Year 13 Deans Their Hopes and Aspirations In a Year Thirteen Leader’s Meeting, soon after we returned from lockdown, we joked that a good slogan for the class of 2020 should be “Sad and Cancelled.” We laughed together as we imagined it emblazoned across leavers jerseys and integrated into the cover artwork for Trek, our school magazine. It was a compact sentiment, said in jest, that momentarily masked the bitter truth of the loss our leaders were feeling. Field trips, talent quest and sports fixtures; trips to China, Chile and Japan, the fruit of four years of working hard had all suddenly disappeared. It had vanished into the mist of an even pithier sentiment, expressed by our Prime Minister, “Unprecedented.” They say ‘Hindsight is always 2020’ and as more of 2020 became hindsight our wonderful leaders began to see the year with more clarity, and thanks somewhat to their proactive leadership there were many rights of passage that were not sad or cancelled. The talent quest moved online, the sports fixtures thinned out and stayed 8
local and unlike many schools across the country, we held a school ball that will go down in Oats history as one of its best! I was Seventh Form (Year 13) in 1999, which means I finished school a millennia ago. It also means I have some understanding of what it feels like to head off into an adult world where talk of apocalyptic chaos was frontpage news. In 1999 ‘they’ thought that all the computers in the world were going to crash when their internal dates changed to “2000.” It was thought that a worldwide computer implosion was going to drive us all back to the dark ages. “Y2K” has long since been relegated to the answer to a question in a millennial pub quiz, but at the time I know at least one bright-eyed teenager who felt a strange combination of anxious and hopeful about his burgeoning adulthood arriving at the frontier of some new challenge for humanity. I imagine it feels a little similar
for you, the class of 2020. You are heading out into a world that is not the same as the one your parents grew up in. It’s a world where people cough into their elbows. Like your parents told tales of cassette tapes and dial-up internet you will have to explain what a plastic straw was and maybe more serious things like chain stores and internal combustion engines. There is a heaviness and anxiety about your generation that I know you feel. But I hope you feel the aspirational hopefulness that we Millenials felt and that Baby Boomers and Generation X’ers felt despite the cold war. One of my favourite quotes is from Poet, Robert Bly, “Your first mortal wound is the wellspring of your genius,” an idea more simply expressed by C.S Lewis, “Hardships often prepare ordinary people for an extraordinary destiny.” This is, I hope, a truth that is in the process of being realised in you as you make your way into this heavy, but hopeful world. Locked in their house, sick of their family and out of decent things to watch on Netflix, some students found that they
