About That Date: August 1

Most of you who visit this site know that I was--for decades--a teacher. Public school, private school, public university, private college. A little bit of everything--though most of it was in that wonderful middle school in Aurora, Ohio. Every one of those gigs was different from the others--different wonders, different horrors (I exaggerate)--but one thing was annually the same about all of them: On August 1 each year I began modifying my Summer Mode and began preparing for the commencement of classes.

Now, first, what was "Summer Mode"?

When I was teaching--wherever it was--summer was ... heaven. During the academic year, you see, I worked seven days a week plus evenings and holidays. I always had grading to do (try grading 150 compositions sometime!), class preparations, school-related reading, meetings, play rehearsals, etc. These commitments are why I always bristled (not like a hairbrush but like a threatened wolf) whenever some dim doofus who knew diddly-squat about teaching would wax wise about how teachers worked only nine months.

But in the summers! Time to travel, read, write--all, I soon realized, school-related. Joyce and I have always spent our vacations traveling to places that related to our teaching--homes and graves (!) and important sites in the lives of the writers whom we taught. I would often spend a summer reading the complete works of writers like Jack London and William Shakespeare and Willa Cather and Ernest Hemingway and the other artists whose works the kids would be reading during the year. Gave me some perspective.

As the academic year expanded throughout my career (when I was a kid, school started the day after Labor Day, ended after Memorial Day), I realized that July was the only month I was not teaching. By the time I retired from public school teaching (January 1997), the school year (meetings, etc.) began in mid-August; the year ended in mid-June. That left only July for Heaven.

So ... anyway ... when August 1 rolled around, I would begin spending my mornings on work directly related to school: planning the syllabus, printing out material I would distribute to my classes, ordering things I would need, fussing in my classroom ... you know. Gradually--as August continued--I would spend more and more of each day on schoolwork, and by the time the first faculty meetings arrived, I was pretty much ready for The Invasion.

By the time the kids swarmed into class for the first day, I was ready!

But, of course, I wasn't--not completely. Things always happened I didn't expect--or plan for. So it goes in SchoolWorld ...

Anyway, yesterday was August 1, and on that date I always feel a little ... surge ... of something. A little nudge to my Jiminy Cricket, who wakes up, buzzes a little, then remembers I am retired, and goes back to sleep.

I do miss so much about teaching--mostly the classroom interactions. My colleagues. I manifestly do not miss the seven-days-a-week-plus-evenings-plus-holidays aspects of it.

But every now and then this housefly of a thought flits and flirts through my brain: I wonder if I could ....

Nah.

And, besides, today is August 2. Too late to get started for the year ... maybe next year?