Historical September 1985 report or notice. Original dates, prices and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
Have you written your New Year’s resolutions yet?
For many of us, the real new year starts not in January, but in September when school starts again. That means it is time for new resolutions: I will pack my lunch the night before. I will complete homework before I watch any TV. I will start reading for the book report when it is assigned instead of waiting till the night before it’s due. (Parents substitute “I will see that the kids do all of the above.”) In our family, the back-to-school new year has been observed continuously since I was 4-1/2 and since my husband was 6. (Rick missed kindergarten and, as a result, never learned the proper use of scissors.) We are each the oldest child so never thought about the end of summer till we started going to school.
For our children, however, from the time they were born, someone in the family has always been going back to school.
When I finished college, I started teaching. Backto-school no longer meant getting new school shoes, but attending in-service meetings and resolving to make written lesson plans at least a semester, or a month, or more realistically, a week ahead of time, or to grade and return those 100 essays within the week after they had been submitted.
By the time I retired from teaching (the first time) to have daughter Beth, Rick was back in school, first going part-time at night at Washington University and UMSL and later— when I returned to teaching—going full time until he earned his bachelor’s degree.
Two months after “finishing” college, he was back working part-time on a Master’s degree in education and teaching in high school. That was fifteen years ago, and we still live by the school calendar.
As I write this to make the deadline for The Times, which also takes a summer vacation and starts up again in September, we’re gearing up—getting clothes ready, buying shoes and supplies, packing Beth to move back to college, trying to accept the fact that Melissa is starting high school already. Rick is wondering when his teaching schedule at the junior college will be finalized and I’m wondering what our enrollments will be in University College at Washington U., where I work. Rick and I are also getting ready to go back to class as students again.
We are currently both working toward a Master of Liberal Arts degree at Washington U., a program which I sometimes describe as the chance to take classes in subjects you didn’t have time to take as an undergraduate. (For example, last semester I studied The American City and Rick, Science and Western Thought from Aristotle to Newton.) The point of all this biographical trivia is not that we are something exceptional. Just the opposite. Many, many people are students of one subject or another all of their lives.
For us, the start of another school year is a real measure of time. Taking classes is a way of continuing to grow. Commencements, by definition, invariably draw the question, “What next?” For those not pursuing a degree or taking credit courses, many people enroll in short non-credit courses and lecture series; classes taught at community schools, junior colleges, universities; lessons in playing piano, knitting, swimming, or flying airplanes. Self-improvement can take the form of physical fitness programs or may be an unexpected reward in volunteering to help others.
Finally, for those not going back to school themselves, there is still a feeling of starting new. Summer is over—forget the 80 degree weather in September. Forget the calendar marked “first day of autumn.” When Labor Day comes and school starts, summer is over. Kids are back in school, and everybody knows it even when there are no kids in the immediate household. Then many decide it’s time to get back in line, to lose weight, quit smoking, or finish painting the house before winter sets in. So, to all of us who are going back to school with fresh notebooks, good intentions, and firm resolutions, happy new year!
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, September 1985.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times1985_09.pdf, printed page(s) 5; PDF page(s) 5.
