FTLComm - Tisdale - June 13, 2000

This morning as I drove by the elementary school I spotted a boy sitting with his back pack beside the locked side door of the school, it was ten minutes after eight. I did not want to embarass the fellow so I don't have a picture but after checking out the best garden in town about two blocks from the school I spotted this fellow on his way to join his fellow school mate, it was 8:15. We so often fail to realise how important children view their school experience. We joke about them being always on the look out for holidays and reasons not to go to school but actually for most kids the opposite is the real story. School provides the kid with a routine, a structure on which he or she is building the conventions of their lives, one day at a time. It might surprise you some time to discover the remarkable good attendence of most students. A few days or less a year are all that they might miss and it is not at all unusual for a class to have four or five students with perfect attendance each and every year. One of the mistakes we as adults make because for so many odd reasons we so quickly have forgotten what it was all about. We think that school is really all about academic pursuit, certainly children know about their learning process but they are much more aware of the real value of the institution we call school. They know that the routine, the organisation and order are by far more important to them then what we adults talk about when we consider schooling. Kids realise that the friends they make, the way they learn to interact with one another and perhaps the most important thing of all is learning how to learn, all will contribute to their future in some marvellous mysterious way. One day at a time.