There aren't enough apples: Why teachers this year deserve even more gratitude

It's always felt as though the year begins not in January but early in September when school starts. Everyone, not only students and teachers, accepts the summer holiday is over and it's time to get down to work.

Keeping the kids out of school because of the COVID-19 pandemic would not only have economic costs (particularly for working women), it would further jangle our already lockdown-scrambled sense of time. If the school bell failed to ring in the fall we would find ourselves lost in a temporal forest with dusk coming on. We wouldn't know when we are.

What are the alternatives? Online learning has proven to be an arid and unfulfilling experience. A generation for whom computers are toys cannot flick a switch and turn them into tools. Remote education remains a work in progress. Home schooling is a big project sometimes undertaken by those unqualified to do so. Heed Philip Larkin's "They f**k you up, your mom and dad."

Even odds your father and mother are bonkers. Nearly a statistical certainty that on varying occasions one or the other of them will be.

I say this as a parent. It is important for kids to get out of the house.

And beyond book learning there is critical knowledge you gain from attending school that you can't acquire elsewhere.

The Human Community 101

It is in school that you will meet the majority of the knobs and goofs who will become your best friends. There is no viable theory as to why some people, from different backgrounds, can find the same things funny, enjoy the same tunes, can be happily bored together.

You go to school to make friends for life.

Physical Education 201

The other kind.

Likely your first crush was on a school mate, perhaps the girl in front of you in French, perhaps the boy from Grade 9 whose locker was next to yours.

This subject is one of nearly endless complexity and the rate of failure is high so learning the fundamental rules of attraction (and heartbreak) is essential before more advanced study.

This semester there will be a focus on eye contact.

Comparative Living

Despite what your mother told you there are people smarter than you, faster than you and better looking.

There are kids who will have far greater opportunity simply because their parents are wealthier.

There are kids who are at a disadvantage because you are more privileged than they.

Teachers will consciously and unconsciously favour some students over others.

Cliques to which you desire admission will reject your every petition. You will learn in school that life is not fair.

Advanced Awareness

The majority of your teachers will be hard working, dedicated educators. They will be inspiration and sound counsel. A smaller number will be lazy and witless and of little use to anyone.

You will learn that you ultimately have to take responsibility for your own fate and that once you get out in the real world you are sometimes going to encounter and have to deal with incompetence and ignorance.

You will learn that systems of support are never perfect and sometimes you will be on your own.

The Human Community 120

Playing on the team or in the band, making a case on the debating team or acting in a drama club production, you discover how we are better and stronger united than we are apart.

You learn that victory is sweeter when it's shared and defeat less painful when it's borne together. You come to rely on teammates and learn to be a player who can be relied upon.

Teachers this year are bearing a special burden

We trust teachers with the minds of our children. That's an immense responsibility.

This September we are asking they meet that challenge while putting themselves at risk and with increased burdens for the care of students.

This year, more than ever, they deserve our gratitude.

There will be a second — and third — wave of COVID-19 and the prevalence of disease might well mean some schools have to close again. Until then the teachers and custodial staff, administrators and bus drivers are giving us back our calendar, restoring some semblance of order to a year that had lost direction.

For that there are not enough apples.

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