Getting Ready: What I Learned during Summer Vacation, Part 1

The letter came last week, the one that welcomes teachers back to a new school year and announces the meeting schedule.

I am not ready; I don't want to go back. I didn't accomplish anything, nor did I refresh myself in any meaningful way; so I decided to assign myself a short series of essays about the summer to see if I can find something to build on to have a productive school year and avoid having the same problems in the future. It's a variation of the cliche essay "How I Spent My Summer Vacation."

The first thing that I learned is that I, like everyone else, am a creature of habit who repeats mistakes. This isn't the first summer that I've wasted. I have wasted more time this summer than I have in past summers, but that waste is really a difference of degree not a substantive change in habit.

The second thing that I learned is that time matters. I can't get the months back. They are irretrievably gone. I have always known that wasting time is costly, but now that I'm older with an AARP card with all rights and privileges that membership, the fact that wasted time is indeed lost time has become frightening.

The logical conclusion is that I must change. I remember a Linda Ellerbee commentary on NBC Overnight a long, long time ago. She claimed that the real time of new beginnings was September, the start of the new school year, not December. I hope she's right, but that hope brings me to the last thing that I learned this summer. I'm not sure that I know how to change. I guess I'm going through the ennui that makes rich guys buy motorcycles and marry trophy wives. Maybe they buy trophy wives too; I'm not a rich guy, so I don't know.

I think that's what I learned. I have a few additions to "My Summer Vacation" assignment that I want to get to, but none of them fit here, so I'll save them for another post. For right now, I've got to get ready for the new school year. I probably should see if Ellerbee is right and try to make September the time of new beginnings instead of waiting for December.