The Tenth Final Year

Any adult who’s had to go back to school—actually sit in a plastic chair under fluorescent lights while someone performs authority at the front of the room—knows that nostalgia for the place is a lie built on selective amnesia. The reality is an alarm you resent, textbooks that appear to have been written in the same decade the building was constructed, and teachers who’ve traded the physical cruelty of earlier eras for a subtler psychological kind. The cliques are still waging their generational war over the hallway. The only novelty is a corner of the bathroom where the emo kids go to feel something. Progress.

I’m doing this again. My own fault. I’m finishing what feels like my tenth final year of school, this time to complete a web design qualification, which means I have voluntarily re-entered a system I was genuinely relieved to escape the first time around. The age gap between me and the rest of the class is not clarifying. It is mostly exhausting, with occasional moments of dark comedy.

The compensations exist. Every kid in the room, including the ones who look like they’d be more comfortable in a different institutional setting entirely, has a MacBook—which means that during the slow stretches, while the teacher explains something I already know or something nobody will ever use, half the class is quietly playing Plants vs. Zombies. I find this deeply honorable. Technology has democratized the ancient practice of not paying attention, and that feels like genuine civilization.

To everyone currently serving time in one of these places: keep reaching. That’s what they tell you, anyway. By the time you know whether it was worth it, you won’t need the encouragement anymore.