophy and IR resigned to the fact that I would never successfully grow a beard.

Sometimes I look back at my four years in that corner of the Fife coast and wonder how much I really achieved at university. What I do know is that I experienced a lot. Coming from the provincial backwaters of Ulster, St Andrews for me was a cosmopolitan melting pot of fascinating people and ideas. It was exciting and filled with freedom and adventure.

One of the things I loved most about St Andrews was the conversations. You could sit next to a marine biologist at breakfast, social anthropologist at dinner and run into the Art Historians at the pub. And in my degree, I was lucky enough to study a wonderful range of subjects from biblical studies to business and Latin American politics to logic. In a primary school classroom where I now work, there are few things that excite a love of learning more than a scrap of genuine expertise dredged up from a world beyond their textbooks.  So, I am exceptionally grateful for the genuine breadth of learning that St Andrews gave me.

Those four years in North East Fife were some of the happiest of my life and I gained so much from my time here. I was able to represent Scotland in the obscure Dutch sport of Korfball. I had some of my first opportunities working in education with the University’s Widening Access team. And I even met my partner at a Theology cheese and wine event.

But the other great love of my life began (as do all good ‘Bubble’ stories) in the sweaty kitchen at a mediocre house party of a friend of a friend. That’s where I first heard about STAND. It was going to change everything in student journalism. STAND was the sexy millennial HuffPost to the Saint’s stuffy pretentious Times of London. I wrote a few verbose vapid listicles and bathed for a couple of weeks in the validation of online publication. After that, I was hooked and have been writing ever since.

After university, I’ve been exceptionally lucky in the range of opportunities I’ve been given. I was offered a place on the Charityworks Graduate Scheme which gave me a year of experiences across the not-for-profit sector. Through this scheme, I joined a tiny social enterprise called Twin Cafe importing fairtrade coffee from Nicaragua and forging links between communities in Sheffield and the city of Esteli in Nicaragua. After my time with Twin Café came to an end, I was offered a place on the Teach First programme and worked in a school in inner-city Birmingham before moving with my partner to Lancashire.

When the corona virus shut down my school, I suddenly had a lot of free time and wanted to give the children in my class a tool to help them discuss the massive changes going on in their lives. So I decided to write them a book. From the perspective of Parsley Mimblewood – a whimsical imaginative kid who’s been home schooled all her life – it navigates issues like missing friends, being cooped up together and dealing with emotions. My class seemed to really benefit from the story, so I uploaded it to Amazon Kindle and it’s had a really good response from readers around the world. Hopefully, it can help children to process some of the big and scary changes happening around them at this time.

How to NOT go to School: Parsley Mimblewood Saves the World is also available to download for free on Mike’s website: https://parsleymimblewood.wordpress.com/