It's a beautiful sunny day today, and I can see everything so well. I had my downstairs windows washed yesterday. And today I opened my front door and let the sunshine in for a couple of hours. A treat, thanks to the weather.
Weather. I just wrote a short essay about it. In the essay I said I grew up where the weather was perfect. I will stand by that. Yes, we sometimes had morning fog off the ocean, but it burned off as the sun came up. I loved living close to the ocean, and that occasional fog was something I liked and liked knowing about as a feature of where I lived. I also liked it when there was no fog. Get it? The weather was perfect.
OK, yes, it rained occasionally.
Which brings me to what I thought of today.
In elementary school, when it rained, we stayed in for recess. I always liked that because it was unusual and because we were not doing school work; we were playing. Heads up, Seven up, or some other game involving an entire class of kids.
It occurred to me to wonder today how our teacher(s) felt about it. No breaks from the kids. As a child, I assumed they liked it, too, because they liked us. That was a given. That's the way I saw it, and I never had a different kind of thought about it.
But my friend Joan, who recently retired from teaching 2nd grade--and she is so happy to be retired--told of having to spend all recesses inside. No breaks from the kids, except at lunch time. And she did not like it. When they were in they were doing school work. It's a reflection of new educational theories and practices. Our indoor recesses were the rare thing, the exception, remember. I don't think this means Joan didn't love those kids, but anybody needs a break, a change.
Back to me. What I come away with, regarding my own experience, is that I was a pretty happy kid, secure in the love of my parents, and therefore secure in the love of other adults, like my teachers. I never thought they might not like me. What do you think of that?
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