2kool4skool

"Are you a schoolgirl or are you getting schooled, girl?" Thoughts from the first week of school that wasn't school nor the first week of anything for me, technically.

This past week was not the first week of school, a statement which hasn’t been true for me for the past eighteen years. September 2024 marks the first week immediately following Labour Day that was not my first week back at school—and yet, I still think about this past week in terms of that very event. It wasn’t the first week back at school because this year—a year which I still think about as beginning in September and ending in June—I am not a student in any formal capacity.

Though, I am still “in school”, as both of my jobs right now are teaching positions. And I’m still thinking loads about “school”, given that the weekly schedule I’ve structured for myself, in effort to not squander my time away from academia, includes hours of research, reading, writing, and planning for applications to graduate school. During the not-school hours of my day I’m choosing to fill my brain with school-related stuff. No, I didn’t do this over the summer. This is what September is for! It’s back to school season.

I remember one year, I think it might have been before Grade 11 or 10, the night before school I groaned the typical teenage grievances about not wanting to go back to school, to which my mom replied: “What are you talking about? You know you love going back to school.” And while I remember genuinely feeling the “ugh I don’t want to do this I wish I was still at camp” sentiment back then, what my mom was definitely true as well. I loved “back to school” season; I loved going back to school. The excitement of getting my schedule and courses, organizing my school supplies and checking off items on my reading lists, plus I will always warmly welcome any excuse to get new pens and highlighters. I love how the summer weather feels just a bit cooler on the first Tuesday in September, even though it’s the result of an emotional change and not a seasonal one.

But perhaps more than the back-to-school sales or events, what I love is the mindset of starting fresh. The first day of school can truly be a clean slate for those who wish to seize it as such. When I look back at my notebooks for all my classes, spanning as far back as middle school, my notes for the first weeks of school are consistently neater and cleaner by a wide margin. My handwriting is somewhat of an atrocious, illegible, and embarrassing scrawl, moreover it is a quirk of mine hasn’t improved since I was in Grade 4. Unless I write meticulously slowly, which takes up far more time than I’m happy to spend because I feel the content of what I need to get down is more important than its appearance, my pen and paper notes are written in font only I can read—albeit with an 85% success rate, my lower case “y” and “g” battle “n” and “h” for best lookalike. And yet, at the start of every school year, I try my best to write neater and better, in hopes that I can stick with it for the rest of the year.

In University, back-to-school meant Welcome Week festivities and reuniting with housemates and friends after a summer apart—taking advantage of the first weeks’ minimal coursework and free time in between the craze of establishing new routines. With at least a few weeks’ time before the first assignment deadlines would start looming, the start of school always felt like the time where I could actually learn. I loved having time to just read and think and discuss and engage with the material in my courses—which is, you know, the thing we’re supposed to do for the entirety of the school year. I think that sometimes the experience of thinking and feeling the content you learn is hampered by the context in which you learn them. Especially if you’re someone who, like me, is prone to letting the anxiety of assessment add stress to the process of translating your thoughts and feelings onto the page. Not to mention the, ironically, complicated streamlining process by which human discussions of shared ideas, which one can engage with and expand on, become products of demonstrable knowledge, which one can possess and another will validate with a grade.

I know that assignments/assessments/projects/essays/tests/etc serve many purposes. For one, it is important to learn how to make yourself legible to others. Whether on the page or in conversation, you have to be able to make yourself make sense. In Math you have to show your work, in English you have to communicate your analysis of the text, in just about every subject you have to cite your source. You have to prove that what you are saying makes sense and why it is an important sense to be making. Sometimes the thing that you try to say in a project isn’t necessarily wrong, you just haven’t said it in a way that shows all the sense it makes.

And though I sometimes wish it were enough to just say “I think this poem connects to this theme because of its general vibes,” because that’s the only way I can translate my immediate gut instinct, I do love the process of investigating my initial hunch with the text in front of me. I don’t want approach like a writer reviewing something to assert my opinion, I want to ask myself why something makes me feel the way it does. Still with my pen down, and curious if my initial feelings will be inverted or challenged or intensified or confused, I want to see what is uncovered by magnifying a specific aspect of a text. Eager to understand its nodes of connection to other texts or themes or ideas, I zoom in to zoom back out. I like combining the individual details of a text and using them to justify how the piece is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.

