Once More Into The Breech

Once More Into The Breech - Meaning: Let us try again one more time.

This phrase has particular applicability for us teachers, who are beginning a new semester this Monday. It's similar to Samuel Johnson's statement that a second marriage is "a triumph of hope over experience."

As a serial husband, and a serial professor, I'm here to testify that Johnson's comment is true in both cases. But for now we'll constrain ourselves to the new semester.

At the beginning of every semester I think "This time it'll be different. This time students will come to class prepared. This time they'll be enthused about learning. This time no grandmothers will die during the semester."

And each time I'm bitterly disappointed.

Actually, that's a bit of an overstatement. For the most part the students I get at this particular university are pretty good kids. They're bright, they work hard, and they're excited about being in college. But they've been betrayed by a public school system that teaches them to regurgitate facts without understanding their meaning, that graduates students who are incapable of writing a complete sentence, and that utterly fails to teach them how to think. So I and the other faculty spend an inordinate amount of time teaching skills that, in my God-like opinion, the students should already know. It gets terribly frustrating, and we constantly have to battle the temptation to take it out on the kids.

Oh my, I've gone from being hopeful to clinically depressed. I guess I've better have my morning eye-opener before I wander off to class.

Cheers...