school Archives - The Misfit Farmer

Thomas started kindergarten this week–kindergarten! Seems like just yesterday that we were dropping him off at daycare for the first time. Okay, maybe not yesterday, but it doesn’t feel like five years. Time is strange: days drag, years fly–unless you’re a new Kindergartener with no concept of time. For Thomas, a long time ago could be an hour, month, or year. He remembers a few things from two and three. For instance, he remembers his first tornado warning, in his three-year-old class, when he and his classmates had to huddle in the daycare bathroom.

I only have a handful of vague daycare memories. I remember once having my mouth washed out with soap for spitting. I remember once having a nightmare while laying on my mat during nap time. And I remember getting my “willy” caught in my zipper. That’s it. With predominant memories like that, it’s no wonder I can’t remember anything else, which is a shame because I’m sure daycare was mostly a fun and happy experience, full of blocks and trucks and dinosaurs, much like it has been for Thomas. Why I don’t remember the fun and happy part is beyond me. It is concerning, however.

Apparently, behind my back, my brain has been conspiring against me and erasing my happy memories without my consent. This is a treacherous thing for a brain to do, which is why you should keep your friends close, but your brain closer. Admittedly, I haven’t been checking in with my brain much, so without my support it decided to make mischief. I’m not sure I can blame it. It probably gets bored sitting up there, wobbling around all day, and doesn’t have much else to do. Or, maybe my brain is just a fan of ‘90s teen dramas, which is why it retains so many cringeworthy memories from high school–I’d rather have my infantile memories from daycare.

By the time Thomas is my age, some technocratic billionaire will likely have developed a microchip to implant to store happy memories and bypass mischievous brains. Until then, the best we can do is check in our brains from time to time to see what they’re up to.

Anyway, Thomas has had a great start to kindergarten. Despite all of our worries, he seems happy as the proverbial lark. And despite his happiness, when we ask him what he did in school each day, he says, “I can’t remember.”

Forgetting happy memories starts early.

It has come to my attention that I’m getting old. This revelation occurred to me while I was conversing with our summer intern at the agriculture office. Starting next month, he will be a sophomore at NC State University. Despite his enrollment in a premier institution of higher learning (I also attended NC State), he confessed that he cannot write in cursive.

“How do you take notes in class?” I asked.

“Laptop–nobody takes notes on paper anymore,” he said, with a sense of bewilderment, as if paper was as antiquated as papyrus.

“Do you have textbooks?” I asked.

“Well, kinda, we have e-textbooks,” he said.

Oh, I miss the days of tangible tomes–you know those big heavy textbooks that could be repurposed as an anchor once they’re out of date. Sadly, kids these days will never know the pure joy of getting assigned a used textbook that already has the answers written in it. Nor will their back muscles develop adequately. I swear the backpacks in our day had their own gravitational pull, and likely weighed more than the kids wearing them. Nowadays the only reason kids wear backpacks is to advertise for North Face; they certainly don’t use them to lug around textbooks and Trapper Keepers.

FYI: The intern didn’t know what Trapper Keepers were either. I had to explain to him that Trapper Keepers were basically overpriced folders, in which middle school boys stuffed all their papyrus; meanwhile, middle school girls used them to neatly organize and catalog their correspondence, that is the notes that were passed back and forth on the information superhighway, also known as the back row in class.

It makes me sad that kids these days never experience the excitement of passing notes, of making shadow puppets in the overhead projector, of playing pencil break and paper football, of piloting paper airplanes that fly straight and true.

Now, with only electrons used for learning, school sounds a lot less electrifying.