Back To School

The words that send a chill up the spine of every self-respecting kid. For adults it's a bit more complicated, and for me even more so because I'm going back to school too.

So let's catch up. I had a lousy summer. No need to elaborate, we'll just stipulate that it was lousy and move on. My kids trickle back into their schools this week. What's with the first day half day thing? My kids go to two different schools and they both do it (on different days yet). T come up with a half day schedule, people have to be thinking, okay, we're going to disrupt everyone's nice summer lives by making them wake up at 6:15, but we don't want to give the parents the benefit of a full 6 hours without their kids. I guess this what we call "child-centered" thinking. To this I say "Bah, humbug." I have two teenagers and they do more than enough child-centered thinking for all of us. I don't need the school doing it too.

One of these schools even has a half day the last day before winter and spring breaks. This to me shows a distinct lack of decisiveness and generally muddled thinking.

"Should we have a day off before the vacation? No, that would be silly, but we don't want to start the vacation when the vacation would naturally start, because that might imply that we haven't been giving it any thought, so let's just make it a half day."

Or something like that.

For me personally, the start of school is a prolonged case of the butterflies. My style of teaching is very much dependent on my getting in sync with the class, and having to tune into 4 new classes at the same time is hard work. This year in particular, I'm teaching relatively few students that I've taught previously, and only 2 that I've taught for a full year. Last year, by contrast, I had taught nearly half of my students previously including one entire class. This is not a problem, really, but I'm always a bit on edge until the parents come through for back to school night.

On the other hand, it's exciting to be going to a new building and making a new start in a lot of ways. The first order of business will be to find the bathrooms. After that, anything goes. As teachers, we have either inservice, in service, or in-service, depending on who you talk to. That always seemed kind of gramatically sketchy to me. Should one have in-service or should one be in-service. I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word "in" is.