For years scientists have been trying to figure out why our kids go to school so early. Recent breakthroughs indicate it’s because they have to milk cows or do farm stuff in the afternoon, but this has been highly contested because no one knows how to milk cows or what “farm stuff” means. Others have hypothesized that it’s something to do with football, but most scientists usually got beat up by football players when they were in high school, leading them to reject this theory. Whatever the case may be, I have to get up in the dark every morning before Dunkin Donuts turns their lights on, so I can walk my daughter to the bus stop.
Getting up at 6 a.m. makes sense for some people, like really old people that go to bed at 6 p.m. or people that perform needed services - like liquor store clerks. But every morning when I look out at the moon shining on empty streets with an occasional stray dog running across them, I am completely baffled why I am awake. I talked to the principal of my daughter’s school and he assured me they are working on the problem, but there was this thing he called “tradition,” the same phenomenon that forces us to sing about Figgie pudding, and tradition states kids must go to school before roosters set their alarms.
The irony of this situation is that kids actually don’t like to get up early. I did a survey of my two daughters this morning and it turns out that getting them out of bed is synonymous to having the dentist remove all their teeth and rub salt into their bleeding gums. Later interviews I did with them, yelling at the bottom of the stairs that they were going to miss the bus, seem to indicate they would like to get up at 9 or 10 or like just stay in bed all day and not even go to stupid school.
So the other day when I was trying to find the Little Dipper, waiting for my daughter to put her shoes on, I had this brilliant idea. Why don’t we start school with the rest of the world? Normal people like data entry technicians and post autistic economic theorists go to work long after daylight has been established. Why don’t our kids? It was such an epiphany, like the sun had just come out, which it hadn’t. I’m going to research this idea - right after I’ve had a nice long nap.
