2 years of my life are now gone, I am done with school, its over, my diploma was in my hands, there are no more classes left to walk in to, there is no more homework or papers to hand in, I am done with it all, its over, 2024-2026, that stage of my life has been completed. I remember my first day, I walked into the school with my tie on wrong, a shirt that didn’t fit, shoes that didn’t fit and everything else terrified me, I tried to play it off but I was scared that I had to do year 12. That wore off quite quickly due to the vices of sixth form that came to play, the pool table, the free time, the times where I had 3 lessons a day and time to spend for myself, it was amazing, I spent boundless hours sat on a table, eating food from the local cafe, watching videos for an hour 45 straight on my computer as I sat near the common rooms kitchen, I had new teachers, new subjects, new friends, the friends were the hardest thing as I had to accommodate, I had begun adjusting to my new friends, my singular friend group was the same as it had always been since I was 12 years old, new people came, new ones joined, old ones left, it was a state of flux and I wasn’t that happy about it, I was annoyed at it, I wanted my friend group to stay exactly the same as it was, I didn’t want a new guy from another school to come in and take away my friends, they are MY friends and this is MY friend group, they can’t take them away.
The Common room had a charm to it, the year 13s at the time had cleared out going to the other rooms and we, the new year 12s came in like a triumphant army, claiming new territory and calling it ours, we find our spots, some took the kitchen table, some took the far couches, some took the middle couches and sat there, in the same positions and in the same area every day for almost the entirety of year 12. A beautiful room that at every morning at 7am we could walk into and sit down in the sofas that were being shaped by our asses everyday, each day making it get closer and closer to snapping due to the sleeping, sitting and shoes on the sofas, applying too much pressure to them. The room had a smell, that smell of newness and beauty, the light shining into the room every morning or the sound of the microwave dinging with MJs homemade Italian pasta, the little things within that room brought my joy in the first months of year 12 to new heights, it was a room that brought laughs, peace, tears, joy and pain for everyone involved, it affected us, it swayed and pulsated with the heart and blood flow of everyone in that room, the community formed in that room shall forever endow the people that were in there with countless memories and laughs, it helped me in my darkest hours, when my grandfather died, my brain was scattered and my heart was tender, I knew that that room would help me get over it and process the emotions I was feeling because I knew I could walk in and see Adam and Katie tickling each other at 8am or see Christian be fully red and covered in paint staining the pool table and door and being told off. That is one of the most special things within that room, it wasn’t the people as such, it was the ability to bring the people together.
The lessons were fun, the new teachers, subjects and students who I had to share them with were fun too. I took English, History and Psychology. I had new teachers for English and Psychology. Mr Jones, Ms Malinowska for English and Mr Reilly and Ms Bogdanov for Psychology and 1 Singular new teacher for History, Mr Fischer. The hardest thing with these lessons was adjusting to the new style of studying, it was smaller classes, It was almost a singular study lesson with the teacher, they would come up to me and sit there, turning it into a singular private session, a time where me and the teacher were entirely together and locked in trying to figure out what was the answer to the question I had. Mr Jones was an interesting character, a Welshman who took on more things than he could ever do. He seemed constantly uneasy, irritable at something, usually me and my friend Andrew who was in my English class with me. Mr Jones taught me The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini and Post-2000 poetry, his class was large but with a small group, we sat in the middle, Me, Andrew, Aisha, Izzie, Sophie and Jasmine, we sat around a rectangular table asking questions, speaking about poetry and literary theory on the books we were reading. Me and Mr Jones never worked well I don’t believe, there were intense times of disagreement, I felt that he listened to my analysis of the poems and shut them down with fury but there were times where he praised me and lifted me up, I do not blame him for these switches of emotion, He is a teacher and he has had to definitely deal with students who are more incompetent than me. His classroom was always too warm or too cold, the constant adjustment of the temperature was a procedure in our class, he would always wear the same style of shirts and a loose fitting tie. He was seemingly incredibly tired, he had a wife who was pregnant during the start of my Y12 experience and then when she gave birth, he got more tired, which is something that I cannot blame him for. There was then Ms Malinowska, she was the other English Teacher, she taught us plays, Tennesse Williams masterpiece, A Streetcar named Desire and Shakespeare’s comedy, Twelfth Night. She is one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had, her classroom was even smaller than Mr Jones, she had a rectangular room near the other English classrooms, she was a terrifying yet amazing teacher, she had eyes like a wolf and a mind like a hawk, me and her had a better relationship, but that did not stop quarrels. I sometimes did not do my homework, I feigned essays and did nothing to help my case, there were times that I sat in her office in the common room, as she was the head of 6th form and I had to rewrite my essays from scratch, pure unadulterated writing about literary criticism or theory. It was torture and I thank her for it. She was a no nonsense tell you how it is person, she was not afraid to tell a kid off right in front of everyone else, as I had been on the end of it many times, it is not something nice, she is a brutal teacher and will tell you off when needed, it is the key for good teacher-student relationship, I believe.
