Last Day of School 2017

Always fun, always bittersweet.


Good for the parents who worked hard to support their child's school and made sure their child was ready for learning.

Good for teachers who made teaching and learning happen every day.

Good for administrators and staff who keep things running and are one source of constancy for many children.

Good for the district staff who keep things humming.

Food for thought:
Eric Thames and the Transformative Power of Boredom
In his book The Power of Boredom, philosopher Mark Hawkins describes boredom as “spaces in time containing pure creative potential available for self and life transformation.”

My friend, college professor, and Bucs Dugout staff writer David Manel recently noted the call of Gayatri Devi, a professor of English at Lock Haven University in Pennsylvania, “to lean into boredom.”

“Properly understood, boredom helps us understand time, and ourselves,” Devi wrote. “Unlike fun or work, boredom is not about anything; it is our encounter with pure time as form and content.”

From Quartz:
Psychologists recommend children be bored in the summer

Do you entertain your kids with chess camp, art school, cooking classes, or tennis lessons during the unstructured summer months? Or perhaps all of them?

“Your role as a parent is to prepare children to take their place in society. Being an adult means occupying yourself and filling up your leisure time in a way that will make you happy,” says Lyn Fry, a child psychologist in London with a focus on education. “If parents spend all their time filling up their child’s spare time, then the child’s never going to learn to do this for themselves.”

In 1993, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips wrote that the “capacity to be bored can be a developmental achievement for the child.” Boredom is a chance to contemplate life, rather than rushing through it, he said in his book “On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life”.

Fry suggests that at the the start of the summer, parents sit down with their kids—at least those above the age of four—and collectively write down a list of everything their children might enjoy doing during their break.  

Then, if your child comes to you throughout the summer complaining of boredom, tell them to go and look at the list.

“A child develops best when, like a young plant, he is left undisturbed in the same soil. Too much travel, too much variety of impressions, are not good for the young, and cause them as they grow up to become incapable of enduring fruitful monotony.”

philosopher Bertrand Russell

"Fruitful monotony" - I like that.