School Days, School Days

Today was the first day of school for the boy and for many other children in our community and around the state.

It is amazing how much of our schedule and the community’s schedule is designed around the attendance calendar for schools and school district.



To graduate from college, I had to pass the writing competency exam. By evidenced in this blog, the exam did not scare me away from writing. What I remember is the topic I chose from the list of given topics. While I don’t remember the other choices, I remember writing about society’s dependence on the agrarian calendar. . . which we still use today, at least in our community, to design our school year.

I also remember our previous Governor taking great strides to plant seeds with recent high school graduates at the National Governor’s Convention held in our state a few years ago to imagine schooling, including attendance calendars, differently than how they as students might have experienced schooling. I thought. . . how smart! These recent high school graduates were products of our current system and within the next decade would likely have a child entering the school system. What better candidates to envision a different system? As that is what keeps our system from changing . . . people who have experienced it, were successful or semi successful and don’t understand why it would need to be any different for their children. Maybe someday, we will be less tied to, less married to, less dependent on the agrarian calendar, as I wrote about over twenty years ago.