September 2001

This is the first September in 20 years (the last time was 1980) that I am not starting school again for the year. I mean, I am, technically, but I have no classes, so it's not quite the same thing. This could suddenly turn into a very lamented, blue article. But I will try hard not to let that happen. After all, this is Just Add Water, and I have standards to maintain.

So instead I'm going to talk about all the things that students have to do that I don't have to do this September, in an effort to perhaps make the students feel jealous of us working folk, and to make us working folk jealous of, well, the other working folk. I mean, who else can we be jealous of? Certainly not the students, slaving away all day for 8, maybe 9 months of the year and then with 3 months off. How awful is that? Three months off? What would a person DO with all that time?

It's much, much better to be in the working world. Two weeks off is all any civilized person needs, at most. And work 6 days a week, if you can. This 5-day work week is much too easy on people. A culture of leisure, we are. Taking it all too easy. Those students are the worst. Sheesh. What an awful lifestyle, school.

But it's the lifestyle I know best, and, so, in some strange way, I miss it. I miss the smell of stinky feet in a classroom. I miss the chalkdust clouds so thick you can't breathe. I miss the stale, recirculated air of the school buildings. I miss the first year calculus students who never seemed to have a clue what a valid limit proof was. The list goes on.

And it's not really that I miss these things, so much as I miss being part of that whole culture. I guess it's just part of growing up, growing older. Eventually things change. But that's part of the fun, too.

Well, it looks like I'm drawing to the close of another Just Add Water. Not my finest effort, but it's been a while. Once I shake the rust off, this column will return to its former form, forming forms formally. Alliterating anxiously, always ably aimlessly ambling.