Change Of Season

 The grass on the hillside is growing high, partly because of the season, but also because the buildings and grounds crew for the district are taking the same tack that many of the rest of us are: The year is almost over. Currently, if a ball was errantly kicked up into the standing weeds above our playground, we would have to put a picture of it on milk cartons in hopes of finding it before next fall. 

The flurry of standardized testing that is taking place is another sign of the creeping close of the school year. Everyone's skills and capacities are being measured one last time in hopes of defining a line that creeps up from left to right. See kids? You haven't just been taking up space for the past one hundred eighty days or so. 

You learned something. 

If they started the year without a sense of letters or numbers, hopefully they have more now than when they first took a seat in their classroom. In between calls for quiet and fire drills and copious amounts of recess that were extended by extra trips to the bathroom or water fountain or leaving early or not coming to school at all, the arrow somehow ended in the up position. 

Just before we turn them all loose again for two months with our fingers crossed that the inevitable "summer slide" won't set them back too much once the call goes out for them to return to these hallowed halls. 

All of this was accomplished during a year that we had at one time been asked to close our doors. No classes. No recesses. No balls kicked into the weeds. All of these kids would have been shuffled up and dropped into different schools with different teachers and all those new faces. 

And who knows how tall the grass might have grown on those hillsides?

I can complain about how things went down this school year. We have a lot of work left to do with the kids that come back next year. One hundred and eighty days to try and squeeze it all in, give or take. 

Mostly give.