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Cheaper By Dozen Analysis

Better Essays

The cliche is that students nationwide will settle in and be assigned a “What did you do on summer vacation?” essay on their first day back. I have never been asked to write, nor asked anyone to write, such a letter, but it remains a staple of shows and cartoons. It has been used in movies and television as a conceit to begin a narration, leading to an extended flashback that contains the main story. At times, the reader (the teacher) doesn’t believe the tale, while other times he or she is flabbergasted that so much has happened to a young child, during the innocence of summer.

That innocence is childhood, and it is summer. As adults, we lose it (except for teachers). At contract time, I wonder if the ire teachers receive–“AND THEY HAVE SUMMERS OFF!!!”–is as much a longing for that childlike innocence of youth as an issue of pay? Probably not.

We are at war with idle. We are a nation of efficiency, our legacy of the industrial revolution. Ford. Time-motion studies. Read “Cheaper by the Dozen”.

And we extend it to school. Anyone who’s seen the opening theme to “Phineas and Ferb” knows that the catalyst for every episode is that there is nothing to do (except to sit around and watch television shows like “Phineas and Ferb”). I’ve argued elsewhere that …show more content…

What is life? Toil? I hope not. An epic. Again, I hope not; too exhausting for me. So then what? That’s the question for your students. A major league scout will not show up at the Little League game and offer a contract. So what is life? And how do we achieve our hopes and dreams?

And what do we do with our idle time? Enjoy it?

And, if life is neither Idyll or Epic, why do books and movies and stories portray it as such? What is the purpose of life? What, you ask, are their favorite stories and why?

Now that’s how you start the year; not with a reflection, but with hopes and dreams. Discuss.

Thomas Carlyle
To Anna D. B. Montagu
Hoddam Hill, Ecclefechan, 18th July,

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