Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?

Am dreading the first day of school even more. I wish I could hide behind the skirts of some never-aging never ending mother figure and never need to go to school ever. I am in my predicament reminded of a poem where the Child is in a terrible straits about having to go to school and is complaining to his Mom about how the boys will bully him etc and it's revealed only in the last line that he's the Principal.

Sigh - Six whole new classes of faces I've never seen or at least never taken notice of before to contend with. A plethora of unpronounceable names. Forms to fill, duties to assign, questions to answer, work to check up on, discipline to enforce ... and we haven't even gotten to the real teaching yet.

Remember when I was a kid in Secondary School - I really loved the idea of going back to school. For one I was basically in the same class for all four years - the make up of the class hardly changed. So got to know people better and better and had more on-going friendships. Second, school was where all your friends were and holidays in those days, we didn't go out as much as the kids do nowadays so your only option for talking with friends and hanging out after school was during the term. And also, school kept your mind occupied with interesting stuff to learn and absorb. I seriously think I'm actually dreading school more now ...

I'm pretty sure that tonight, Ms Tan and I will lie in bed, stare at the ceiling and repeatedly say to each other, "You're not yet asleep right?" Has happened for every "day before" school for the last year and a half. I guess some traditions come into existence out the anxiety or the dread one feels before an event.

It's not even the knowledge that I won't have time to do the things I want to do. I think I'll pin it down to this - there is a repetitiveness that GOING BACK to school represents for teachers. While there is a desire for familiar people, I want to do different things with people that I know, rather than embrace the system (again) with a different batch of kids. Odler teachers bring up the fac t that the KIDS are different and that this is the challenge. Perhaps. But is not the thought more damning? The KIDS are different and we're going to expose them to the same minimising, alienating politically correct, de-humanising system ...

"How many deaths will it take till he knows that too many people have died"

The system does not progress much over a year and so you're returning to the same production process - perhaps a different phase in the process, but still, the same groove. A deadness appears, in the sense that your kids from last year have moved on and you're back in the same groove. It's not even with a sense of mission that will rehabilitate you, as you realise that the rest of the world has been recognised as one year older, advanced or more progressed, and you, are just going to repeat it all over again. Conceptually I think it is a depressing thing. Some may enjoy the familiarity of repetition; having not even repeated very much, I am already sickened by the thought.