Another August

January usually gets all the credit for convincing us that we can become entirely different people. New year. New me.

We buy a new planner with clean pages and unreasonable expectations. I still do not know if I prefer the larger one or the smaller one, they both have valid arguments. We make resolutions with the confidence of people who have never met February. We download a devotional app, join a gym, organize the pantry, and declare that this will finally be the year everything changes.

For some people, it truly is.

For others, the unused planner eventually joins the others on a shelf. The devotional app begins sending increasingly desperate notifications. That reminds me, I need to go rate my Bible app. The gym membership survives several months longer than the exercise routine because canceling it somehow requires a personal appearance, two forms of identification, and the courage to disappoint a fitness consultant that we have not ever had the opportunity to meet.

Still, there is something worthwhile about wanting to begin again.

A fresh start can give us the push we need to reconsider where we are headed. When things feel like they are getting out of hand, we would love to stop for a moment and have another chance. When I look back on all of the failed New Year resolutions, I tend to believe that August does a better job of inspiring real change than January ever has. January comes in all loud with fireworks and such, but August sneaks in with supply lists, sharpened pencils, and a notebook or two.

Year after year, August appears and motivation fills the air.

Every aisle at the store understands the process, suddenly they become flooded with notebooks, folders, pencils, glue sticks, calculators, and enough crayons to color every page of every book ever written. Let me help you out, if they aren’t Crayloa, put them back on the shelf. Parents stop for a few packs of notebook paper and somehow leave with two overflowing carts, three storage bins, a new lunchbox, and several household items that have absolutely nothing to do with school. Oh, and all of the accessories necessary to make any locker feel like home, except, nobody uses lockers anymore.

Back-to-school sales become the project of the month. Families study weekly advertisements with the seriousness of military strategists, they know exactly where to get the best deal on those TI-84 calculators. Some may even remember the overwhelming crowds on tax-free weekend. It was almost like early Black Friday shopping. People woke up early, fought through crowded stores, and stood in checkout lines long enough to finish a small novel, all to save seven percent on blue jeans and loose-leaf paper.

Nonetheless, the supplies will eventually run out. The pencils will disappear into the same mysterious dimension where missing socks and television remotes have decided to go. The new clothes will end up wrinkled across a bedroom floor before the first full week is over, and at some point, everyone will be doing the best they can to get through the semester.

Even so, there is something special about the beginning of another school year.

For some students, this will be their first year of school. The excitement is unreal!

After taking that necessary first day of school picture and making their way to school, they will climb out of the car or step cautiously from the bottom stair of a yellow school bus. Their shoes will still look new, some might even give a little flash of light with every step. Don’t worry, they will be trading those in soon.Their lunchbox will still match their backpack, along with the corresponding monogram so they don’t forget their name. Their backpack will be ten times larger than they are and filled with enough supplies to suggest they are preparing for a six-month stay in a Pre-K dormitory. Their parents will stand nearby trying to smile while also wondering how five years passed so quickly, and then ugly crying on their way home.

These little scholars will walk through unfamiliar doors and enter a world that will soon become part of who they are, and introduce them to everything they were meant to be. They will learn letters, numbers, classroom rules, and the complicated politics of playground friendships. They may meet the people who will sit beside them at graduation many years later, or stand beside them through some of the hardest seasons of their life.

For others, this will be their last first day.

The senior wakes up knowing the routine. The alarm sounds at the same unreasonable hour. The hallways look familiar, so much so that they probably skipped the last Open House because what is the point when you already know everyone and everything about the whole process. They make their way to school, with a little less exuberance than on their very first day.

Yet this time something feels different.

This is the year when ordinary routines begin turning into the last time. There will be a last homecoming as a student. A last yearbook picture. A last football game from the student section. A last first-period class and a last walk through hallways that once seemed endless. A last band concert. A last Spring Break and eventually, a very last day.

There will also be other things that will bring excitement like the long-awaited senior outfit for the yearbook picture, graduation announcements, and the hopeful calculation of how much money each relative might place inside a card. Seniors may insist that graduation is entirely about accomplishment, though many of them will still monitor the mailbox with the financial awareness of small-business owners. Venmo and Cash App are also available now days, you’re welcome seniors!

As the year continues, they will begin looking back, even though they might not say anything out loud because who really wants to say they are going to miss it?

The days will pass by one by one and they may begin reflecting back over the years to the teachers who challenged them or the friends who changed them. They will ponder on the moments that seemed insignificant until time gave them meaning. Like the time they hopped off the bus with their eyes opened wide, flashing velcro shoes, and a backpack that was ten times bigger than they were.

