At night when it is quiet my mind always seems to wonder while I am getting ready for bed. I always come out from putting in my contacts to share some strange info or thought with Jason. I am not sure why winding down the day always brings on strange thoughts for me but it does and Jason has to endure my ramblings. Last night I was thinking of how school has changed since I was in elementary school and I was sharing that with Jason as he watched family guy on TV. Then it dawned on me that there has been a reversal of things over the last 20 years and I found it rather interesting.
When I went to school the world wasn't all rainbows and roses. They didn't worry so much about you feeling included and part of every group and having your feelings hurt was just part of the reality of life. We got to enjoy having Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine's day parties at school and even got to bring in yummy stuff to share with our class that if you wanted it could even be homemade. When we went to gym we played dodge ball and got creamed by the big kid in class but still managed to get up the next day and make it through another round. In the cafeteria we ate what they gave us or what mom put in our bag. There was not 3 options of what to partake in each day you either brought or bought. I also recall that they actually cooked the food at school when I was in school, it wasn't brought in already prepared just to be reheated for the lunch crowd. I remember being excited when it was pear day as we usually got little green jello frog on top of our pear half. I loved those little green frogs so much I rarely ate them I just would hold them in my hand and admire them and then wrap them in a napkin and try to take them with me. Jello frogs don't usually survive being wrapped in a napkin much to my dismay.
After school if you played on a sports team only the kids on the team that won got trophies, or at least they got bigger trophies than the teams that got 2nd and 3rd and they knew who won because they kept score. If you didn't play sports you went outside and played until your mom yelled at you to get back in the house now. We rode our bikes in the streets with out helmets, roller skated with out knee and elbow pads, fell down and bled and got stitches. If you watched it was happy shows that if there was a problem it was easily solved with just a pleasant chat with mom and dad who sometimes slept in separate beds in the same room but separate beds none the less. Sometimes we watched after school specials to learn how to deal with the reality we faced in dealing with other kids at school.
We send our kids to school in the land of rainbows and roses and then we watch reality on TV for entertainment now. I wonder how things will be different for my grandkids when they go to school. Will they stop parties all together? Will they stop using grades so that no one does better than someone else? Or will things be totally different and be more like what it was when I went to school and kids lived in reality and we used to TV to visit the fantasy world of rainbows and roses.
