Saturday 17 September 2011

the last

I've written three quarters of a page of one of the last essay plans I will ever write. I've bought a folder and notebooks and a canvas bag to hold them which will all contain the last notes I will ever write while sitting listening to a person qualified to educate me as I sit in the last classes I will ever attend. This is 17 years of education, compulsory and higher, beginning to end. I have to say it is a very very odd feeling.

I can see it coming. I can see the feeling. All those years of classrooms and uniform shops and pencil cases and sitting and studying and exams and marks and pages of reading and attention just stopping. Jesus it's going to be amazing. To finally be able to say: yes, I am educated. I have an education. I have gone through your system, Mr Government, and finished it to a healthy level. Look at me. All happy to be in that statistic of graduates. In that little vineyard of freshly ripened grapes with capes ready to be squished into a delicious maturing wine all nutritious and lovely. I finished your growing, all that classroom time you wanted of me, all those exams you made me do, all those long essays no one ever reads you made me write, all those excruciatingly quiet oral classes. I will have done it. And I cannot fucking wait.

Seriously, that feeling will be my favourite. The completion. When I was in primary school I never finished anything. Nothing ever. Books, little exercises. I was terrible. I enjoyed dawdling on a subject, stretching it out so I wouldn't have to do something else after. Or worse, finish the thing and find there was nothing else to do after. It wasn't important to me whether I completed it or not, what was important was whether I'd done it well. I was all for quality and less for quantity. But then of course that's not allowed and you have to produce screeds and screeds of finished things, even if the quality is less than it could be if you took a little longer.

I'm still working on my time-keeping though. When it comes to these types of tasks I will find a way to leave it until the last minute and sort of, well, "test" myself. How long can I leave it before what I produce is utterly unacceptable? Which is the worst, most stupid thing to do, but before it was the only way to actually make what I was doing exciting. Otherwise writing about Nazi poetry is boring as a feast of cream foods with no Dairylea triangles. I've chosen my courses this year though: ones I like, ones I'm truly interested in. Lots of medieval fodder. I am not wholly sure why the medieval period attracts me so much. Perhaps it offers a world that isn't full of things that flash and function at the speed of light and iPhone apps. It offers an escape. And that's part of what literature should do, right? Put the modern, unsatisfied world away and smell old musty pages and read of feudal systems and knights-errant and actually going outside.

The exception to the medieval theme is the course I'll do on Brecht. But he's kind of interesting in his own wee way. The way he manoeuvres politics and revolution into his plays while still making them charming and entertaining is quite intriguing; something worth studying. Plus I did unexpectedly well on the exam of his in second year and I'm pushing for a high end degree. There's only so far being clever can take me, the rest will be strategic subject choices and scrounging essays off previous students of the course. And brie. Brie is very important.

So that's my plan. These are my last courses, my last days guaranteed in education, my last year in a student flat with a student card that is valid. I was, I can't really say why, embarrassed about being a student before. I think it was due to having the title but not actually feeling like I studied at all and did what students do. But this is the year. This is my student year. It's my last year with the title, but it's the first where I'll genuinely feel I've earned it.

I don't need luck. I don't need a miracle. I don't want to be asked how I am. I don't want to discuss it. I'm just going to do it. Go outside. Do the thing. Prance about with my Sancho and Rosinante and stab unwittingly at windmills in honour of Dulcinea del Toboso until I finally die slightly less disillusioned. But hopefully I'll die with a first in my degree and get out of this damn education system with a big fat smile on my face.