Screw you, June.

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June 26, 2017 by readlisaread

Oh, I know what you are thinking: “Ah cripes, here we go again….”, but I assure you, dear reader, this is not a typical surface rant, this one has deep roots.

June, for a kid, is an exercise in torment.  The weather is starting to improve, the nights are the longest, the school year is winding down, and looming just about tantalizingly in reach, are the glorious months of July and August.  Remember how those months used to stretch out, so vast and almost endless, Labour Day weekend not even a blip on the horizon… still below the curvature of the earth…the next school year still an embryo, a germ of an idea, a seed not quite sprouted.  Let’s extend that metaphor… the seed of the next school year is planted under the feet of the learners streaming from the schools, which lay fallow over the hot months, harbouring and nurturing the next-year seedlings as they take purchase, ready to welcome back the hungry horde of harvesters.

Picking through this tangled sort of analogy, I think things like “feast or famine”; “bounty of harvest”; “But a weed is simply a plant that wants to grow where people want something else”. I walked through a friend’s garden the other day, and there was a story behind each rose  bush, some having a lineage that could be traced back generations. Equally glorious were the Fox Gloves– a wildflower (which is just a weed in a different guise). And this brings me back to my point.  I left that garden with a sense of sadness and farewell, and this is the Teacher’s truth of June.  Every June, every one from kindergarten to grade 12, each and every June is a time of celebration, sure, mixed with melancholy.  And even though I don’t have my own students and classes any more,  I still have that same sense of ending and partings of the ways, the same awareness of my colleagues feeling that familiar feeling of joy and angst.

All of this brings me back to a feeling I’ve had awhile.  We talk, in vague-ish sorts of terms, about “life-long learning”.  I believe in this concept, passionately, but what does it really look like, in real terms? In other peoples’ lives?  I’ve been having conversations with a number of post-secondary instructors and their organizations. For the first time we are having conversations about our collective learners, rather than viewing the K-12 learner as a completely different beast than the post-sec learner who shows up at the door of college or university 62 days after leaving high school. Increased dual-credit programs and  pre-employment training has created new timelines along with new opportunities for our collective learners, some of whom graduate high school with a college certificate or several first year university courses completed. Suddenly, those 62 days between high school and post secondary are a blurry border at best.

I’m all for celebrating the milestones, but as Grad ’17 season comes to an end, it occurs to me that these should be celebrations of way-points, not destinations.

Next time, why I am finding it more and more difficult to argue against Year Round Schooling…


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