Flashback Friday

If you live here in the 'Ville, then you already know that today is the start of the famous St. James Art Fair.  It's become one of the most popular arts and crafts fairs in the country.  I'd be willing to bet it's even more popular than the Country Living Craft Fair in Morrow, OH, but I digress.  St. James has grown so popular here, that in the past few years, the school system has made the first Friday of October a day off for the teachers and students - it seems that alot of the teachers wanted to go to St. James and the school system had trouble getting enough substitute teachers.  So they did the only thing they could do: give the kids another day off from school.  The school system called it a "professional development day."  Right.  Add to this the fact that school is closed Monday for Columbus Day and Tuesday for parent-teacher conferences and the kids have a pretty sweet mini-vacation.  All I know is that we sure didn't have nearly as many days off from school as the kids do today.  We got off for national holidays, but not for parent-teacher conferences or arts and crafts fairs.

Back in the day, parent-teacher conferences were held at night, after parents got off from work; we didn't have entire days devoted to the conferences.  And if your parent got a note from the teacher saying they had to come to the conference, it meant that you would be in major trouble when your parents got home from the conference.  From what my co-workers tell me, today the teachers ask all parents to come to the conferences - not just parents of kids who are doing bad in school.  Maybe this is along the lines of how they don't pick kids for teams any more because they don't want to single out the non-athletic kids and hurt their self-esteem. 

On the rare occasion we did get a day other than a national holiday off, they called it a teacher's in-service day.  It sucked for them to have to go to school while the students got to stay home, but I really don't remember having alot of those days off, unlike the kids today.  Maybe our places of employement should start having in-service days -- we can stay home while our bosses have to go to work.