Nostalgia for old school days

School ended this week (at least they've gone back to ending it in May; for awhile there, it was ending in June, which just seemed WEIRD.) Every year when school ends, it makes me nostalgic for my own school days, back in the "dark ages" of the 60s and 70s! I have no children of my own, but I still live next door to the school I attended when I was in elementary school (my parents picked this house to buy precisely because it was right next door to the grade school I would attend).

I miss things like "Weekly Reader." I used to really enjoy reading that, and I remember one summer, I think the summer between third and fourth grade, or maybe between second and third grade, I had a summertime subscription to "Weekly Reader," because they were offering it to parents who wanted their kids to be able to read it over the summer.

And I really miss ordering Scholastic Books! They used to have a flyer in the "Weekly Reader" (if I remember right) every six weeks or so, and you'd fill out what books you wanted, get a check from your parents, and bring it to the teacher so she could send it in. Then, a few weeks later, your books would come, and she'd give them to the kids that had ordered them. I loved to read, and while the other kids might order one or two or three books, I usually wound up ordering seven or eight at a time! I still have a few of them, too, that I ordered in those long-ago days.

I miss films. Do kids today even SEE films anymore, or is everything on DVD now? You'd go into your classroom, and sometimes on the teacher's desk was a round metal cannister. "We get to see a film today!" everyone would exult. (It meant you didn't have to listen to the teacher drone on and on; the film HAD to be more interesting than a boring lesson from the teacher!) If the cannister was big, it meant the film would last all period; if it was small, it was only going to last about 10 minutes. (Aw, rats!) Some teachers knew how to thread the film onto the projector, and some had to have one of the boys do it (why do boys always know how to do stuff like that?) Someone would pull the screen at the front of the classroom down, and it made a "shoop" sound as it was pulled down. After the film, the kids would beg the teacher to let us play at least some of the film backwards, and everyone would laugh because it looked so funny to see everything going in reverse. Today's kids are probably so used to picture-search on DVDs and videotapes, it would never occur to them that once upon a time, watching something backwards seemed laugh-out-loud funny.

What ever happened to blackboards? At the school next door to me, they've all been replaced by the newfangled dry-erase boards, those white plastic things that you write on with Magic Marker or whatever and not with chalk. Why are blackboards outdated? Does any school anywhere still have blackboards anymore?

And does any school district anywhere still start the day after Labor Day and end a couple days after Memorial Day? It used to be when you saw the Jerry Lewis Labor Day Telethon, you knew that was your last day of summer vacation. You always got a couple days at the end of May, then ALL of June, ALL of July, ALL of August, and if you were REAL lucky and September 1st was a Tuesday, you got the entire first week of September as well before the fall semester began. Now most schools start in August, and some here in Phoenix even start in (gasp) July! The kids get a week off in October (we just got Columbus Day, which nobody except the post office pays attention to anymore), two weeks at Christmas (we got that too, but we called it "Christmas vacation" and not "winter break" as they do now), and a week in spring (I don't think we even got Good Friday back then). Why do they need so much time off during the school year?

I miss field trips. It used to be so much FUN, to get out of school for most if not all of a day, get onto the school bus, and go somewhere! I have wonderful memories of going to the Mineral Museum at the State Fairgrounds in 1972; you wouldn't think a museum dedicated to a bunch of rocks would be fun to see, but it was.

I miss assemblies (yay! we get out of class for an hour to go to an assembly!) And I miss the yearly ritual of buying books at the campus bookstore in high school. It was always interesting to bring the books home and sit down and look at them to see what we'd be studying that year.

I do NOT miss P.E. (the idea that we need P.E. in schools because it helps kids not be obese is ridiculous; if you're a chubby child, P.E. will not help you lose weight; trust me, I know, because I was a chubby child, and I was NOT athletically gifted, and I stunk out loud at everything we did in P.E. - basketball, softball, running laps, dodgeball, soccer, gymnastics - P.E. was endless torture and misery for me, and I hated it so much that to this day, I'm grateful I don't have to do it anymore!) I don't miss math class (I stunk at math, still do, and I hated that "lost" feeling of sitting in math class, not understanding a word the teacher was saying, because math was like a foreign language to me, and seeing all the other kids "getting it" while I still had no clue how to do the problems and come up with the right answer.)

I often think about all my old teachers and wonder where they are now, and how many of them are even still alive. Most have probably passed away. One of my old history teachers, long since retired, attends my church, and I saw him just a week or so ago and got to speak with him; of course, he doesn't remember me, but I remember him. Although seeing him looking 30 years older is something of a jolt because you remember people the way they were the last time you saw them, frozen in time in your memory.