Article for 2012 Sep 04

2012

2012 Sep

Sep 04 Tue

This article is one of the cringiest for me to re-read. I swear I don’t call people chavs in real life, I hope I’m not so prone to humble-bragging, and I very much would like to think that I make more sense than what I’ve written below!

I am now in sixth-form. New year; new exam-courses; not a new school, though it has been refurbished, well, a couple of decades ago. But it’s still a good school, the best for miles around, though it used to be much better. The school motto used to be “The exceptional become the rule”, which is what parents want to hear. It was replaced with “Celebrating diversity: welcoming both geeks and chavs”, which is what teenagers want to read, as long as geeks and chavs aren’t in fact welcome. Unless they’re me. I’m not sure what I was saying here. It’s true a lot of teenagers aren’t that unkind towards the socially unfavoured. I know I wasn’t. Then again, I wasn’t exactly top of the social ladder.

Anyway, the lunches are as lustrous as last year’s. The pudding was so glazed in custard and cherry-jam that it was luminous. The caterers would like to assure me (and my geeky chavvy friends) that no fire-flies flew into the food-factory. I can believe that. (As that well-known song by Owl City goes, “You would not believe your eyes / If ten million fire-flies / Lit up the pud I was gonna eat.”)

But enough of the digression into desserts. I am slightly disheartened by the shabby state of my school, and I would quite like the sign “welcoming geeks and chavs” to be less sarky. You may accuse me of hypocrisy, with that sarky paragraph on fireflies in custard, and irrationality (if school becomes a decent school, then the chavs receive a decent education, so they cease to be chavvy, so an exceptional school cannot be overrun with chavs), which is why I propose letting the exceptional become the rule again, rather than focussing on encouraging heartfelt mutual appreciation between jocks and geeks, toffs and chavs, outcasts and inbetweeners. That will come of its one accord (hopefully).

So far I have gone some distance in letting the exceptional become the rule. You see, I am somewhat exceptional at Latin (bear with me on this, I only got an A at GCSE). It may not be my doing, but the other person who was considering taking Latin in the Lower Sixth has chosen a different subject instead. Therefore the average person in my Latin class - the rule, so to speak - is exceptional me.

Of course, as you know I’m not that exceptional at Latin (I only got an A at GCSE) so the exceptional has not yet become the rule. Nevertheless, I do believe that if I do the work exceptionally enough, if I memorise the noun-tables exceptionally enough, if I learn the Cicero and the Ovid exceptionally enough (I would be quoting some now, but I don’t know any as term has only just begun), that I will get an A in Latin A-level.

Let the exceptional become the rule.

Or even, let the exceptional become the ruler.

That would make me Emperor, and it doesn’t get better than that.