School's out, and somebody I know has loaded her kid's schedule with activities, activities and more activities. There's Kumon, speech and art classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. And there's taekwondo and swimming on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. All these, she says, so that her tweener won't get bored during the two-month lull.
I wonder: whatever happened to carefree, school-less summer days? My friends and I never had any of these organized activities and yet we were never bored. We climbed aratiles trees, we picked fights with the kids from the other street, we read komiks on the sly, we played patintero under the full moon.
Having none of the pressure to excel, or to make productive use of our school break, we discovered the joy of reading. Our minds did not atrophy from doing nothing--or from the lice that happily romped on our sun-baked heads. We built imaginary castles and scraped our knees scaling fences.
Times have changed, of course. There's the undue pressure to produce wonder kids. And in a world that runs on Counter-Strike mode, inactivity is synonymous to boredom.
Crazy, but I suppose in due time, there would be organized activities for kite-flying, climbing trees and breezing through the summer break.
2 comments:
i think we're pushing our kids too much with all these activities. i think it's best that we just let them be kids. i'm glad i spent my summer vacations running around my lolo's orchard, reading komiks, playing with mud, and those rare vacations to Baguio; it was cleaner and much colder back then.
whoa! they have to do all that? summers for me meant quiet time for reading and imagining ;-)
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