Flipping a Coin

I just finished talking to Hurricane about his first day as a Grade Two student. His teacher is nice, he can’t sit beside his friends and they didn’t do anything at all today. From what I remember about when my kids were going to school, they didn’t do anything in class either. Isn’t it strange how they managed to get so smart all by themselves?

I understand what the kids are saying, “We did a bunch of stuff, but I don’t want to waste my free time going over it again. It wasn’t that much fun the first time.” The short form is “Nothin!” They will have happy memories of their school days and hopefully they retain enough to become productive cogs in the corporate machine.

I was thinking about the first week of school when I was on a walk today. In particular, I saw some cool looking leaves. If I remember correctly, we would always have a project assigned early in the year to collect and preserve as many varieties of leaves that we could. Of course part of the project was to name the tree or bush the leaf came from and give as much information as a human could possibly give. For me that was generally two pages triple spaced.

I would go out and pick up some Maple leaves, some oak leaves, a willow leaf and that was pretty much it. How many leaves can a kid find and write about anyways? If you were to talk to the teachers, probably more than three are needed.

My mom would iron the leaves between two sheets of was paper to preserve it and I would tape it to the page. I loved the smell when mom was ironing those leaves. The only thing that said autumn more was piles of leaves burning. I just had an idea. Maybe I should redo one of those leaf projects for the blog. I would get that cool smell, a blog and maybe one of my old teachers (if any are still alive) would up my grade. Couldn’t hurt.

That is just what I’m going to do. There just isn’t the large number of leaves out here as we had in Ontario, but I was all about quality as opposed to quantity anyways. I’m excited about this! Hmmmm… As I recall I was excited about this back in the day as well, until it came time to actually do the work.

I have to report for jury duty tomorrow, maybe I can plan my project while I am sitting there getting bored. Unless it’s a life or death thing, I plan on flipping a coin anyways.