Another is the Psychology teachers, Mr Reilly and Ms Bogdanov. Mr Reilly was a 30 something teacher from the midlands, bit of a belly, white pale skin with freckles on his face and arms, he had constant twitches and nervous ticks in his face. He was a good teacher at the start but it went downhill, he used AI for all of his lessons, didn’t engage with us and read off from the slides without ever really teaching us, I felt bad for him, I liked him and I wanted him to do well and I wish him well for the rest of his career as an educator but there was just a lack of energy from him, I am not sure what he was about, there were times where I wanted him to succeed and I gave him chances to turn it around but after a certain amount of time, the chances went, he did not try and help it or change his ways. We, being the students in Y12 and Y13, complained about him to the higher ups within the school and nothing happened, merely a slap on the wrist for him, his classroom in Y12 was a long room, cold with white paint chipping on the walls and a singular projector with a huge amount of books, boxes and unopened textbooks in their original casings at the back. I sat near the back, trying to not be seen. I never wanted to do Psych, I do not know why I chose it. It was more a mere impulse decision, the allure of it got to me and kept me there. There was the the other teacher, Ms Bogdanov, a bundle of Caribbean joy, she was a woman who faced constant hardships and took them head on and full of gusto, she once had torn both ACLS, had seizures and had to take a class from a terrible grade to As in a matter of months, she was a woman who had such an amazing relationship with her students that it got her in trouble, she was deemed that her relationship with the students was “inappropriate” and “wrong” and that got her sacked, the idiotic school management ruined it from us, they kicked off one of the greatest teachers that the humanity department ever had, she was a woman who was treated everyone, even the ones who treated her with disrespect with kindness, her smile was a beautiful smile that lit the room up and made the students eager to learn and retain that ability to learn. Her and Reilly never had a good relationship, they clashed heads, budded and sparred, he was scared of her, he would walk into a room and then instantly walk out, they never got along. The final new teacher, an Aussie history teacher called Mr Fischer, was someone who I had never met with his specific style of teaching, a man who disregarded basic attire for the teachers, smelled of cigarettes and swore at us. We spent a lot of the time mucking around rather than actually doing lessons but do not take this away from the fact that he was an amazing teacher, someone who could simplify the topics into digestible chunks that I and the other students within the class could learn from and understand easily, some say that we spent too much time not studying and while their opinions are valid, for me he worked, I liked him and I shall continue to like him, he was a great guy, an amazing teacher who could make any student comfortable enough to talk to him, he had a natural Aussie charm and his lessons reflected that. Another teacher who I had before Y12 but I must speak about is Mr Keen, I am not entirely sure on what his job is but he was my former Maths tutor during my GCSEs in school, he helped my get over my fear and inability of maths and guided me with specific helpful examples on how to do maths when my diagnosis of Dyscalculia came to him, he was an older man, late 50s, grey hair, beer belly, a jolly smile and a red face, he was always threatening to kick students out or punch them when they got too loud, he would always complain on having to teach the y7s maths, I was once a Year 7 who he taught maths so I understand why he hates it. He was the main customer of me and my mothers baking, I would bring him baked goods and he would always appreciate them with a lot of joy, he would always find me and give me a thumbs up or a verbal
“They were amazing will” to me with a thumbs up and a nod of the head, he was a teacher who shall stick with me for a while, he contributed to the appeal of the y12, he embodied, for me, the laid back approach to this new year, he spent a lot of his time on BBC news or on his phone doing things I shall never know, I almost morphed myself after him during this year.
