Prepping

 I am sure that if I looked back over the years, a feature that I can access just to the right over there, I would find that my attitude in the days and weeks leading up to the Winter Break (also known colloquially as Christmas Break) that I am desperate for some sort of adjustment. I thought about this as I was taping up my now traditional door decoration for my classroom: The Grinch, who lived just north of Whoville. 

I do my best to be a Who. I want to love Christmas and all things that point in the direction of holiday cheer. Shortly after the Halloween Parade that our students embark on once a year, the questions abound regarding how many days until the holiest of holy. This curiousity is not limited to our Christian kids, but it exists in those whose faith might be found in another district. The countdown until that two week vacation is one that takes on the air of a nuclear device that is ticking down with our hero given the barest instructions of how to defuse it. 

Just don't cut the wrong wire. 

Meanwhile the business of being at school continues. Grades are given, report cards are handed out, and work continues to be done. Nominally. The grownups who are in charge of leveraging the ethic that suggests that we aren't closed until Santa comes for a visit are hard-pressed to keep the fires burning for themselves, let alone being able to spread that passion for learning out beyond the corners of their increasingly festive classrooms. Expectations shift mightily in these days of advent. 

Again, nothing particularly new about this. I can recall being in grade school myself once upon a millenium ago. There was a lot of red and green construction paper. There was a lot of cotton balls. And there were gallons of Elmer's Glue used to affix bits of those materials to one another. Which left precious little time left over to practice singing Jingle Bells at the top of our tiny lungs. 

Because this is the time in which the progress through the year slows to a crawl. How much we want it to be the end is inversely proportionate to the speed with which the calendar pages fall to the floor. 

And once again, it's just not filling me with joy. Maybe one day my tiny heart will grow three sizes. Til then I'll keep an eye on what's going on down in Whoville. From a distance.