Well, today is the re-beginning of school, and in spite of everything I’ve thought and felt over the past few months and the complaints I’ve made and the different ways I’ve tried to get out of returning to Willkie High, I have to say I’m excited to be going back!

Why?

Well, people like making connections and having routines and seeing old friends and making new ones. And the daily rhythm of being a high school sophomore is a pattern I have perfected! I’ve got my backpack and my notebooks and all my pens and pencils and stuff and I’m ready to go. I’ll collect all the papers my teachers hand out and I’ll take their assignments and bring them home. By this time I know them all by heart. My favorite one is the unit on Stonehenge. We do it every September and I get a real kick out of the idea that Druids dragged huge heavy rocks hundreds of miles to make something big that we still don’t understand and when we look at it all we can do is scratch our heads.

The lesson? People have always done stuff that’s kinda weird.

Anyway, I’ll really try to play by the rules this time and get my work done and handed in on time, but before long I know I’ll start to wonder why I have to study so hard for all these standardized tests and I’m sure I’ll get tired of it, because that’s what I do.

And then around the middle of October, I’ll go into my backyard at home, sneak behind the equipment shed where we keep the lawnmowers and rakes and stuff, and I’ll dig a deep pit.

And then I’ll dump all my assignments and papers and materials into the hole and I’ll cover them up with dirt. And I’ll do this every single week all the way through to the end of school, so when Mr. Boozenporn and all my other teachers ask “Bubby, where’s your homework,” and “Bubby, didn’t you take that assignment home?” and “Bubby, why don’t you get things done?”, I can shrug and say “Oh yeah, it’s probably just buried under some other stuff somewhere.”

That’s how I manage to stay a sophomore year after year at Willke High!

I know it seems like kind of a waste, but the way I see it, someday some cultural archaeologists will come along and dig up all that stuff so they can piece together the history of education in America! Or at least the history of education during this particular time in America, which is bound to seem as strange and mysterious to them as Stonehenge seems to us today.