The Last Day of School

Last Thursday was the kids’ last day of school, as I’d imagine is the case for most of you with school aged kids. The approach of the last day is always a tad bittersweet for me. I think most working adults think, even if just for a second “damn those kids are lucky,” and I’m no exception (and I was a teacher for two years, so I also think “damn those teachers are lucky; why the hell did I stop doing that?”). But at least I get a reprieve from my normal help-get-the-kids-ready-and-drive-them-to-school duties, so summer break does normally mean 30 extra minutes of sleep for me, and that’s nothing to sneeze at. And to the extent that I sometimes feel that my stay-at-home wife has it easy with two kids in school these days, now with all three kids home all day well … lets just say she’s working harder than me these days.

The first last-day-of-school that I remember was in 1980, when I was 7 years old, finishing up second grade. I remember the sheer chaos, the stray papers floating around the school. But the thing I remember most was the 8^th grade class, who were all singing a song I had never heard before, a song that had just been released a few months prior. I can still hear the words echoing down the hall:

We don’t need no education; we don’t need no thought control

That was all they sang, just the one line, over and over. It was simple enough that many of us younger kids picked it up and started singing it, over and over (and dumb kids in my class simplified it further to “we don’t need no education; we don’t need no education”: repeat). That phrase must’ve been uttered 10,000 times at St. Mary’s elementary school in June of 1980.

I was thinking of this last week, driving the kids into their second to last day of school. They were chatting to each other in the back seat and I just started singing along. I began to get into it and, before long, I was belting out “Hey, teacher, LEAVE US KIDS ALONE!” I looked in the rear-view mirror to see four eyes staring at me, wondering who the hell their father was talking to.

That night, my four-year old son (who’s technically just in preschool, but its 5 days a week, 3.5 hours a day, so it’s kind of like real school) asked us if he had school the next day. Excited, my wife told him. “Yes, tomorrow is the LAST DAY OF SCHOOL!!” thinking my son would be oh-so-excited to hear that. My son replied “ARGGHHH” and followed that up with a whine, which I think definitively proves that four year old boys are focused very much on short-term penalties and not long-term rewards.