October 1, 2014 - Written by: Beth Teverson

An Autumn Education: Why Every Year I Go Back to School

I’ve always been a fan of October. Autumn has always resonates a certain sense of excitement in me. I look forward to it all through the sweltering (and often rainy) summer: the cold crisp mornings, the warm colours of the trees.

It always seems a time to look forward, to make changes, to start a new.

I imagine this feeling is due to my memories of school: spending the six weeks of summer holidays (didn’t it feel like months?) anticipating the start of the new school year: new timetable, new subjects, new stationary.

I’m reminded of a quote from Tom Hanks in the film You’ve Got Mail:

‘Don’t you love New York in the fall? It makes me wanna buy school supplies. I would send you a bouquet of newly sharpened pencils if I knew your name and address.’

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Sometimes I do see a little bit of my school times at work. I remember walking into the cafeteria for the first time, feeling completely at a loss as to who to sit with: Broadcast people sat with broadcast people, editors with editors, interns with interns (eventually, after a few weeks of eating lunch at my desk, the library assistant asked if I wanted to join her).

All the smokers stand behind the building where they keep the bikes, and today a friend and I typed my name and the name of a guy I’d kind of taken a fancy to into Lovecalculator.com and got 87%!

But it isn’t just the social element I miss about school.

I miss how easy it was to learn.

At the beginning of the school year exams seemed far enough away that you could enjoy learning without the pressure. Now, with the internet and all, education is surely easier than ever?

And yet I often feel myself so swamped by the amount of articles and blogs to read and videos to watch it’s hard to feel that deserved sense of achievement in knowing something.

This particularly occurs when, having dropped it in a conversation with someone you then completely forget firstly the person who wrote it, secondly the website it featured on and lastly the evidence they used to conclude to this idea.

So I’ve decided to be a little more proactive with my education.

Starting with the swing jive class my friend from work has insisted I attend. I went along feeling slightly apprehensive about my abilities and returning home perhaps a little more so. But it was fun and it required me to use a part of my brain I haven’t really used before.

I’ve also recently got fed up of the following conversation…

Person A: Oh hey that reminds me of Film x.

Person B: Oh shit yeah I love Film x.

Me: I haven’t watched Film x.

Person A and Person B: Whhaaattt??? Beth how can you have not watched Film x?

So a friend and I have decided to start a blog based on my watching a shit load of really good films I’ve never watched.

Writing about them has meant learning how to read a film: something I’ve never really challenged myself with.

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I guess when it comes to education, it’s hard to stick to it when you haven’t got a teacher breathing down your neck asking for your overdue piece of coursework, but taking it into your own hands can be really inspiring. School is, after all, only the beginning of an education.

If you enjoyed this article, why not check out ‘Are We a Bunch of Dumb Asses?‘