It’s that time: Ring, ring goes the school bell

“Up in the mornin’ and out to school” Chuck Berry sings. “The teacher is teachin’ the Golden Rule…”

This may sound crazy, but back in the Stone Age, summer vacation lasted from the first of June to the first of September. But the thing is that after three full months of spending days mowing lawns and hanging out at Dairy Queen, by the end of August, you were sorta’ looking forward to starting your next higher grade. I know, weird.

Fast-forward to the first of August 2024, and even though it’s not even the midpoint of summer, astronomically-wise, Socorro schools are back in session. They’ll start up on Monday in Magdalena.

You can always bet that school is on the way when notebooks and binders and pencils start hitting the endcaps at Walmart. What I find interesting about back-to-school sales, and this applies to both high school and college-bound students, is that in their ads, they throw in other not-so-educational items like flat-screen televisions, video game consoles, headphones, smartphones, DVD players—all things that have nothing to do with studying. You could even slap a sticker on a bottle of Bayer and call it a back-to-school aspirin.

And here’s a heads-up. The once-a-year tax-free holiday starts tomorrow, when the state is putting its gross receipts tax on hold for school-related supplies. We’re talking notebooks, paper, writing instruments, crayons, art supplies, rulers, book bags, backpacks, handheld calculators, maps, and globes. And you don’t have to be a student per se. Desktop computers, laptops, and tablets are also GRT-free through Sunday midnight.

The first day of school always brings up memories, and last Thursday, I was FaceTiming with my daughter Caroline, who lives in Texas. It was her birthday, and she was ruminating about all the changes (at least those she could remember) she’s seen since starting first grade in 1986.

She reminisced about VCRS, cassette tapes, her Walkman and the rest of it, and how those things were pretty cool back then. And how, here we were, a thousand miles apart, looking at each other face-to-face on our “I-things,” talking about the good old days...of the ‘80s and ‘90s.

It reminded me of a meme that said, “I’m so thankful I had a childhood before technology took over.”

I’m figuring that meme was probably written by someone at least four or five decades old who experienced a world devoid of cell phones, laptops, or 500 channels on cable TV. Back then, diversions were, for the most part—may I say—analog, like a telephone you dialed, a record you had to flip over, or a television you had to stand up and walk over to in order to change the station.

Frankly, I’m not so sure that my memories of growing up haven’t been embellished here and there over the years to fit a more idealized picture of life before high-tech, but when you get down to it, each of us, no matter what generation, likes to think our childhood was better.

Except for my own parents, who never let me forget about how tough things were before I was born. Like school, for instance. When she was in her twenties, my mother was a teacher in a two-room rural schoolhouse, back when “book learning” was not much more than the three R’s, but she would say with pride that every kid came out knowing how to read, write and “cipher,” even if they had to repeat a grade.

That was way before politicians started using public education policies for single-issue voters to get elected, it seems.

The downside was that there was paddling and detention and something unheard of nowadays – flunking out. Those were the sort of things that kids understood, like physical pain and humiliation. Getting us ready for real life, I guess.

In any case, it’s a moot point because now corporal punishment is out and computers are in.

Pretty much everywhere you look, computers and other electronic devices are all but standard in classrooms, a far cry from when we had to use a slide rule to figure out problems and formulas.

All in all, there are some pretty good schools in both Socorro and Magdalena and the kids as a whole come out decent people, regardless of whatever technology there is.

While I’m not so sure that technology is actually taking over and that there’s a looming Skynet about to subjugate the human race like in those Terminator movies, who can say when there are millions and millions of cell phones and computers going at the same time?

But then I find it worrisome that a post from the Bayer company started showing up on my Facebook feed soon after mentioning it (see above).

In spite of that, I’m not too worried about A.I. taking over the world after I found out how they struggle with CAPTCHAs.