posted 2007/07/25 at 20:46
These past couple of weeks it's been kind of hard to avoid all the reminders in the media that school is going to start soon. The Best Buy commercials and special site on Yahoo! are just the tip of the iceberg; our local Meijer has now set aside the area usually reserved for Christmas trees and decorations (or at least that's what the area was used for before their recent redesign) and started stocking it full of notebooks, folders, locker supplies and the like. One wonders if they'll just convert the area over to Christmas in September once school has started. Perhaps my own bad memories of back-to-school shopping are affecting me here (particularly those early years of going to a super-rich private school yet having to do all of my school clothes shopping at K-Mart), but there's a large part of me that wants to tell Yahoo! and all the retailers to just shut up and wait until the start of August to start their campaigning, if not after the start of the NFL preseason. Kids don't need reminders that their summer vacations are rapidly coming to a close.
I will say that this is actually a bit of an improvement. There used to be another department store on the corner opposite from our local K-Mart that would actually start their back-to-school television campaigns in June. I never liked that place to start with -- the store was always very poorly kept, their prices were never that great, and the workers were unbelievably apathetic -- but the fact that they would start advertising back-to-school stuff in June, at a time when I didn't have cable in my bedroom so I was limited in there to local over-the-air channels, drove me up the wall. Worse yet, these commercials weren't put together that well, since the chain in question never had that much money and were always using technology that was five to ten years behind everyone else. Sadly, given that Wal*Mart is now occupying the real estate their store once stood on, in a sick sort of way I actually wish that this particular store was still there.
This is also the first end-of-summer since 2000 where I'm not preparing to go back to school as a student. I am, however, going to be teaching again this coming semester (details are still being finalized, and I'll post them once they are), and I think that I'm now gaining a new appreciation for the range of feelings that students have for returning to school. As much as I wish companies wouldn't start advertising back-to-school stuff until the start of August, as a teacher it's never too early for me to be thinking about how to greet a class that will probably have both students who like going back to school and students who loathe it. I'll need to start working on syllabi here in short order, but I also have to worry about the image I portray on that first day, and how to best serve all of my students. It does feel good to finally be getting back in the saddle, though.
copyright © 2008 Sean Shannon