The kids are going back to school. What are you going to learn?
September feels more like a fresh start than January. Adults should be allowed a new term too, preferably without compulsory PE.
Having four children means September has spent a large part of my adult life announcing itself loudly. The shops fill with school uniform, supermarkets build towers of stationery, and parents begin discussing name labels with an intensity normally reserved for peace treaties. The children might not be thrilled about returning, but the whole thing still carries a sense of movement: a new teacher, a new timetable, a new subject, another chance to be better at something than you were in July. Adults get a council-tax reminder and are expected to carry on. January gets all the publicity as the month for starting again, but I’ve never found it particularly convincing. It’s dark, everyone is skint, and the new year seems to demand a new body, a new career and a colour-coded system for drinking more water. September is less dramatic: summer loosens its grip, ordinary routines return, and doing one thing differently feels possible. Most of us still recognise it as a beginning, even if nobody has issued us with a timetable. Adults should get a new term too. I don’t mean enrolling on a degree, buying an expensive collection of textbooks or suddenly deciding that this is the year you become fluent in Mandarin. School can leave us with the idea that learning only counts if someone sets homework and eventually tells us how well we did. Adult life has one important advantage: we can choose the subject. Nobody needs to grade our bread, examine our pottery or ask whether our knowledge of the night sky will be relevant to our future employment. There’s something wonderfully freeing about learning a skill nobody in your annual appraisal has requested. It could be sign language because you’ve always meant to learn it, or astronomy because you’re tired of looking at a sky full of things you can’t name. Perhaps you’d rather take a painting class , make bread or learn enough of one song on an instrument to recognise what your hands are trying to do. None of these has to become a qualification, a side business or a personal brand. The best subject may be the one with absolutely no sensible career value. One song is quite enough to begin with. Photo: Lauren Holding on Unsplash . I think adults are generally terrible at being beginners. We’re happy to be bad at something in private, where nobody can see the wonky bowl or hear the murdered guitar chord, but a class puts witnesses in the room. Children spend most days getting things wrong in public because that’s, in effect, their job. An adult loses a game of chess to a nine-year-old or fails to centre the clay once and begins to suspect the activity has exposed a flaw in their character. It hasn’t; they’re simply on lesson one. The clay hasn’t uncovered a character flaw; it’s just lesson one. Photo: Jonathan Cosens Photography on Unsplash . The point isn’t to become good at it by Christmas. That would turn a pleasant idea into another target, and September already contains quite enough admin. Book one lesson, borrow one beginner’s book or give the thing four Tuesday evenings before deciding whether it’s for you. If it sticks, lovely; if it doesn’t, you’ve still learned something — possibly that you can’t make a symmetrical mug and don’t care. There’s also something useful, as a parent, about remembering what it feels like not to understand something straight away. It’s easy to tell a child to keep trying when we’ve spent years doing things we already know how to do. Sitting in front of a sewing machine, chessboard or language tutor with no idea what comes next restores a little humility. You may still be unable to help with the maths homework, but at least you’ll have fresh evidence that “just concentrate” isn’t a complete teaching method. So when the school-uniform displays appear, treat them as a prompt rather than a retail threat. Pick the thing you’ve half-wanted to learn for years, and make the first attempt small enough that it can’t become a grand September project. You don’t need a certificate, a five-year plan or a new pencil case, although I won’t stand between any adult and some unnecessarily nice stationery. The children can have the new shoes and labelled water bottles. The rest of us should at least get a subject. Header photograph: Laura Rivera on Unsplash .