Raaaant

You know what I really really want? Just to be able to sit down and lose myself in a book for 4 or 5 hours. Without having to worry about the time I’ll lose, time that would and should have been spent doing that homework or starting that assignment or revising for that exam or practising piano or...

Because yesterday, I realised that I can’t do that. No, I’m not talking about the physical plausibility of it, I did end up listening to about half of Angels and Demons (don’t judge me, you horrible judgemental people!). I’m talking about my mentality. As soon as I even began to consider the idea of just... dropping everything and reading, my mind’s knee-jerk reaction was to create a mental ‘to do’ list: piano practice, Maths and Eco homework, speech and drama, sponsorship letter writing, drama monologue... I’ll stop before I bore you all away from this webpage.

And it wasn’t as if I wanted to sleep, or lounge around and watch ditsy Aussie soaps on TV, or mindlessly play RPG computer games, I wanted to read a bloody novel! And my work mentality wouldn’t even let me do that in good conscience. God, what is our wonderful academic school doing to us? At what point does ‘persevere’ become ‘get a damn life and stop thinking about those stupid useless marks’? Unforgiving percentage points, denoting our value as academic assets to the world. Cold numbers that say nothing, nothing, nothing! About one’s honesty, loyalty, sense of justice.

And what do we even learn from it all? How to write out a memorised 1000 word essay in 40 minutes? How to cram facts, expel and then forget them? How to curtail expression, regulate creativity, observe conventions, do exactly as they say so they’ll give us our little pieces of paper with those meaningless numbers on them? What does school encourage, what does it foster within students, what do we learn? We don’t learn how to think, we learn what to think.

Rebellion would feel so good, but not many brave it. We rant and rave and rage about the injustice, the pointlessness of it all, and then we settle down and meekly accept our rewards, spoils of the feast we crave. Content to snap at the morsels offered us.

Aah the poetry, gotta love it.