A new school year is an interesting dynamic, one student is opening an entirely new chapter while another is preparing to close an entire book that took them most of their life to write. Both deserve to be celebrated.

August is filled with anticipation for both students and parents, but also for the teachers, administrators and staff, because an extraordinary amount of work goes into creating a fresh beginning.

Families buy supplies and new outfits. They study school calendars as though planning an international summit. They coordinate transportation, work schedules, sports practices, and after-school care. They also attempt to restore a reasonable bedtime after a summer spent living as though clocks were merely decorative suggestions. Teachers return to classrooms that somehow look as though someone picked up the building, turned it sideways, and shook it. Desks are stacked in corners. Boxes cover the floor. Chairs have migrated into unfamiliar rooms. A cabinet that was carefully organized in May now contains three broken rulers, an unidentified power cord, and seventeen copies of a worksheet no one remembers creating.

Desks are arranged and rearranged. Materials are sorted. Curriculum guides are reviewed. Name tags are prepared. Procedures are planned. Then comes the bulletin board. A teacher can explain complex ideas, manage thirty students at once, respond to emails, document progress, differentiate instruction, attend meetings, supervise lunch, and complete one hundred tasks before noon without visiting a restroom. Yet one crooked bulletin-board border can bring that same teacher to the edge of human endurance.

For me, this August marks my twenty-sixth year of experiencing some version of the first day of school.

I have been the nervous student with the oversized JanSport bookbag, and before you ask, no, my shoes did not have lights. I remember the excitement of new supplies and the belief that the right binder might finally make me an organized person. School supplies are still my favorite accessory. I have been the senior who entered the building for one final year. I have been the teacher who spent an unreasonable number of unpaid hours trying to make a classroom feel ready before students arrived. I have also been the college freshman wandering across campus in search of a building that apparently existed only on the official campus map. College campuses have a special talent for making simple directions sound achievable. Someone will say, “Go past the library, turn beside the fountain, walk behind the science building, and take the second entrance near the courtyard.” Twenty minutes later, you are standing beside a maintenance shed wondering whether earning a degree is worth this kind of humiliation. Somehow, you find your way.

Today, I am a university employee who still gets to experience the excitement of another academic year. I remain grateful for that.

The beginning of a school year gives people an opportunity to reconsider what they are doing and where they are going. New classes create space for new goals. Dreams that once seemed distant move one step closer. A person who wondered whether change was still possible begins to see a path forward.

Some students begin college immediately after high school. They arrive with a mix of confidence, nervousness, and a very limited understanding of how expensive textbooks can be. They soon discover that one required book may cost more than their first car payment and that the professor may use only three chapters. But fortunately, they can sell it back for the same price as a Starbucks Coffee.

Others may return to school after building careers, raising children of their own, serving in the military (thank you for your service), caring for family members, or spending years believing that college belonged to someone else. Their journey may look different from the traditional picture of campus life. That is okay, and sometimes better!

College today may look completely different from one student to the next. Some of them may walk across a college lawn each morning with coffee in one hand and a backpack over one shoulder. Others log into an online classroom late at night after working a full day. They prepare dinner, help children with homework, clean the kitchen, answer one more email, and finally begin their own assignment when everyone else has gone to bed.They read discussion posts in waiting rooms. They watch lectures during lunch breaks. They write papers after midnight. They learn how to cite sources while also packing lunches for the next morning. There is something deeply moving about a person who decides that a long-held dream still deserves a chance, just as much as the traditional freshman student walking with the coffee-in hand.

As with most things, Education has changed significantly across generations.

Curriculum standards have been rewritten more than once. Teaching methods have developed. Some changes have strengthened learning. Others have arrived with impressive acronyms, expensive training sessions, and very little evidence that anyone needed them. Educational trends have a habit of disappearing for several years before returning with a new name. What was once called good teaching may eventually reappear as an innovative instructional framework. It will be introduced through a slideshow containing seventy-four slides and discussed during another professional learning community meeting. Every educator needs one more reason to attend another PLC.

Technology has also transformed how students find information, communicate with instructors, and complete their work. There was a time when researching a subject required an encyclopedia. Families owned entire sets of them. They occupied a full bookshelf and contained enough information to help a student write a report on Abraham Lincoln, volcanoes, or the digestive system. Today, students can access thousands of sources within seconds. That access is remarkable. It also creates the challenge of determining whether any of those sources deserve to be trusted. Information has become easier to find while discernment has become more important. For anyone who has made it this far, please accept my annual academic plea: Do not build your next research paper upon Wikipedia, it’s never going to be okay to do that.

