The school year is dead: long live the school year. All over Hong Kong students and teachers are preparing for a new start. Spring is in the academic air. Teachers seem to have a wonderfully selective memory that allows them to forget the stress they felt during report writing, their high dudgeon following a careless remark from a senior manager, endless hours of marking and preparation or the time when Alvin was sick all over the computer keyboard. Students are glad to be back. Many will have been bored witless or perhaps have been forced to attend tutorial schools giving little or no respite from the academic grind. But the lucky ones will have had exciting holidays abroad or have attended imaginative summer schools. They might ask why their own cathedral of learning is not quite so exciting as they live on the romanticised memories of scary rope courses, endless games of basketball, flashy computer programs or hours of free painting. For those beginning school for the first time or changing to a new school the excitement can be palpable. Hopefully not as dramatic as one young student reported in Peru who brought a dead pig as a welcome gift for his new teacher. But it will be real, nevertheless, for each in their own way. Primary students who were top of the tree face the prospect of clambering back up the greasy pole of status in a secondary school. Parents can once again get into a routine handed down from generation to generation based around the school day. As they do so they might ponder why they still dance to the same rhythm as European rural societies dating from Victorian times that insisted on long summer holidays to help get the harvest in. Maybe this agrarian history is why education is replete with farming metaphors. Educators talk about sowing the seeds of knowledge in fertile minds. They nurture and care for these in the hope that learning will blossom and thrive generating growth as students reach for the sun and harvest rich rewards. Teachers in the autumn of their careers hope that as few lessons and ideas as possible fell on the stony ground of indifference, ignorance and irrelevance. They may even want to genetically modify some pupils, but the best teachers know that a questioning mind and a strong, determined personality are as important as acquiescence. So as all sights focus on getting the most from the next nine or 10 months pencils are sharpened, school bags packed and classrooms prepared. Education never stands still and one of the challenges ahead will be separating the wheat of effective change from the chaff of fashionable pedagogy. But occasionally the field is not as fallow and free of last year's crop as one would hope. A female colleague still winces at the memory of one sunny September morning when one of her year one students on her first day put up a hand and announced. 'Please miss, I don't like you. My sister says you're mean.' Despite past trials and tribulations, surely things have to be better this time? Perhaps not but hope springs eternal. Paul McGuire is deputy principal of an ESF primary school.
