Here it is, the end of August already.
Labor Day is looming on the horizon, its hot breath bearing down on our necks. That means that some school districts have already restarted their indoctrination programs, and the others will do so within the next 2 weeks.
Feeling the intractable advance of time bearing down on my “jobs to complete this summer” list convinced me to sub out today’s post, without permission but with attribution, to Mr. Van der Leun. In his post, Back to School, Gerard turns a sympathetic eye to the plight of a 10 year as he views his life thus far: a seemingly interminable sentence of classroom drudgery and boredom interrupted only by the two-a-day recesses.
Day in day out, week in week out, year in year out … you trudge off to this room crammed to the brim with bird’s nests, flash cards, trilobites, pilgrim hats, Indian headdresses, drawings and paintings in which the proportion of the head to the body is never right, but looks for all the world like an exhibit by demented Fauvists with no drawing skills whatsoever and a very garish color sense. Twice a day, everybody in this room is let out. Is it any wonder they run screaming into the sunshine?
The protocol is broken occasionally by holidays, extended summer vacations and snow days, if you’re lucky enough to live north of the Florida Keys, but that just makes the whole affair worse by presenting a temporary glimpse of freedom beyond the walls. As they say, read the whole thing. You’ll never wax idyllically about good old fashioned school days again.
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