Classrooms have moved from chalkboards to whiteboards. I still appreciate a good dry-erase marker. There is something deeply satisfying about using one that writes smoothly without producing a faded line that looks as though the marker has already given up on life. We can’t forget those fancy overhead projectors once stood at the front of classrooms. Everyone would rush to make sure they could throw their hands in front of the light to make the hand puppet that nobody could figure out. Teachers wrote on transparent sheets while attempting to avoid placing an entire hand in wet ink, then spray it all with water just to begin writing again. Those machines gave way to interactive boards and digital screens that are in most classrooms today. Students can now watch events unfold across the world without leaving their desks, and use that never ending marker that can be any color you need it to be in a single moments notice.

The tools have changed but the purpose remains the same. Education should help students learn while creating an environment where meaningful learning can occur.

Learning is a process rather than a single moment. Some ideas make sense immediately. Others require another explanation, a different example, or enough time for the pieces to come together. A learner begins with limited understanding. Through study and experience, that person develops greater knowledge, skill, judgment, and wisdom.

We were created with the capacity to reason. We can question what we are told. We can remember the past, interpret the present, and make decisions about the future. We can examine the world and ask what something means. We can consider why it matters and how it connects with everything else we know. Education develops those abilities.

At its best, education offers far more than information. It teaches a person how to examine an argument, evaluate evidence, recognize bias, communicate clearly, and reconsider an earlier conclusion. That final ability may be one of education’s greatest accomplishments. Many people know how to defend an opinion. Fewer have learned how to revise one.

Every level of education develops the learner in a different way.

A child discovers that effort can produce improvement. A teenager begins recognizing interests and abilities that may shape a future career. A college student starts connecting knowledge with purpose. A graduate student discovers that expertise often begins with realizing how much remains unknown. Doctoral education has a special way of making a person feel brilliant and completely uninformed within the same afternoon. You may finish reading one article and feel prepared to solve the central problems of your discipline. Then you open the next article and realize you need to look up six words in the abstract.

This is called intellectual growth. It may also be called Tuesday, if you can remember what day it is.

As another school year begins, I find myself thinking about the people who helped form my own understanding.

Teachers taught me to read, write, question, research, and communicate. Professors introduced me to ideas that changed how I understood faith, education, psychology, history, and human development.

Students also taught me. They taught me that instruction requires patience, flexibility, preparation, and humor. They taught me that a lesson can be carefully planned and still take an unexpected turn before the first five minutes have passed. They taught me how to explain the same concept one more time without appearing as though my soul had left my body.

Education has given me opportunities I once imagined. It has also given me opportunities I never knew to imagine.

I am grateful that my work allows me to experience another beginning every August. I am grateful that learning remains part of my daily life. After twenty-six years, the first day of school still reminds me that there is more to discover.

To the student entering school for the first time, I hope this year begins a lifelong love of learning.

To the senior entering school for the final time, I hope you notice the moments that once seemed ordinary. Take the pictures. Attend the events. Thank the teachers. Spend time with your friends. This year will move faster than you expect. One day, even the routines you complained about may become part of the story you miss.

To the college student beginning a lifelong dream, I hope every difficult assignment strengthens the determination that brought you there. The work will stretch you. Some weeks will feel overwhelming. Keep turning the pages. Keep submitting the assignments. Keep moving toward the reason you began.

You can do it.

To the adult returning after years away, your timing does not diminish your purpose. Life experience has taught you lessons that no textbook could provide. You are beginning with wisdom, resilience, and a clearer understanding of what this opportunity means.

To teachers, parents, professors, administrators, bus drivers, counselors, cafeteria workers, support staff, and everyone preparing for another academic year, I hope the work ahead proves meaningful even on the days when it feels exhausting.

Your influence extends further than you can see.

A student may forget the worksheet. The student may forget the test score. The student may even forget the subject of the lesson. Yet students often remember the people who encouraged them, challenged them, believed in them, and made them feel that their future was worth preparing for.

So, buy the supplies.

Ticonderoga and Crayola preferably.

Wear the new outfit.

Even the light up shoes, if you must.

Take the front-porch picture.

Please do not forget the picture.

Open the book.

Ask the difficult question.

Learn the subject well enough to understand it, challenge it, and believe that even though you may not ever use it, you have whatever it takes to make it through the class. Take every opportunity to grow.

Knowledge expands what we are able to see, understanding changes what we are able to do, and wisdom helps us decide what should be done.

Even though Christmas is almost here again, August reminds us that the year is far from over. In fact, it’s just beginning.