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While numerous studies on dropping out of school exist, there are a lot less that focus on the return to school of drop outs. This article is a contribution to the analysis of the reasons why school drop outs take up studies again, in other words return to the place that they left. It identifies two reasons: time and space. It shows how the decision to return to school occurs when something has clicked into place, marking the transition from circular time to linear time, and highlighting the effects of spatial anchorings on this transition. Finally, the article analyses the rushed time-scale of the measures of active remediation in response to dropping out of school, because they aim to achieve a rapid return to school while disregarding the temporal and spatial principles at the basis of this process.