In the normal run of things, I don't have much time for statistics which always seem to my hugely unmathematical brain to have all the logic of a maths problem that goes: "If a train is going at 190 mph in a north-westerly direction, how many people are eating ham sandwiches?".
Percentage increases, price differentials, falling quotients: they usually throw about as much light on a situation for me, as a scattering of tea leaves in a saucer, or the horoscopes in the back of Cosmopolitan. However, I found myself unreasonably delighted about one set of statistics reported in this newspaper this week which revealed that Transition Year students gain an average of 46 more Central Applications Office points in the Leaving Certificate.
Unreasonable, because it is now some 10 years since I was in Transition Year, and you'd think that I would have stopped feeling personally responsible for the whole system by now. Unreasonable too, because I have never once doubted that Transition Year was A Good Thing, so there is no real reason to feel so childishly pleased that the boffins in the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment agree with me. Yet delighted I was; so much so that I felt like ringing up people I haven't seen for 10 years to demonstrate the maturity I learnt in Transition Year and go: "Naa-na-na-nanaa".
The school I went to, Newpark Comprehensive School in Blackrock, Co Dublin, was one of the first in the country to try out this weird, new-fangled Transition Year idea. By the time I got there, it was fairly well established in the school, as were the rumours that earlier Transition Year groups had done everything from live on a boat for a year to tend goats in the Himalayas. Sadly, when I reached goat-rearing age, Transition Year had been watered down into a more manageable formula that worked well.
Yet it was still a fairly unusual concept in Ireland, and one that was not altogether approved of by parents from other schools, by some TDs, or indeed, by other students, who often far surpassed their parents in conservatism. I lost count of the number of times I outlined the case for exercising those creaky creative and intuitive muscles, unused by hours of reading, writing and arithmetic, and for taking some time to mature a little.
I entered Transition Year with the firm conviction that this was going to be a life-changing experience for me. Having seen too many films, I had visions of myself forming Big Chill-style friendships over intense personal development sessions or discovering that I had an innate talent for decorating plates that would see me wealthy in old age. Of course it didn't turn out that way, and I remember being rather scornful of those who had promised so much - "Transition Year, change my life? Like, roight."
Which isn't to say that I didn't enjoy it thoroughly. There were trips to outdoor pursuits centres where the chance to flirt with the instructors and stay up till 3 a.m. with my friends easily outweighed the sticky problem of the outdoor pursuits themselves. There were personal development sessions where everybody squirmed anxiously at the thought of having to say something, and then surprised themselves by being breathtakingly honest. Then there was the sheer pleasure of tripping off for a hectic session of yoga or self-defence instead of scuffling for the back seat in biology.
It was fun, but at the time it didn't seem life-changing. For a start there was far too much in the way of academic studies to be truly revolutionary - who could really rebel, when they had to get back for a 2.30 p.m. class in Irish? Then there were all those lectures, hour-long sessions with a diverse collection of speakers, spent lolling in rows, pretending not to listen. Jonathan Philbin Bowman was invited back to speak at one - a remarkably courageous or foolhardy move given that Newpark was the school he so publicly left at the age of 16.
Typically he managed to raise hackles and laughs in almost equal portions, but finally endeared himself to most of us by staging a mass walkout. We only got as far as the chipper, for want of anywhere better to go, but his rabble-rousing speech was typical of the insidious, impressive and enduring way in which Transition Year so radically does change your life. An hour after his speech I was back in my seat, feeling a little sheepish at my earlier behaviour, but 11 years after his speech, I still remember it. I remember hearing, as if for the first time, that school was going to end one day, that it wasn't the be all and end all, and that the most important thing was to be a good, and if not good, then an impressive, person.
It was a message that was repeated in various forms and guises throughout Transition Year, if never quite so eloquently. That year was the first time I began to realise that there were several sides to every story, several ways of looking at everything and several people who were more interesting than you would ever give them credit for. This hugely valuable information wasn't drummed into my skull by constant repetition, was never written on a blackboard and if I now know it by heart it's because I learned it to be true rather than learned it by rote.
Yet these more traditional methods of learning were the ones that other people - parents, students, TDs - seemed to think were the only real means of education. A year spent developing your sense of the world, would obviously send you ricocheting into a drugs dependency at best or an inability to study for the all-important Leaving Certificate at worst. I refined a healthy ability to argue during Transition Year, an ability to refute the idea that taking time out was just a waste of time, and a dangerous one at that.
So in a way, it's no wonder that I'm crowing quite so much about the statistics on Transition Year and its effect on Leaving Certificate points. I would have loved to bandy around these statistics all those years ago, proving to the suspicious that Transition Year is an academically superior option. For my own part, I learnt rather too much from Jonathan Philbin Bowman and from Transition Year, to really see CAO points as the be all and end all, or to see Transition Year's validity only in terms of its academic potential. But it's good to have something to keep the number-crunchers at bay while teenagers get on with the vital business of becoming abnormal.
Louise East can be contacted at wingit@irish-times.ie