Possumblog

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves, are triumph and defeat.--Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

REDIRECT ALERT! (Scroll down past this mess if you're trying to read an archived post. Thanks. No, really, thanks.)

Due to my inability to control my temper and complacently accept continued silliness with not-quite-as-reliable-as-it-ought-to-be Blogger/Blogspot, your beloved Possumblog will now waddle across the Information Dirt Road and park its prehensile tail at http://possumblog.mu.nu.

This site will remain in place as a backup in case Munuvia gets hit by a bus or something, but I don't think they have as much trouble with this as some places do. ::cough::blogspot::cough:: So click here and adjust your links. I apologize for the inconvenience, but it's one of those things.


Thursday, August 12, 2004

It’s BACK!!

Chet the E-Mail Boy rolled in yesterday evening with all sorts of outlandish tales regarding his whereabouts the past few days--the only one that sounded remotely plausible was running into some long-faced goober selling sugar plums in Kampuchea.

In any event, Chet is now back and the World Famous Axis of Weevil Thursday Three has been unloaded from the flatbed and is ready for you to cogitate upon!

As with all past Thursday Threes, we usually intend for these questions to be somewhat related to the goings on of our beloved Southland, but today’s are not the least bit geographically constrained, meaning that you do not have to be from the South to participate and enjoy the festivities!

Our questions today are from Jim Smith, who notes that the children are now beginning to head back to school, and in celebration of this fact, Jim wonders:

1. When were you most excited about starting back to school and why?
2. Did you like school in general and why/why not?
3. If you had it to do over again would you do anything differently in school?

Good questions, all. (I assume this “school” thing Jim refers to includes everything from kindergarten to grad school.)

If you have your own blog, leave a link below in the comment section--be sure if you are leaving a link in the body of the comment to use the pointy-bracketed “a href="http://website” formatting convention, and if you are relying on the URL line in the fill-in form, be sure to FILL IN YOUR URL! If you don’t feel like answering on your blog, or you are blog-deprived, feel free to just leave your answers in the comments.

NOW THEN, answers!

Number One--I never really remember being all that excited about going back to school, although I didn’t dread it the way some kids seemed to. It was just school, after all. I enjoyed getting to see my friends again, and getting some new pants and such, but that’s about it. College was no different--I went when I was told to go, and went home when they said I could.

Number Two--Yes, I liked my school. I went to a small private Christian school close to my home from the first grade until the twelfth grade. It was cozy and friendly, mostly, and I guess I got a pretty good education. We did seem to get our share of principals who were nut jobs, though, the sort of pinheaded idiots who seem to enjoy bossing little kids around. (Not that such activities aren’t enjoyable, of course, but you know, there ARE other things in life.)

Sadly, the school is no longer in operation. Even more sad, at least to me, is that the first graduate of the school to ever sit on the board of trustees was me, and I was one of the people who had to make the decision to shut it down. You spend twelve of your crucial formative years growing up in a place like that, full of your memories, your hopes and dreams all bound up in the little classrooms and the playgrounds and the lunchroom and knowing how to turn off the main breakers so that school gets cancelled for the day, and then to have to sit there as an adult facing a roomful of parents to let them know you’re pulling the breaker for good--well, it’s a very hard thing.

Number Three--Done differently? Well, maybe. I think I would have been much more secure financially to have studied something other than architecture in college, that’s for sure. It’s still fun from the personal fulfillment point of view, but try telling the loan officer you’re sending in an envelope full of personal fulfillment in lieu of this month’s mortgage, and he gets really antsy.

In junior and senior high school, I think I should have not been quite so eager to hang around with the wrong crowd--“crowd” being a highly elastic concept, given how small our school was--but it would have been better if I didn’t know some of the things I know. In fairness, however, the fact that I survived the experience means I have a much more keen sense of the types of behavior to beware of in my own kids.

So there you go.


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