Resist the Allure of A New Beginning
The academic year’s ‘clean slate’ is actually a little dangerous.
The beginning of the school year is seductive. You might not be a teacher, or a student, or a parent of a student, but I’m sure you can feel the energy: Everyone gets new, sharp, unchewed-on pencils! Fresh backpacks! Blank day planners! And with all this stuff comes the promise of a blank slate; the possibility that the Tuesday after Labor Day will be the first day of the rest of your life.
I like this feeling. It comes with crispness in the air, and plants undergoing elaborate renovations, letting go of everything that, let’s just say, no longer serves them. (Trees are especially flashy redecorators, and you can spend the fall ushering in your Brand New Self to the sights of neon yellow or crimson or hot pink foliage. OK, Nature! We get it! You’re better than us.) The sticky sludge of all the sweet excesses of summer will be reigned in, again, at last.
I’m a teacher. I went straight from student to teacher to student to teacher with no gap years in between, so that my life since I was three years old has been on an academic clock. I may have a bit of a bias about the patterns I notice this time of year. Please feel free to call me out on this, and tell me that no no no; your year begins in spring, as it should, and you…
