Back To School, at Least for Now

For many students, the “first day” of school arrived this week. Teachers, God bless them, started even earlier.

Cars crowd parking lots used these past weeks by skate boarders perfecting tricks and youngsters learning to ride two-wheelers. Soon the sounds of children at recess will fill the air—followed shortly by the cheers of Friday night football and Saturday morning soccer.

Summer vacation is officially over.

When I was a kid, summer vacation seemed like an eternity. I went to a private school, so my vacation, book-ended by Memorial Day on one end and Labor Day on the other, stretched out for three months (sometimes even longer depending on when Labor Day fell). Twelve weeks give or take, of carefree, homework free, bliss.

Time enough to almost erase the memory of multiplication tables and spelling tests. Long enough, that by the end of vacation, I missed school and was excited about going back.

What happened to those lazy, hazy days?

Today’s kids get out of school in June, and they’re back in the classroom by mid-August. Several weeks sliced off—less time to regenerate and refresh. Families scramble to push camping trips, reunions and family excursions into a shorter timeframe. By summer’s end, everyone feels rushed and over scheduled, as if vacation time had never happened at all.

Then suddenly another rush hits. The rush to “get ready”—to buy back-to-school clothes and supplies. It happens even before the "Dog Days" are over.

The dog days of summer—the hottest, most sultry days of the season—run from July 3 to early September in the northern hemisphere.

Wait, we haven’t had many dog days this year.

It’s been unseasonably cool, but I’m guessing those dog days still have a chance to show up. Who doesn’t remember about a week or two after school starting the weather suddenly turning hot? I’d sit at my desk fanning myself with sweaty hands and dream about cooling off at the beach.

Summer vacations may have changed, but one thing hasn’t. The anticipation about which teacher you’d get and which friends would be in your class. That still happens every year.

Back when my kids were in elementary school, class lists didn’t appear until a few days before school started. It would be a day of clock watching, wishing the hours away until the designated hour to view the list. It was always exciting—for them and for me. They’d insist we be there waiting so they could check the list as soon as it was posted. They begged me to hurry—they “couldn’t wait” to find out. Once they did, they wanted school to hurry up and start. 

Now a teacher, my daughter, waits from the other side. She’s the list poster waiting to meet her students on their first day of middle school. It seems the cycle has come full circle.

Well, almost.

Her oldest child is in elementary school, so she now sees the waiting and the excitement from a mother’s perspective. I vicariously relive it from a distance, and from that distance, I have a different perspective too. 

My daughter couldn’t wait to head off to school from her first day of kindergarten to her first day of college. I remember both days (and the tugs at my heart) as if they happened yesterday. 

Life is different from when I was a kid. Today the advantages of technology allow learning 24/7—kids are not in a holding pattern over summer vacation waiting for that first day of a new school year to start learning again.

Thank goodness. With the deepening budget crisis, summer vacations may stretch out longer in the future. Furlough days and shorter school years will undoubtedly have an effect on teachers’ ability to cover required course material. They will push and scramble (even more than they do now) to do their job.

So, while we wait to see what happens, how our legislators resolve the deepening crisis, let’s give kudos to those incredible teachers who dedicate themselves to make the world a better place, and let’s encourage our kids to learn anywhere they can.

Will Richardson, co-author of a 2011 book on PLNs (Personal Learning Networks), believes that the best teachers in (students') lives are going to be the ones they find, not the ones given to them.

Let’s hope that's true. At the rate things are going, we may have a serious teacher shortage along with longer summer vacations.

Talk about "dog days."