TALES FROM THE SHIRE

Already?!

Teachers and students, parents maybe, lament that it seems summer break gets shorter and shorter each year.

There’s a song about as old as I am, called “See You in September”. It’s cute and catchy. But it can be confusing to today’s students, except those who enroll mid-September pretending they didn’t know school started already.

If my nostalgia is correct, and it is, when that song was written school basically started after Labor Day and get out right before Memorial Day. Some say it was set that way for farming. Here in the South, maybe it was lack of air conditioning, a true luxury in those days, that lent kids such a long break. A class full of hot, cranky, stinky third graders probably wouldn’t learn much anyway, since the hum and rhythm of the lone oscillating fan put them to sleep, so keep them all at home. But that was when most moms were at home and able to yell “IN or OUT! Quit slamming that screen door!”

Summer was a season, not exclusive to astronomical and meteorological.

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