Copyright 2009 Lydia Hinshaw
ORMOND BEACH, FL -- My summer adventure, 2009 version, ended Friday.
The kids go back to school Monday, and I truly feel sorry for the teachers who must now get them to behave themselves and learn something.
For the past eight and a half weeks I've driven busloads of kids around four days per week. We've done tourist attractions (Silver Springs), water parks (Daytona Lagoon, Wild Waters), movies, skating rinks, bowling alleys, public park playgrounds and that old standby, the beach.
It's been a crazy summer. For the kids, it was mostly unstructured free play wherever we went. The staff merely tried to keep the children from getting lost or injured.
What rules there were, were made to be broken.
Although no eating or drinking was allowed on the bus, it always looked like the picnic site of a litterbugs' club at the end of the day.
I would position a large garbage container under the emergency door, so I could sweep out the bottles, candy wrappers, sandwich bags (and sometimes half-eaten sandwiches), junk-food crumbs, and my personal least favorite trash, those foil juice containers that can be punctured with a plastic straw.
I did the sweeping after other staff members and I had removed all the larger and more valuable stuff -- the backpacks, lunch boxes, shoes, T-shirts, shorts, socks underwear and portable video-game machines that had been left behind on the bus. Each day when we returned to the daycare center, quite a few of the kids would blithely charge off the bus barefooted and empty-handed.
It was quite a summer. I am truly glad it's over.
Starting Monday, I'll be taking a handful of children to school in the morning, and picking up perhaps 25 of them in the afternoon. The numbers will be much more manageable, and the job will be much more fun.
The kids go back to school Monday, and I truly feel sorry for the teachers who must now get them to behave themselves and learn something.
For the past eight and a half weeks I've driven busloads of kids around four days per week. We've done tourist attractions (Silver Springs), water parks (Daytona Lagoon, Wild Waters), movies, skating rinks, bowling alleys, public park playgrounds and that old standby, the beach.
It's been a crazy summer. For the kids, it was mostly unstructured free play wherever we went. The staff merely tried to keep the children from getting lost or injured.
What rules there were, were made to be broken.
Although no eating or drinking was allowed on the bus, it always looked like the picnic site of a litterbugs' club at the end of the day.
I would position a large garbage container under the emergency door, so I could sweep out the bottles, candy wrappers, sandwich bags (and sometimes half-eaten sandwiches), junk-food crumbs, and my personal least favorite trash, those foil juice containers that can be punctured with a plastic straw.
I did the sweeping after other staff members and I had removed all the larger and more valuable stuff -- the backpacks, lunch boxes, shoes, T-shirts, shorts, socks underwear and portable video-game machines that had been left behind on the bus. Each day when we returned to the daycare center, quite a few of the kids would blithely charge off the bus barefooted and empty-handed.
It was quite a summer. I am truly glad it's over.
Starting Monday, I'll be taking a handful of children to school in the morning, and picking up perhaps 25 of them in the afternoon. The numbers will be much more manageable, and the job will be much more fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment