School's out for the summer

Usually I need to have a really good reason to drive up to the kids’ school to pick them up at the end of the day rather than having them take the bus. This is both practical and ideological. From a practical perspective, my work day is 45 minutes longer when they take the bus, and it’s time I usually need. From an ideological perspective, it’s because leaving the job of driving our kids to school to the bus drivers is a way to cut down on automobile use and traffic. Besides, as taxpayers, we pay for the buses; we ought to use them, and they’re just going to start costing us more if we don’t.

On the last day of school, though, it doesn’t take much for Holly to convince me to pick her up. Unlike some schools where parents drive up to the curb to fetch their children, we’re required to park on the street and walk up to the school plaza. On the last day of school it’s always a madhouse, with parents picking kids up, teachers saying goodbye to students, preschool-aged siblings tearing around enjoying the mayhem. But I go anyway, in part because there is one moment every year that I love so much to witness: just before the buses pull away from the school lot, all the teachers stand in a row at the fence and wave goodbye. I love the part where they all line up together and wave, because it signifies so much for me about the year. Even if it’s hard to deny that they are probably waving with a huge sense of relief – after all, it’s their vacation that’s about to begin as well as the kids’ – there’s also something so affectionate in it. Yesterday was the last day of school: I went up to the plaza, and stood with my kids watching the teachers wave goodbye as I do every year.

Perhaps one reason it’s so meaningful to me is that the school year is a complete entity in a way that not many other things in our lives are. It has a beginning, a middle and an end in a way that not a lot does. And when I see the teachers lined up and waving goodbye, it always brings to mind for me how much mileage we all cover together in the course of a school year. On the first day of school in September, the teachers are just as cheerful, if not with the same look of relief they had yesterday: they make such an effort to welcome the kids into the new school year, introduce them to the benefits and the expectations of the grade they are entering.

And then one by one, the yearly rituals unfold. Back-to-school night. The first few homework assignments. Bigger projects. Occasional presentations for the parents: class plays or “authors’ teas” where the kids read their work to an audience of adults. Parent-teacher conferences. Holiday breaks. Report cards. More projects. Field trips. Classroom tests. Standardized tests. Assemblies. Student concerts. Every year, the same set of events unfolds.

But more than the simple ritual of it all, to my mind, is the sense of distance traveled. I’m amazed by how much progress the kids make every year. So much curriculum gets covered. So much information is incorporated. I’ve written before about marveling at how much Tim has learned about early American history this year, but Holly knows things about Alaska and the Iditarod that she didn’t have a clue about when the year started. Tim learned the basics of a lab experiment and started geometry. His Spanish vocabulary increased. Holly’s class discussed emancipation and the Underground Railroad.

Perhaps in some ways I’m envious. If I look back over the past nine months, I can name lots of events that happened in my life, but I can’t offer an itemized list of what I learned. I can name books I read, but I can’t give a straightforward account of what I know now that I didn’t know in September, the way my kids can. It’s all so quantifiable for them. They learned so much and they can tell you exactly what they learned. For me, the past nine months are a little harder to bullet-point.

In three months, we’ll be back on the school plaza. By the end of the first day of school, the kids will have some idea of the topics they’ll be covering over the following nine months. As always, I’ll listen rather abstractly when they tell me on that first day and then be amazed anew to realize at the end of the school year that they really did cover all that ground, they really did learn all that content.

It’s a remarkably successful system. I never fail to be impressed by it. And as I watched the teachers wave goodbye as the buses pulled away from the curb yesterday, I smiled, thinking about how much the teachers and the kids alike have to be proud of with another nine months of accomplishments under their belts as they say goodbye to another school year.