Now, that was the question wasn't it.

History was a funny thing. As a kid, the subject had never really been one on his favourites. He'd always been very focused on moving forwards. Always just keep moving forwards, never looking back, always making progress. In his young mind, looking back was this big unspeakable thing, but as he'd grown older Toby had realised that sometimes, looking back was necessary. And then, when good things started to happen, he found that looking back could even be enjoyable. He still preferred to look forward rather than dwell on things (not that it always worked that way for him), but these days he was at least a little less... extreme about it.

These thoughts all flitted through Toby's head while he stared off out the window and twirled his quill out of fidgety habit. He did this for a long while, thinking about things. waiting until there was a lull in the input from the other students before looking to Glendower and raising his hand to speak.

"I guess this is kinda what Zander said," he began, his expression making it clear that he didn't even mind that he was going to repeat the same point. It felt important for him to say it, acknowledge it out loud for the first time. Also, he wanted to say it with the positive twist. "But sometimes you gotta look back, see what went wrong or right, and that's the best way of knowing how to keep moving forward, and how to keep making things better. I used to think that the only way of moving forward was to only look forward, not dwell on the past, not ever. So I never ever did that. But sometimes you have to look back to know how to move forward. Or to understand what's happening in the here and the now. Whether in general history or, like, personal history, y'know? And I think it's easiest to look back at history when you're looking back at good things."

See? He'd learnt stuff.

Of course. That was completely leaving out the fact that Toby tended to ignore or lowkey deny the parts of history that didn't fit his idealistic views of things. But that was a problem for another day.