The Chronicle Herald (Provincial)
Bittersweet end to school year
Last week's news that Nova Scotia's youth will not return to the classroom this school year saddened me.
Because it's yet another sign that it will be some time before The Great Pause ends, but also because it means the pandemic is robbing the young of something bittersweet and special.
I speak here of the last day of the school year, which for me was always memorable, but never quite so memorable as it was in elementary school, when the days were like years, and summer vacation seemed to go on forever.
In the sepia-toned way I remember that time, I loved everything about school: the stuff we learned, the kids, the teachers, the sports, whether at recess, after school, or inside the postage stamp gym.
Yet no matter how singular the year was, no day was like the last one.
I see myself sprinting through the doors at Sir Charles Tupper Elementary out onto the schoolyard then, along with Phee, Tank, Rake, and Biscuits, throwing our Camp Fire scribblers into the air, and standing there as the pages floated to earth around us.
Now, none of that may be true. I may have just appropriated a scene from Goodbye, Mr. Chips, and merged it into my mishmash of memories until I have made it my own.
It is also possible that I'm simply imposing an adult feeling, long after the fact, onto a childhood event, which I can do.
So Tuesday, in search of someone to remind me what it is really like to be a kid as the school year winds down, I called Talia Metlej, a Grade 6 student at Springvale Elementary School in Halifax.
“I have so many great memories of going there,” said the 12-year-old, who has attended Springvale since kindergarten, following in the footsteps of her older brother and sister.
Talia was hoping to have more of those sweet memories, until COVID-19 prematurely shut down her Grade 6 year.
Usually, around now, children in her grade at Springvale would be looking forward to the end-of-year city-wide track and field meet, and the visit to Bayside Camp, along with the orientation trip to Saint Agnes Junior high, which she will attend next year.
Now, none of these are happening.
Neither is the graduation ceremony, which takes place during the day, or the nighttime Dj-ed dance, put together by the parents — both the traditional ways in which Springvale grads are sent off to junior high.
“I'm pretty upset,” said Talia, who like me, favoured gym over math. “I didn't think this would go on this long.”
It would be different if she were in Grade 5. Grade 6, the last year at her school, is different.
My recollection of our end-of-school tradition may have existed completely in my imagination, or, by now, has gone the way of the Etch-asketch.
In past years, Talia and her friends just gathered at the playground outside when school was let out for the year, and the golden days of summer began.
But it will be different in 2020, she told me.
No summer basketball, or swimming. None of the pointless kicking around with friends that make those seemingly endless summer vacations linger in the memory.
Talia still sees friends who live in her neighbourhood. And there's Facetime and the telephone.
“But some of them don't even have emails,” she told me.
You are not going to hear complaints from a girl, who, at age 12, is stoic enough to say “that's life,” about the unfairness of having one of the seminal events of her young life occurring during a global pandemic.
So let me say this: I hope, as Talia does, that maybe at some point this summer she and some friends get together and have that grad party that for now has been postponed.
I hope that, when she's my age, she looks back at the summer of 2020, and that the memories she has of it are fond ones, as they should be when you are 12 years old.
Most of all, I hope normalcy returns any day now for her and every other school-aged kid in this province.
I remember being that age: I was in a hurry, we all were, because we knew something exciting was out there waiting for us.
I'm here to tell you that it still is. You'll see.