Are we there yet

The end of the semester is quickly approaching. There are only 4 class days left for us and I am only teaching on one of them…sweet. Of course exams still need to be graded so that the seniors can graduate…or not. Most of my students in the lab are gone now or will be going soon. For the first time since being here…I will not have an undergrad (at least not one to myself) for the summer. Now I’ll need to do all my own dishes, pick up my own dry cleaning, organize my own post-its, shuffle my own ipod playlists, reverse alphabetize my own file cabinets, tie my own shoes, and sharpen my own pencils…this is going to be one long summer. The nice thing is that I’ll actually be at home for most of the summer…save the trip to Europe which will be a nice change of pace from the previous summers filled with traveling and conferences which really make summer much more stressful than it ought to be. Which reminds me how much I am opposed to the assignment of summer reading for kids in school. Seriously…it sucks. It doesn’t make kids want to read…it makes reading a chore. Summer should be a time when kids actually get a chance to go outside and get dirty and go to camp and run around and be sweaty and gross and not sitting inside and reading “All Quiet on the Western Front” (which is a good book by the way but I had to read it over a summer vacation and thus resented it until much later when I read it again on my own), unless of course that’s what they CHOOSE to do. Seriously…why do schools do this? If you’re going to have a vacation then make it a vacation…not some protracted learning activity that breeds resentment of the very education its trying to further. Moreover…why does reading a book have such a special place. If we are gonna have them do that then how come we can’t have the assignment of summer “acid-base titrations” or summer “physics of inclined planes” assignments? Of course you should all know that your assignment for the summer is to read this blog every day…its good for you, you’ll thank me when you’re older. Patrick OUT!!!