“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.” Yeats

Seeing all these pictures of graduation ceremonies is really taking me back. I am a sucker for school, a total sucker. If there was a way to make a living being a professional student, I would be at the top of my field.

I love school. I love the camaraderie among the students, the eye-rolling when 465 pages of reading are assigned, the palpable feeling of tension the day of finals. I love great teachers who are teaching for the right reasons. And I love graduation, but I always wish as soon as everyone tosses their caps up in the air, we could all run back inside and do it all over again.

I recently made the difficult decision to not get my master’s degree after being accepted to my dream school because, quite frankly, I can’t afford the loan payments and since I’m getting out of the journalism game, it seemed pointless to pursue a graduate degree in it. But walking away from grad school, particularly that one, was the single hardest decision I’ve made to date.

Several years back, I promised myself that I would fulfill two key dreams by the time I was 40: I was going to visit England, and I was going to get my bachelor’s degree. In 2009, twenty years to the month from when I received my associate’s degree, I got my BS in communication. I turned 40 in April, and I got my diploma in May. I think that’s close enough.

I’m not sure what it is about school that I love so much, but some days I get so homesick it’s all I can do not to crawl up the street to my alma mater and see if anyone will let me sit in on a lecture. Just a small one, c’mon.

I love that feeling that comes with the first day of classes. I was 38 when I went back to school, and I had a new notebook, new pencils, and lunch money in my bag when I headed out for that first day. All I was missing was a Care Bears backpack and pair of dark blue, stiff new jeans and it would have been junior high all over again. I still had that feeling of uncertainty as I walked up the steps toward my first class. Would I make any friends? Would I be the oldest person in school? And if I was, would they give me a nickname like “Granny McWrinkles” and jokingly pretend to hang out with me, but then laugh when I asked for decaf coffee in the cafeteria? Kids aren’t the only ones with school-related anxiety.

None of that came to pass, and I was actually relieved to meet a lot of people my age who were going back to school for the same reasons I was. I’m still friends with some of them now, and that feeling of camaraderie is always there. We went back to school later in life and we got our degrees while juggling all of the other demands on people our age, and let me tell you something you might not know unless you’ve done it – that’s a big freaking deal. I did it while working full-time, but I am in perma-salute to those of my classmates who did it while working and with kids still at home.

Once this year’s graduation pictures start to fade away, my longing for school will abate a little. At least until fall. That’s when you’ll find me back on campus, wearing a letter jacket and shuffling through the leaves, trying to con kids out of their textbooks so I can feel that sense of academic belonging, just once more.