No Planned Fall Break

In our school district, most of the schools are on fall break this week. Some were on break last week also. The school my kids are in, however, did not plan a fall break. The principal and headmistress at their school are tough as nails. Actually, the headmistress does not enjoy it when children who are released from schoolwork, their avowed most dread enemy, actually find their most dread enemy to be boredom. "I'm bored" or "why can't we play more video games" are phrases the headmistress is going to add to her Banned Words List. (Banned words in writing assignments to teach creativity. Words like "big" or "very" or "fast" are often on the list.)

I'm done talking about myself in the third person now. I shall now refer to myself as "me" or "I". Yes, I'm the headmistress, in case you hadn't guessed. For some reason I felt the urge to switch from third person to first person after reading a chapter in Ezekiel yesterday where Zeke goes from third to first and it sticks out really obviously. OK, back to the no fall break topic....

Poor kids. No fall break. Actually, it's been a great week of no fall break. We've done just enough schoolwork to keep boredom and video game badgering from setting in, and we've had lots of things just sort of happen to make it a nice break from the ordinary. Today, we went on a hike. Last minute, but it was perfect. Perfect weather. Great hike. I was quite thankful to have my friend's large German shepherd leading the way, since we live in the desert and the rattlesnakes do too, but it was a lovely and mostly uneventful hike--except for the part where we missed a trail marker and headed a mile or more out of the way partway down a canyon.

Not having a planned fall break has taken all the pressure off of me to either make it a full week of school or to schedule zillions of fun activities. I have really liked this laid-back approach and I'm not getting complaints about schoolwork or complaints about needing tons of fun fall break activities.