Dennis Driscoll’s Snowman

The snow is gone; the chickens are back; the house is still a wreck in the aftermath of yesterday’s House Concert.  You know… just another Monday morning in Oysterville!

I have always loved Mondays.  The whole week seems to stretch out like the artist’s proverbial blank canvas with limitless possibilities.   Mondays mean a new week of adventures is in store.  It almost irritates me to look at the calendar and see that the week’s white spaces have already begun to fill up.

Mondays begin my week just as Septembers begin my year.  I blame it all on a lifetime in the classroom, first as a student and then as a teacher.  I added up those school years once.  It came to 60.  That’s a mighty lot of Mondays and a goodly amount of looking forward – enough to make for a lifetime habit.

Jill Trenholm’s Concert Flyer 2014

Even though I know that Sunday is supposed to begin the week, I’ve always taken the term ‘weekend’ literally.  Sunday is the wind-down day – the day for some quiet introspection, for time with friends and loved ones, for the enjoyment of a special meal.  It has always seemed like an ending day to me, not a beginning.

No doubt, a lot of my attitude stems from loving school which, of course, segued into loving my career.  But things have changed considerably since my first teaching job in 1961 and, in the thirteen years since I retired, the entire education system has morphed into something I’m not sure I’d like.

“…and bring back Monday mornings!”

My friend (Linda-the-Pretty-One) has been visiting from Seattle since Friday and we’ve had several enlightening (to me) discussions about teaching today.  She came into the profession late with all the enthusiasm and proper (in my opinion) ideals and expectations in place.  Now after five years in the classroom, she still enjoys the teaching/learning experience but expresses concerns about what “Education” has become.  My take on it is that it has morphed into a bureaucratic nightmare.

One of her much longer-term colleagues told her she’s “just out of sync.”  Linda’s educational philosophy and teaching style would have been a better fit a few decades back – before teachers and students were lock-stepped into prerequisite minutes spent on ‘basics,’ before state mandated tests drove the curriculum, before education began to be parsed out like coins into vending machines.  You know… before art and P.E. and even science and social studies were nudged right out of the elementary curriculum.

Linda’s not my only teacher-friend who worries about our educational system and what it has become.   Their weeks are all filled up with requirements and deadlines and reports and meetings.  That sense of discovery that is key to the teaching/learning process is pretty much gone, at least in the public schools of our state.  My overly simplistic analysis of the “why” is that Monday mornings just aren’t a pleasure anymore!  What a shame!