There is no state more impotent than being a parent of a teenager doing A-levels, writes Zoe Williams. Holding a flashcard for chemistry or further maths fills her with a unique kind of horror. Does anyone really understand this?
There's a chart doing the rounds on social media, ranking philosophers by how punk they are. Hobbes and Heidegger, it says, are 'basically a cop'; while for Dionysius the Renegade, Marx and Parmenides, it declares: 'They're not punk, punk is them.' Williams admits she has no way of knowing how true this is, or whether Žižek belongs so close to Engels, for example. To memorise this list would be beyond useless, like retaining the instructions for a plane you have neither licence for nor any reasonable prospect of flying. Yet, here she is, trying to memorise it; because it's A-level season, and there is no state more howlingly impotent than trying to be supportive to people who are marching headlong into a knowledge inferno.
If someone had told you when they were tiny that, one day, you'd wave them cheerfully off as they went to scale an ice wall, and you had no idea what the conditions would be like, nor any clue whether that was the right kind of pick, and only the dimmest sense of their skill level, you'd say: 'No, I will find a better way. I will scale the ice wall myself, and if I perish, so be it.' And yet, here we are; there isn't a plan B.
GCSEs were a different kind of torture, because all the material was dimly familiar, like a recurring anxiety dream from childhood, in which you knew the component parts of a plant but could only describe them in mime. Now they're in territory so strange that even the basics – holding a flashcard, reading out a keyword, waiting for an answer – fill her with complicated horror, locked out of the cathedral of knowledge and shelterless. Who the hell does understand chemistry, anyway? How can he understand it? It can't be more than six months ago that he couldn't use a spoon.
The school sends out helpful emails about supporting your young person, and she only ever used to skim them, because how they could possibly approach the uniqueness of her cluelessness? But actually, reading between the lines, all the advice boils down to: 'Your job is: try to be normal.' She is currently finding this harder than further maths. But what does she know? She has no idea what happens in further maths.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist.
