Five Things to Expect During Back To School Week

Well, kids, it’s Back-to-School week here in much of our part of the nation (this author and his brood happen to hail from Michigan) and quite frankly, there’s no sweeter a sound than that of absolutely nothing. Seriously. Stand back, turn your head hither and yon, and just take it all in: Nothing. The sweet sound of silence. The incessant yammering and buzz of children being utterly shut off as they are herded like cattle into their schools and respective classrooms are like Christmas for parents. Fool yourselves all you want, deny the facts from here to eternity, you and I both know there is no better time in a given year than Back-to-School. Sure, we’ll all miss the carefree days of hanging out at the lake, or roaming an amusement park, or visiting other towns, but when it all comes to a head and we can look back on another successful summer vacation where no one was kidnapped or killed by fireworks, we can all be thankful that the kids get to leave the house all day legally. Yay for school.

But going back to school isn’t all Angelic choruses and unicorns shitting rainbows. Oh, Hell no. You have to take the bad and severely annoying with the great, just like with everything else. Just because those crotch-spawn little food-holes you call your children are away at school for the better part of the day does not mean they don’t bring a slew of different things back with them at 3 PM. Things that are not welcome in your home; things that should never be let free of the shackles of the classroom.

PAPERWORK

One would assume at this point in our civilization that the archaic idea of a Ditto or a piece of Paperwork would have gone the way of the pager or the Sega Genesis. But apparently not. It seems there are still those troglodytes out there who do not have email and thus, the teachers must print a Bible’s worth of take-home pages for us parents to go blind over and scribble our names upon for no other reason than to say yes, we understand our children are in your class doing your class shit. Okay. Got it. Even without an email address, wouldn’t it be just as simple to just shake hands in a gentleman’s agreement and nod in affirmation at the child’s Open House in two days? Oh, that’s right… we have to do that, too. Look: just take our damn kids and do educational crap with them. We promise you we trust you and we also promise you we don’t need to know every move you make through the day. Seriously. Oh, but here’s your forest’s worth of papers, fella.

EXTRA-CURRICULAR ACTIVITIES

Do your kids want to wrestle? Do they enjoy Scouts? How about playing the French Horn? Maybe they want to be in the Chess Club or Junior Scientists of America? Maybe all of these things and Gymnastics? Sweet Baby Jesus can’t they just leave us alone after school, too? Nope, sorry pal. You had those gibbering stink-factories, now you have to deal with all their extra shit you so loved talking to them about when they were youngsters. So now when little Johnny joins the Lacrosse team, and big sis Bev is the President of the Robotics Team, and big bro Billy is in Eagle Scouts, don’t come crying to us when every single night of your week is spent driving everyone everywhere. Dumb ass.

CREEPY TEACHERS

Not a year goes by when one of your sticky offspring comes home from the first few days of school bitching about one of her teachers being a filthy, handsy, snarky, shithead who’s always glaring at her with pedo-vision. Trust us, it will happen. Your male kids usually don’t care too much about this and are often the ones who will fall for their Art Teachers and have lucid dreams in which they are painting one another in acrylics. Anyway, there’s likely no real reason to worry about your daughter who’s getting the lust-eye from Mr. Grabanass, just make sure she doesn’t start bringing home notes asking her to stick around after class to help ‘wash his globes’. Because that’s gross.

HOMEWORK

Guess who’s gonna have homework this year? That’s right! You! Oh sure, it will all be disguised as homework from your kids, but you’d better believe that the ones getting stuck doing all that fraction shit and naming the capitals of Canadian Provinces will most definitely be you. It’s not that your kids aren’t bright little lights of your pathetic lives, it’s just that they don’t like homework and would much rather watch YouTube or play Madden while you sit there and wrack your brain over the why’s and wherefore’s of Kenyan Government and their natural resources. You can bribe them all you want and you can threaten to take away their stuff all you want, the fact still remains you are gonna be the one who ends up dividing by Pi.

SICKNESS

If you were one of the lucky ones, your kids didn’t spend one day this past summer in bed sick. But don’t count your lucky constellations just yet, Bucko, because we will be willing to bet real money that one or all of your germ-hoarding grease-bag kids will end up contracting some kind of virus within the first seven days of school. It’s like the Ring but without the cool videos. And the death. And then he or she will be hacking around the house with a nose full of jade phlegm and a cough that reminds you of that chain-smoking drifter that hangs around the Speedway. And then comes the good news: you also get sick. Isn’t school great? Isn’t it? Hello?