Summer vacation is over and school is back next week. Can you believe it?
I am not going to say Where has the summer gone?, but I know you’re all thinking it.
It started with a bang on May 23 for people in Cache Creek, and then a quick progression to full blown drought and heartbreaking wild fires. I wonder if anyone has had a peaceful summer.
Thinking of how we react to the end of our own summer holidays, we expect students to reluctantly give up their summer freedom for the classroom.
Au contraire! As any teacher can tell you, the first day of school is usually a happy occasion for most as students meet up with old friends and relish a day of relief from two months of nothing to do. Or worse - summer jobs!
There are smiles everywhere you look, faces bright with expectation.
I always looked forward to going back to school. Learning was never a chore, although I was never a fan of homework, and some days were better than others. Math sucked; English rocked! The universe was an open book in those days.
And we didn’t even have computers! No World Wide Web (www.). No Google. No smart phones. I remember my Grade 2 teacher took the time during one class to teach us all how to use a telephone - rotary dial. Sometimes I kinda miss the whirling clicking noise those dials use to make.
How did we ever survive? I wonder if I could have accomplished more if I’d had access to the information that our children have now, but I doubt it. The latest issue of Mad Magazine was enough of a distraction - surfing the internet would have been the end of my days in the classroom.
But these days I welcome that “distraction”. Thanks, in part, to the internet, I continue to learn. I’ve taught myself to sew - something I skipped as a teenager. I’ve reacquainted myself with music and headed off in a different direction.
I still ask myself: What am I going to learn today? because learning keeps us moving forward and open to new ideas. It’s not contained to classrooms anymore.
Wendy Coomber is editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal