I wrote this in June for English... I think it's sort of how you feel?
For most of us year twelve wasn’t exactly a conscious choice... it was more a logical consummation of the past twelves years of our education. Did you realise you were walking into a full-time job when you walked into the gates on February 1st? I didn’t. Sure I knew it was going to be hard and draining. But to the point of basically giving up your soul for ten months, giving your self over to VCE. Yeah I wasn’t prepared for that.
I don’t know about you. But I never feel like I’m doing enough. There’s always someone trying harder, doing more. I could be sitting on the floor in an empty classroom, surrounded by a sea of history notes, hair in disarray, tears streaming down my face… but the reality is, there’s someone out there doing more than me, more stressed than I am; going to get a better score than I will.
You tell someone you’re in year twelve; they suddenly treat you like you’ve got a disease.
“Oh love, how’s it all going?”
“Are you getting enough sleep, finding time for yourself?”
“What are you going to do next year?”
“Just take it one step at a time, it’ll all be over in X amount of months.”
“RAH RAH RAHHHHHHH”
Year twelve forces you to make sacrifices you shouldn’t have to make. Do I sit and play guitar for half an hour and neglect my maths and suffer the consequences later. Do I go out and come home too wrecked to do anything for half the next day?
Why should living life and enjoying being young come with guilt?
Year twelve isn’t really about learning anyway. I’m someone who’s grown up with a thirst for knowledge. I love to learn. I’ve always wanted to know more. I glue myself to people who know so much more about the world than I do. Year twelve doesn’t give you an opportunity to learn because you have a passion to. Year twelve teaches you to apply a set of information in a certain way to meet criteria.
That’s not learning.
Being in June; I’m kind of going what’s this all for anyway.
I mean, the obvious answer for me, is getting the 89 I want and having a smooth path into uni and the rest of life.
But why has our society created a system where a person’s intelligence is rated upon one set of exams. They get ranked by a number.
I don’t know about you, but I’d feel more personally satisfied leaving school knowing I’m a person with some substance and character. Not an air-inflated, spoon-fed version of fifty other graduates with a respectable score above 80. I want to learn to think for myself.
And as much as our enter scores shouldn’t matter, and when it comes to life and death, don’t. Society still manages to make us feel like they are the absolute defining moment in our lives. Someone asks you ‘what you’re planning on doing next year’, you reply, ‘you don’t exactly know yet’… they stare at you rather bewildered and don’t exactly know what to say.
Do adults really find it so hard to remember what it’s like to be seventeen? Who seriously knows what they want to do with the rest of their life at seventeen? Sure you may have some idea, but more likely than not it’s something someone’s put into your head, without you even realising.
I’m not thinking four years time. I’m thinking six months time. Summer 2010, ’11; the beach, being 18, black Russians, boys, driving, dancing, jamming, reading Tolstoy to my hearts content; enjoying life in the way year twelve won’t let you.
Maybe I’m just being far too cynical and pessimistic.
But can you honestly tell me that you can party like there’s no tomorrow whilst meeting all the demands of year twelve?
I can’t do it.
If you can, care to share the secret?
I don’t know… I just feel like year twelve doesn’t let you be a person. If anything... it’s introducing you to a world where you’re just a number, another cog in the machine.
What’s wrong with our society?
Want to know the secret? Stop doing it for the number. And do it for you. Screw everybody else.
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