Commentary —

Everyone’s Favorite Time Of The Year!

by eddie small

Well, kids, guess what time it is? Here’s a hint: loads of fun. No, it’s not time to set the microwave on fire. It’s time to go back to school! Yay! Isn’t that exciting boys and girls? I’ll bet you’re all really looking forward to those tests, projects, endless nights of homework, and…hey! What are you guys doing? Come on; come out from under your bed and listen to me! Now, I know that going back to school can be a little saddening, but all you really need to get through the year is a positive attitude, along with several antidepressants. With those, I’m sure you’ll see that school can be no more painful than a root canal without Novocain being done on you as your appendix explodes.

The most important thing to do in order to get ready for the new school year is preparation. You must ready yourself for the schedule and workload. No longer will you be able to hear “good afternoon” instead of “good morning” when you wake up. You will also not be able to spend upwards to three hours doing nothing but follow a fly through your house. While you will still get to stay up late, it will not be to watch TV, but rather to finish a 12-page essay on corn. Also, many of the books you read will not have the pictures or feature Charlie Brown as the main character. Now, the most obvious way to get through this tough situation is to run away to some isolated country like Uzbekistan where school probably does not even exist. However, this may present some legal issues, so I won’t get into that. Rather, let’s go through each aspect of school that will be tough to get used to and try to solve it using logic and good old-fashioned reason. If you thought I really meant that, please stop reading this column.

Waking up early is generally viewed as one of the worst things about going back to school. This is because, unless you have been forced to get up and run at 8 in the morning every day of the week except Monday by certain sadistic cross-country captains who shall remain nameless, you have generally been consistently getting up at around 2 in the afternoon during the summer. In fact, your real hardcore teen will get up at 2 in the afternoon the next day. However, now that school is starting up again, it is time to get back in the grind and start waking up early. The best way I can think of to get used to this is to start getting up a little earlier each day, and then hopefully by the time school starts you will already be used to getting up at 6, so it won’t be as bad. On the other hand, this plan would involve getting up early, which, to quote Ben Franklin, “bites the big one.” So forget that and just start waking up at 6 on the first day of school. Besides, if you’re used to getting up early, you may actually be expected to make conversation in the morning, rather than just saying “urgh,” which is a lot more fun.

The other difficult part about going back to school is getting used to the classes and workload again. This is largely because of a major flaw in the education system, explained here, with the key terms in italics:

The teachers teach the students stuff during one year that they will need to know next year. Then, the students go on summer vacation and forget everything they have ever learned except how to operate a remote control, so when school starts again, the students have already forgotten all of the stuff they learned last year, which they were supposed to know for this year. Thus, the teachers have to spend most of the year teaching the students the stuff from last year and less time teaching them the stuff they were supposed to learn this year. The students then enter the world as ill-prepared adults who don’t have a thorough knowledge of such vital information as quadratics, and our national productivity lowers, and are eventually taken over by the Japanese. It is as this point that the caterpillar emerges from its cocoon and becomes a butterfly.

As we can see from this flow chart, not remembering the information you learned last year will not only make for a bumpy re-entry into school, but also the downfall of American society. So, to help out you students, here is the most important information you should know for whatever grade you are going into:

Math –– If Billy has three apples, and Joan has seven apples, and Joe is on a train heading to San Francisco from New York at 15 mph, and the conductor on the train is allergic to apples, and Pythagerous or any other famous mathematician is on that train, you must crash the train by any means necessary.

English –– Never take anything you read in a book literally. Always interpret it as symbolism. If you are reading a biography about George Washington, and one of the sentences says, “George Washington was born on February 22” you must not interpret that author’s message as trying to tell you when George Washington was born. Your English teacher will be much more impressed if you interpret it as a symbolic message symbolizing the decline of the record player in middle-class America.

Science –– Never assume that your science teacher has a limited amount of free time.

Social Studies/History –– The United States has never done anything wrong. Slavery is a hoax set up by the terrorists trying to undermine our larger than life image, and the Indians wanted to move.

Spanish/French –– After you learn how to say, “I am sorry. I do not speak Spanish/French,” you no longer have any need to study either of these languages, unless you want to learn how to say, “Where is the library?”

Well, that’s about all the advice I have for you kids. Yes, going back to school is going to be tough, but you’ve gone through it before, and you can go through it again. And, when things get tough and you don’t think you can finish that essay or pass that test, just remember one thing: the Nike factories in Malaysia are always looking for more help.

(Eddie Small will be a sophomore this year at Newtown High School.)