A Boomer’s Journal

   Here we are, smack dab in the middle of the dog days of summer and for a whole lot of kids in our area, summer is effectively over. That’s because they are back inside the hallowed halls of learning. This also means that the summer season ceased even a week earlier for educators and school staff. They were called back to duty for mind-and-rear-end numbing meetings and mandatory staff development sessions, not to mention the task of getting their rooms and books and lesson plans ready for another new crop of darlings.

If you detect a slight ‘snark’ to my tone, you are correct.

I am not in favor of this early start to the school year, which replaces the times when kids need to be bored and forced to find creative ways to amuse themselves as the August sun burns its way into lawns and the petunias struggle to pull water from their roots. However, I see no end to this trend, so I am resigned to accept, but not like, it.

There are some who say that school should be year round, since the US of A is losing ground academically on the world stage. Studies abound that there is a national downhill slide in the quality of education for our children, that many other countries surpass us in science and math. And these reports might have some validity. Maybe we are slipping. How can this be happening, since we have one of the most egalitarian systems of free and appropriate public education, and a very strong element of private education, much of it in the form of religious and charter-type systems that the world has ever seen?

I don’t think it can be attributed to bad teachers, since it seems that it is becoming more difficult than ever to get certified. Is it from the very fact that we must offer the same education to all, and not cater merely to the brightest and best, as some nations do? Could it be an ingrained fault with our ‘local control’ system, not having a more nationalized control? Could it be just because we are so large? But then China is large, one could say. Could it be that maybe it comes from an attitude?

In our country, we have come to take education and teachers for granted. It may be compared to water, which we look at in the same way. We sign the kids up, the teachers teach. We turn on the tap and get a cool drink. We buy the kids some clothes and shoes and some pencils and paper and send them on to school. Then, we expect them to learn and achieve and get good grades and be entertained and fed (in some cases, two free meals a day, even though those same kids have iPhone 6’s and $100 sneakers). We jump in the shower and expect the spigot to spew a nice warm spray. We do these things without thinking, because someone has installed the pipes properly and someone is working somewhere in a treatment plant to purify our water. Someone has built a modern school. Someone has developed a curriculum. Still someone else has gotten certification and advanced training and figured out how to get young minds to comprehend Egyptian history and macroeconomics and freshman algebra and how to diagram a sentence and what a poem means, really.

I have sometimes been a perpetrator of this lack of appreciation for what comes easily to us in this nation. Roads are fixed, planes fly, the switch on the wall yields light. And at times, I have been guilty of feeling the same way about education. We sent our kids to school and expected that they would grow and learn and progress and become more independent, every year, like clockwork. And they did, sometimes in spite of their teachers, but mostly, because of them.

People, young and old, are heading into this new school year with dreams and expectations. Teachers want to do justice by their students. Kids want to make friends and fit in, and maybe even learn something along the way. Administrators want to have an uneventful, safe, and productive year, where everyone gets along, all the teachers are awesome, and their student body moves upwards toward achievement. They all have jobs to do and I wish them only the best. Do we, as parents and taxpayers, always support them as we should? Do we always do our job? Is this why we are slipping?

These are easy questions to ask, but not easy questions to answer.

At any rate, for those times when I didn’t say “thanks for a job well done” to the people charged with the sometimes-herculean task of educating, well…“Thanks for a job well done.” And may all your dreams for The School Year of 2015 come true.

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