Learning a big lesson on the first day back to school

There I was. One minute I was enjoying a grand summer vacation at my home on Limekiln Lake, and the next thing I knew I was walking into my fourth grade classroom at the Inlet Common School.

My new daily routine at school was about to cut into my hiking, fishing and exploring time.

In my world, summer days were very fast-paced and seemed to melt away as quickly as morning dew on a spider web.

Any self-respecting fourth-grader would agree that school tasks such as multiplication, division and spelling tests would do nothing but slow down the progression of a perfectly good day.

Now in my classroom, the hands of the clock seemed to come to a standstill.

I could barely wait for the day to come to an end so I could enjoy the remainder of the warm fall afternoon.

Our first class assignment was to compose a short story on what we had done over summer vacation.

There were so many things I wanted to write about that I could barely decide where to begin. My teacher suggested I start with a list.

The list went something like this:1) Broke fishing pole tip at the beach when I ran over it with my bike;

2) Found some old bottles that had stinky liquid type stuff in them at an old logging camp;

3) Made two large attempts to jump my bike over a large ditch;

4) Used 40-odd bandaids during the summer;

5) Lost and found several pocket knives;

6) Sold worms;

7) Fell from tree;

8) Sunk a canoe;

9) Caught a lot of frogs;

10) Made some drawings;

11) Searched for treasure—and the list just kept going.

By the time the writing exercise was finished all I had really done was put together a four page list of stuff I could have been doing right at that moment.

In an attempt to save myself, I asked my teacher if it wouldn’t be better if I just took the boys in the class outside and did my assignment as a hands-on presentation.

I tried to read her face. Just as I thought she was going to entertain my suggestion, she uttered the words that I hated most.

“Since you didn’t get your work done in class I think you should do it at home and bring it back tomorrow.”

Oh, no! Homework would cut even more into my after-school exploration time.

Right there and then I decided that if I was ever going to enjoy an after-school exploration of the woods, that I needed to do a better job at getting my in-class work done.

Consequently, I made the decision to never write another list.

I surmised that a poorly written in-class assignment would be better than homework any day.

Mitch Lee, Adirondack native & storyteller, lives at Big Moose Lake. ltmitch3rdny@aol.com