A cold classroom, a sweater, a pen: Olajumoke Falohun builds "School Days" from almost nothing, and the smallness is part of its force. On the surface, a student takes notes, daydreams, and then stops. Underneath, the poem asks what all that note-taking is for. Its answer is a little unsettling: the speaker writes out of fear of what bad grades will cost, not out of love for the subject.
That fear is laid out in the poem's most carefully built sentence: "bad grades won't / get me to first class / get me a job / get me a luxurious lifestyle." The repeated "get me" turns the lines into a staircase, each step a bigger prize than the last. The break after "won't" lets the negative hang over the whole list. "First class" can be read two ways, as a top degree or as the best seat on a plane, and the slide between them mirrors the speaker's logic: study leads to status, and status leads to comfort. Notice what is missing. Learning and curiosity never appear, and every reason sits in a payoff somewhere in the future.
Pressure like that produces its own escape routes. Three times the speaker says "I picture," and each picture carries them further from the desk. The first is a joke, the pen "smoking / from all the overwork" like something on a sitcom. Comparing their stress to a TV gag holds it at arm's length, since if it's funny it can't be too serious. Next comes the 4:30 bell and the thought of knowing "that i am free / for the time being,anyway." The line "know that i am free" stands briefly alone, a moment of relief, before "for the time being, anyway" takes it back. Freedom here is only a gap between obligations. The third picture is "you at school, / great big campus, / tiny little dorm room." The poem never says who "you" is, and that openness lets the image work in several ways. What it does show is the earlier dream shrinking. "Great big" and "tiny little" are almost childlike pairs of adjectives, and side by side they make the promised "luxurious lifestyle" look cramped. The destination at the end of all that work seems to be a small room.
Formally, the poem is free verse, with no rhyme, no regular beat, and lines that swing from around eight words to two or three. It reads like thought rather than composition. Sentences spill over line breaks, and the punctuation is loose: a lowercase "i" mid-line, a comma pressed against the next word in "sweater,i think." Whether or not that is deliberate, it gives the feel of a quick, unedited mind, a student thinking faster than they write. The plain, spoken register of "Good thing i brought a sweater" is why the ending lands so quietly. Even the sweater matters, since it is the one comfort the speaker has arranged for themselves in a room that offers none.
The final lines pull everything together. The teacher "talks of presentations / enough to fill a book to the brim / with notes,but / my pen stops moving." "To the brim" suggests overflow, with more demanded than a person can hold. The enjambment leaves "but" dangling at the end of its line, and then the short last line arrives with no explanation. Earlier the pen was only imagined smoking from overwork, and now the real pen falls still. Whether that means exhaustion, boredom, or a quiet refusal, the poem doesn't say, and the silence is the point.
The poem matters because it gives an honest voice to a feeling most students recognise but rarely say aloud: the gap between the glossy future being sold ("first class," "luxurious") and the present of cold rooms and aching hands. It neither complains nor preaches. It lets a stopped pen make the argument.