(TL;DR WARNING)

Ah, school. A confusing labyrinth of emotionless buildings, inhabited by either over- or under-enthusiastic teachers, none of which seem to want you to learn anything worth knowing. If you're still confused by year 10, you're probably doing well. Of course, if you do find a good teacher, they'll no doubt be replaced by a book-thumping egotist with a penchant for underdeveloped wit on his own part next year. And as if that wasn't enough to raise your cynicism to an almost insufferable level, there's no consistency! One school may focus on the arts, while another may focus so heavily on sports, you don't have a chance to participate in any other classes for fear of not performing on the field at a level which may buy adoration and respect from your equally single-minded classmates. Why they force me to wake at sparrow's trill each Saturday to participate in an activity that demeans me for an hour then causes me to ache for the rest of the weekend does not seem entirely legal. And just in case we might have a chance to rest during the week, we still need to do some form of sport that keeps us suitably confused. What the fuck is lacrosse, anyway?

If I had my way, I'd be studying I.T, music and another art, along with English and Science. At least English and Science are engaging, whereas maths sits me in a room for an hour with numbers being drilled into my head so that I may one day impress colleagues with my knowledge of negative fraction indices. Not that they'd care, the bunch of pen-pushing socialites... Ehm. At fifteen years old (eesh, that actually sounds really young. Am I that old?), surely we should be making some career decisions - and whilst I'm attempting to do this, I've needed to enroll in French for another year in order to guarantee my place in a Uni course that doesn't involve looking at a whiteboard and naming the colours. The irony in this is that the teacher doesn't realise that none of us give a fuck about French, and we're just there in order to raise our results. So, she gives us piles of homework which stress us into lowering our efforts in other, more important subjects. I'd rather do a science lesson in place of French, but noooo, we need to be doing a variety of things in year ten. Yes, that's right, because in five years' time, we'll be building a particle accelerator underneath France while reading a John Grishham novel about the significance of parabola in a murder investigation.

The coursework, of course, is not the most stressful part. I could recite the emo-spiel about playground non-antics, but I'll reserve that to proper //.V people. For now, I'll just grumble discontentedly at the pointlessness of half the coursework. At least exams give me a chance to piss the teachers off by showing them that despite that fact that I loathe them and my homework shows it, I can still learn faster than they ever did in year ten. Oh, I can see it in their eyes.

Fuck this, I've got homework to do.