Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Can we have class outside today? Pleeeeeeeease?

Even though my high school years are more than half my lifetime ago, I can still look out the window on a beautiful spring day, and imagine that I am 18 again and see the following:

The winters of my youth were long, long seasons. -Almost never ending, in fact. By the time March rolled around, there was a new air of hope in school called March Break. Depending on how unseasonably warm it was getting, you would see kids outside on marginally cold days to bask in the incoming sun. If this had been July, everyone would complain about how cold it is outside, yet after spending 4 months with below freezing temperatures, the slightest hint of warm weather was enough to get our asses outside to meet the sun half-way.

My favourite was having classes in Portables. They genuinely really sucked because they were either too hot or too cold, and you felt like you were getting sent away to prison going out there, yet they did have one small feature of charm... The classes outside!

I can remember all the kids getting ready for the start of class, and then one leader of the group, (We'll call them "Piggy" from Lord of the Flies) would start to enroll other students in greater numbers to ask the teacher if we could all have class outside instead of the stuffy portable.

One or Two kids simply wasn't enough, and even when properly executed, the remainder of the class had to chime in with the obligatory whining, like "Yeah, pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease?" and then repeat that 3 or 4 times so that the teacher really got the point. It was basically a team effort, and you really needed 100% from everyone to get the job done. Sometimes you'd miss, and the class wouldn't bring their "A" game, and you would suffer the consequences of not being outside to learn on a beautiful day.

The really "Cool" teachers were always game for class outside, and it really seemed to lift my spirit on those days. So much so, that even 25 years removed from the fact, I can still look out my window and ask out loud,
"Can we have class outside today?" and smile...

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