Frazz by Jef Mallett for June 04, 2024

What are the chances of them actually reading once they’re out there?

My school (in the woods of central PA) didn’t have A/C. Maybe it does by now.

“Can we have class outside?” was one of our go-to questions the last month of school.

May we leave through that door now that school is out for the summer?

It was the third of June another sleepy dusty Delta day.

I remember reading, in a local paper in the late 1980s, of the dilemma of a school in the North Carolina county in which I live. It had at the time no air conditioning, so on hot days the only relief would normally be to open the windows. But they couldn’t do that because the school was located next to a turkey farm, and the smell would be intolerable. I can’t imagine trying to learn in such an environment.

Depends on the thinking of the county supervisors where I taught. In a board meeting, one of them ranted against the need to have a gym. His theme was ‘we need more plumbers, electricians, etc’ And he also added that he couldn’t really see the need for more than 8 grades. As proof he said, I quit after the 8th grade, and I did alright in life. One of his contemporaries replied, _OK then, what did you do with the rest of the money your folks left you?’ The crowd laugh shook the building. Target’s face turned turkey red.

Kinda reminds me of a recently convicted felon I call Buttercup for his lovely topknot. It usually but not always appears freshly tinted to catch the sun which also appears to have fried his brain.

At the first college I attended, it was not uncommon for a professor to pop into the dining hall at lunch and announce that the afternoon’s class would meet at the front table at Poffenberger’s Tavern.

I wonder if the request to go outdoors was prompted because lunch involved beans or a similar item?

Good morning y’all. I remember classes going outside when it was hot. There was one spot where we could always find 4-leaved clovers. Good times!

Schools with windows that open? What a concept.

One of my elementary schools, and my first middle school, had huge windows that opened wide; unfortunately the school I attended the year school lasted until mid-June (due to a teachers’ strike) was a newer school, and though the glass windows covered most of the wall, only one small (think one foot high) part opened. It was unbearably hot. The school is now air conditioned, though I’m not sure when that happened. My second middle school was build in the 70s; it was a big cube with virtually no windows at all, just a few one-foot square ones that didn’t open, to make it “energy efficient.” They kept it cold all the time, presumably to keep us from falling asleep.

Why didn’t you just ask him if you all could go outside to read to begin with?

I like how Mr. Burke teaches!

Back when 80-90% of the country was agrarian and all the farmers needed the kids at home to help out during the growing season, summer vacation made sense. But that was no longer true for the latter half of the 20th Century and has never been true during the 21st, when virtually all agriculture is handled by adults, machinery, and automated irrigation. And air conditioning (one of Time magazine’s “Greatest Inventions of the 20th Century”) has been around since Willis Carrier invented it in 1902. Meanwhile, the amount of stuff available to be learned about the world has exploded by orders of magnitude. So why do schools still have summer vacation?

I never went to a public school that didn’t have windows that would open, but I also never went to one that had air conditioning.

Now they don’t have windows that open.