Sometimes the idea of writing all that down is too daunting, particularly if it feels easily explained by “general vibes”. Vibes make sense, close reading creates too many questions that I can’t answer or make sense of in a way that fits an assignment’s guidelines, or in a way that feels sufficient to how much I care about what I’m talking about, or in a way that is understood by the desired audience. Though I say this somewhat begrudgingly, I know it’s not enough to say that if someone doesn’t get the point you’re making, then they aren’t your audience and you shouldn’t cater to them. While that can often be true, it is not always relevant. Sometimes you do have to filter and refine and edit yourself to make yourself and your ideas ones that people can understand and connect with. It’s important to know how and when to make sense, so that you can do it when need to, and not care when you don’t have to.

Making sense is something I think I can achieve on paper in school, but not always in real life. I’m finding it especially difficult to make sense during the start of my year that’s supposed to be a “gap year” after graduating, a year where I am importantly not in school, but nevertheless one where I am still talking and thinking and writing about school, and then turning my work into someone with no academic authority over me to ask if I am making sense and will get a good grade.

I think a lot about school, I think I will likely spend a lot of my life there. I’ve joked, probably one too many times in the past week, that I’m an “English student by inclination, [who will likely become an] English teacher by trade.” I am not too cool for school, and I don’t think I ever will be. I promise I’m not a teacher’s pet, and even if I was as a child, I certainly am not in 2024. I do not even try to make the teacher’s life easier. For starters, I’m writing my feelings on Substack instead of grading papers and finishing up my work before the weekend.

From my limited experiences, I do enjoy teaching. I can genuinely see myself really happy and fulfilled in that career path. I also remain steadfastly interested and cautiously inspired towards things that are not teaching. My eyes dart in the direction of other doors, ones that do not close the door on teaching (nor does teaching close the door on them), but these doors are ones which could add detours or forks to my “path”. They also add difficult questions. Are the things I want for myself illusively elusive or genuinely nonsensical? Why do I want to try for something that will cause a lot of pain if I don’t get it, and potentially even more if I do? Why do I want to put myself through this process again, and why would I want to put myself in a position where I will be put through similar processes on a cyclical basis?

I can’t attribute my fixation with higher education to some great media archetype, none of my on-screen heroines went to grad school. Rory Gilmore dropped out of Yale, Hannah Horvath flopped at Iowa, and Elle Woods doesn’t count because she went to law school and I’ve already told my family several times that isn’t my vibe right now.

Maybe “school”, with all its many memories and meanings, is the Mr. Big to my Carrie Bradshaw: We had great times together, we had horrible times together. It brings out my best traits just as it emphasizes my worst insecurities. Its recognitions affirm what I most want to believe is true about myself, its rejections linger longer than I’d like. I talk about school a lot and can’t stop, even when my friends get annoyed or frustrated. I spend a lot of time thinking about school and our alleged “will they/won’t they” relationship. I’ll perseverate on the back and forth, wondering if we are meant to be together and I should give it one more shot, or if we should never reunite because I am finally, once and for all, over and done for good. I will write extensively but never give meaningful credence to the latter option. We’ll be endgame for a while, until we aren’t anymore.

To rehash and reword one of Carrie’s biggest (no pun intended) wisdoms: The most exciting, challenging and significant educational relationship is the one you have with yourself. And if you find some school to love the you you love, well, that's just fabulous.

Maybe someday I’ll say that I’ve matured and moved on to better things. But I might just be a hopeless romantic, knowing full well that I’ll swoon for school when I get the right call. I might actually be hopeful about this whole school thing, including my year “outside” of it. The first day of not-school I logged my review of The Great Gatsby on Goodreads after re-reading it with my summer students, I did horrible stand up comedy in front of new friends and old, and I felt not just settled in the not-school space I’ll be for the next little while, but maybe even a bit excited for what could happen in this previously uncharted territory. After all, back-to-school-September is an inherently hopeful time. If you were to look in my journal, you would see how neatly I wrote today’s date.