For hundreds of thousands of children and adults across the province of British Columbia, today marks the beginning of the 2008-09 school year.

And I'm proud to say for the first time in 18 years, I am not among them.

I finished high school in 2003, and (finally) got my Bachelor of Applied Journalism degree this spring, after five years of work.

So for the first time, I feel a sense of accomplishment educationally. It only took 18 years.

It's a proud moment for any youngster when they can finally say: 'I will never have to pay $90 for a useless political science textbook that I never bothered to open because it was a first-year, three-credit elective again.'

There are many things I learned in university, not the least of which being that - and I say this verbatim - in journalism, you don't need school to learn.

My favourite teacher - who also provided the quote above and spent 25 years as a foot soldier in newsrooms across the province - told me that I'd learn how to be a journalist by - again, verbatim - '[expletive]ing up a lot.'

And [expletive], I have.

I don't remember too much from elementary and high school, other than using 40-year-old textbooks in grade five, being bullied in grade 10, hearing from my teachers in grade 11 how the provincial Liberals and their anti-union tactics are going to run the province into the ground (we're still here), and learning about the Russian revolution in grade 12.

Oh, and cackling with glee when I got 59 per cent in math 11, meaning I would never have to think about the quadratic formula, trigonometry, tables of values, expressing answers in slope-intercept form, or arithmetic sequences again.

Fortunately, I'm done with school, but learning happens every day, in or out of the classroom. Learning that's more useful on an everyday basis than monomials, binomials and trinomials.