Alongside the new teachers was the new air of the school, looking back it felt so fresh, so new, so clean in my nostrils and I took it for granted, there was a wave of freedom for us, the sense that we could do no wrong, we could go to parties and drink and get black out drunk and never have to worry about someone telling our parents, we felt true freedom within year 12, those first few months were some of the greatest times of my life at that school, I felt unchained and new, I had come out of my cocoon and hibernation and become a new person, a new William, someone entirely different from the old one that died last summer. I imagine it is what America felt like after WW2 was over, prosperity and freedom was constant. My first time getting drunk was in year 12, it was a Chinese new year party at my friends jays house and I had downed countless bottles of soju, too many to count, I was completely destroyed, things were flying and I was seeing things crawl around, things were moving in slow motion like an old movie from the 1800s, my blinking became so slow but time was sped up, I remember vividly someone vomiting on themselves and the carpet and him being dragged to the bathroom where he hit his head on the toilet bowl and was bleeding. But however good it was, it caught up with me and my body needed to purge, I went to the bathroom to do my business but I found myself vomiting up everything, a brown sludge in the guest bathroom, I was found hours later, sleeping, pants down and vomit in the toilet with a cockroach next to me, I had to be fireman carried away by my best Friend and sent home in a grab at 12am, I do not regret this, I did not regret anything about that night, it was a night of immense freedom and relief that I placed away from myself, I had become a new person that night I think, just for that night, with the help of Alcohol. I had my virginity taken, per se, of being a normal person, I was now a new person, someone who was free from earthly restraints for a certain amount of time and was floating in the blissful abyss of the drunken world I lived in for a couple of hours, That time for us and more specifically me, was a beautiful scene of organised anarchy, people mingling in their own circles and then mixing with the other ones, becoming friends with new people and finding things they have in common, that is what the air of y12 was like, a affair of true friendship and goodness and something that can’t be replicated.
For Y12, another thing was the new people and the amount of new energy that they brought to the year, despite my disdain originally for the new people coming in and merging, there was a beautiful sense of community that sprung up, the people from the old year and then the new timers combining to become new friend groups, old ones sliding and clicking with new people to become entirely new entities of friends, the people that included, Sophie, Jay, Ayaan, Chris, Andrew, Aisha, Abu, Brenda, Lauren, Heuyie, Yuseong, Egor and countless others I probably have forgotten. The new people coming in and the new lives mixing into a singular pot was amazing, it seemed almost for a certain amount of time that all of the students in the year were friends, an improbable feat thinking now as I have graduated and gone through countless series of dramas.
The love was in the air in Y12, I had gotten a girlfriend from outside of the school, Miraya, she was a bundle of joy, so smart, athletic, amazingly brilliant and a beautiful soul, I was a bad boyfriend and I will hold that regret for the rest of my life, that relationship was for me is something that I will always remember as it has left a mark on my heart, those 3 months were a mix of joy, passion, love and despair, the break up was after a beautiful day at her school for an event, we were sat in her apartment lobby and broke up, I felt horrible and I do not doubt that she felt horrible too, I wished to speak to her again in person before she left for Australia but we never got the chance, we never had the ability to speak to each other and finally place to rest the memory of us and that, I think, will forever haunt me, I do not know why, she was so amazing and I was so stupid and idiotic and it kills me everyday knowing that I was the one who did it. I may never see her ever again, we will never talk again and I will have to hold that burden forever. Even as we have spoken on the phone, there is something not the same about it, it was artificial and didn’t feel genuine, to apologise in person is something much better for a ex relationship than on the phone, I know I will never speak to her ever again, I won’t ever, I know it and I need to come to the realisation of that. This is one of the bad sides of the year 12 era of my life, the sadness, regret, anger I felt at myself at my own idiotic sense, I did not take her out on proper dates, did not want to do the things she did and thought about myself only, my selfishness was so prevalent during this relationship and it showed, these are the downsides, it was one of the things that took my out of the Utopian side of this year 12 moment in my life and brought me back to reality. If I walked past her in the street, there would be no communication, no looking at each other, only silence.
But, however good it was, it was never truly was good for entirety of it, the slow and painful dissemination of people to the other rooms began, some began to leave, move away to the 2 other rooms available due to quarrels and arguments they faced during the year 12, the community that existed was disappearing before my very eyes and I was powerless to try and stop it. Personally, the end of year 12 sucked, the results from the exams hurt me, hurt my relationship with my family and hindered my development, some of teachers and peers looked at me differently, they looked at me with some caution,
“Is this boy capable of doing it”
“Can he even try it”
I think these are valid criticisms and they helped. I changed, remade myself and became a new man who was focused on helping me and that is the beauty of it. Another thing that hurt was the loss of friends, some were planning to go, without a proper goodbye, they were leaving, departing and some from the rest of my life forever. I have not seen some people who left year 12 for months and very rarely will ever be able to see them again. Nothing is ever perfect, Life is never perfect but I think I knew something negative was going to happen but I put it out of my mind as I wanted to take in as much joy and happiness, not knowing that the happiness will bring sadness.
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