There’s a chart doing the rounds on social networks, ranking thinkers by how punk they are. Hobbes and Heidegger, it states, are “essentially a police”; while for Dionysius the Abandoner, Marx and Parmenides, it states: “They’re not punk, punk is them.” I have no other way of knowing how real this is, or whether Žižek belongs so close to Engels, for example. To memorise this list would be beyond ineffective, like retaining the instructions for a plane you have neither licence for nor any affordable prospect of flying. Yet, here I am, attempting to memorise it; due to the fact that it’s A-level season, and there is no state more howlingly impotent than attempting to be helpful to people who are marching headlong into an understanding inferno.If someone had informed you when they were small 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 hint whether that was the best kind of pick, and only the dimmest sense of their ability level, you ‘d say: “No, I will discover a much 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 strategy B.GCSEs were a various kind of torture, because all the product was dimly familiar, like a recurring anxiety dream from youth, in which you understood the component parts of a plant but might just explain them in mime. Now they’re in area so strange that even the basics– holding a flashcard, reading out a keyword, awaiting a response– fill me with complicated horror, locked out of the cathedral of understanding and shelterless. Who the hell does understand chemistry, anyhow? How can he comprehend it? It can’t be more than 6 months ago that he couldn’t use a spoon.The school sends valuable e-mails about supporting your young adult, and I just ever utilized to skim them, because how they could perhaps approach the individuality of my cluelessness? But actually, checking out in between the lines, all the advice comes down to:”Your job is: attempt to be regular.” I’m presently finding this more difficult than more mathematics. But what do I know? I have no concept what occurs in more maths. Zoe Williams is a Guardian writer