Melborp

                Parents and students are stocking up on note paper, notebooks, glitter, glue and goodness knows what else in preparation for the start of a new school year next month. I don’t recall such a mass purchase-a-thon when I was a kid. Back in the dark ages all we had to buy was notebooks, paper and a few pens. Looking back and comparing all the extras kids in even the most fiscally strapped schools today have with what I had, one can only wonder how I learned anything at all.

                Here was my school day for eight years. Lining up in silence outside and entering the school in subdued rows (kind of like prisoners going to the chain gang.) Lessons in one classroom with one teacher until lunch – which we brown bagged and ate at our desks. That’s right – no cafeteria. No library for that matter, unless you called the bookcases in some of the classrooms a library. Then we ran around outside on the theory we needed exercise. You guessed it – no gym either. Back to more classes in the same room with the same teacher, followed by about three hours of homework it was worth your life not to complete. Eight years of that. Kind of builds up a high level of tolerance in a person, doesn’t it? 

                That would constitute an academic problem of giant proportion today but a funny thing happened on the way to blessed release, uhmm, “graduation.”

 I learned to learn. How to teach myself was a life lesson I figured out pretty much on my own because no teacher ever attempted to make learning fun or interesting. They just scared me to death and piled on the assignments. So maybe that eight year sentence to academic hell wasn’t a problem after all but a non-problem, a “melborp” (problem spelled backward), because a surprisingly good outcome came from a bad situation.