Yesterday was the first day many students went back to school. For some, it was their very first day. I can still feel a bit of anxiety in the air as school busses begin to line the streets and parents walk their youngest ones to school. As I look back over my short lifetime, it seems as if not much has changed.  The same fears, anxieties and excitement over the first big day all still exist. Yet so much has changed in terms of technology and new science. These anxieties are just one of the reasons many we attend school. School helps us learn how to concur them and feel more confided as we travel though life.

School seems pretty much the same as when my older brothers and sister went to their first day of school. They did not have to deal with corvid but they did have to worry about Polio or the aton bomb. My mother could not do anything about world politics but she did worry about her children getting polio. That, just like corvid today was a real concern. My sister remembers attending in line at school to get that sugar cube vaccine. Life’s adventures will always be the same but different somehow. Instead of paperback books and the comic’s page as a book cover for our science book. We have tablets with rubber tablet covers. There is still homework but now, it’s done on Google docs or some other on-line platform. Does that mean there are no more pens, pencils or even a pencil sharpener in class rooms?

Yes, technology has transform learning or the way we learn. Just as television might have done with shows like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, Sesame Street or my favorite The Electric Company (if I ever meet Morgan Freeman I will thank him for doing that show). That was all in the sixties (shiver).

I do not want to travel back in time. Things were no better then they are now. It is just different is all. We work. We learn. We try to get along with our neighbors and make new friends and it is a good day we all have dinner together with those family members and friends we love.

Sitting around the table eating, laughing and having fun with at the end of the day makes life worth living. In the end, not much has changed. Just how we do it. Maybe we even have more time to watch TV, but who am I kidding. We are still just as busy as we were in the fifties or sixties. So enjoy school while you’re in it. Enjoy life when you get out. Enjoy the fall and don’t rush through the seasons or life. Stop and smell….the fall flowers or the apple pie and have lots of snacks ready when the kids get home! Shhh my favorite elementary school snack was Drakes Devil Dogs!

The Drunken (blabbering) Chef (Russ)