Classes at the school where I’m employed start this coming Monday.
When I was growing up certain events reliably took place at the same time every year, and one of them was school always starting the Wednesday after Labor Day. Back then the idea of attending classes in August made no more sense than water skiing in February.
During my youth only the nerdiest, geekiest, and dorkiest of boys would ever even hint they were looking forward to the start of school in September. I’m not sure if this was also true of females, since I never was one myself. Prior to high school all I knew about girls my age was that none of them played Little League Baseball, street basketball, or backyard tackle football, which meant our paths never crossed during summer. It didn’t occur to me until years later that the reason no girls participated in those activities was because they weren’t allowed to. Had the adults running youth baseball in our town been a little more enlightened, it’s likely Beth Medvecky and Meg Smith would have been standouts. In fact, had girls been allowed to participate, some of the less athletically- gifted 9-year-old boys, a group that included me, might never have been selected for a Little League team in the first place.
The elementary school crowd I ran with was all male, and in that milieu the more you professed to hate school, the cooler you were. I was amongst the most vocal education-disparagers. That made sense, since the one thing I truly excelled at back then was amusing and/or distracting my classmates by making weird faces, blurting out wisecracks, or engaging in similar infantile antics while a selfless, dedicated, incredibly patient adult with a teaching degree was simultaneously trying to prepare all of us to ultimately become well-adjusted, intelligent, productive citizens.
My ceaseless attempts at comedy weren’t always appreciated by teachers, so like the swallows returning to Capistrano and Punxsutawney Phil checking for his shadow every February 2nd, early in November every year my mother would be summoned for conferences with teachers who’d accurately describe her oldest son as “underachieving,” “immature,” “a disruptive influence,” and often all three of those things. My siblings were model students, so clearly bad parenting wasn’t responsible for my academic and behavioral shortcomings.
But during all those years I had a dirty little secret: midway through each August I was actually looking forward to going back to school! I would never have admitted it, but that’s where everyone else was going to be. What other options were there? Besides, there wasn’t any upside to being class clown at home. The audience there was smaller, and far less appreciative of my juvenile buffoonery.
Ironically (and against all odds) I’m about to begin my 25th year as a public school teacher. I’ve spent the past week setting up my classroom and preparing lesson plans, all the while bemoaning, along with like-minded colleagues, the looming and tragic end of our all-too-brief summer vacation. Of course, none of us would ever voice such complaints to longshoremen, nurses, police officers, plumbers, hairdressers, electricians, daycare providers, welders, firefighters, accountants, engineers, cashiers, construction workers, secretaries, office clerks, or any number of other people whose jobs require them to literally and/or figuratively punch a time clock for all but two weeks a year.
But here’s the ultimate irony: all these decades later I’m still harboring the same dirty little secret. I’m actually looking forward to classes starting!
But please don’t tell my colleagues. I’d hate to have them think that I’m a nerd, a geek, or a dork.
Andy YoungReturn to main page
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