Okay, kids. Outa the pool!

Party time's over.

Your desperate search for nothing to do is at an end.

Summer's done.

Your fall is coming quickly upon you.

The warden is waiting, and the gaolers are polishing their keys.

You have breached your parole by merely existing, and you shall be punished with another ten months of sitting in hot, stuffy classrooms, listening to the majority of your "teachers" drone you into a state of insensibility with lists of facts, figures, rules, and promises of snap quizzes on any material that went in your left ear and set off every one of your boredom sensors before escaping freely out of your right ear.

Even the odd neutrino gets captured as it transits the central bulk of the earth, but too many teachers' words have more in common with dark matter - completely and unconditionally undetectable - when they come in contact with a child's mind that has been rendered inert by the interminable babble of an educator whose career has become interminable.

By this time next week, child, you will be an inmate in a prison whose bars are the spoon-fed thoughts and opinions of Great People, which you must memorize, rehearse, and be able to regurgitate at the headmaster's will.

No matter that many of said thoughts and opinions are no longer relevant - or were useless from the day they were first poured into the unwitting ears of generations of students before you. They are the thoughts and opinions that will guide you through the next test paper, before fading to their rightful nothingness in the junk drawer of your mind.

No matter that the relevant and great thoughts interspersed with the mundane will be addressed to you in such disguise as to make them as deadly boring as the sixth word in the second sentence of the third paragraph on page 123 of whatever Dickens classic you're being buried in today.

And woe betide the young cell-dweller who dares prepare a thought of his own. You can reap the grapes of wrath by no easier means than to suggest that the turnkey in charge of today's lesson consider an original consideration, ponder a fresh imponderable, interpret a new interpretation.

But luckily, not all of the teachers who intermittently block your view of the blackboard during your stay in lock-up will fit the usual pattern of drone, scribble, drone, pass out test papers, drone, collect test papers, drone... return to first drone.

Those are the ones who actually get through.

They are the ones who will expect something of you, something other than just staying awake when the September sunshine is warming the dust motes that burden the air on your side of the window.

They are the ones who won't leave you wishing you could close those heavying eye-lids - for just one transcendental moment - while the heat register inexorably slows time beside your desk in the winter.

They are the ones who will captivate you with excursions into new discoveries within and without yourself while others are beating their prisoners... er... I mean... students with a disdain for the joys of budding springtime opportunities.

They are the ones who will teach you to learn.

They are the ones who will encourage you to enjoy learning.

Those are the ones you will remember.

Visit Bob Groeneveld's blog, Editor's Notes, at http://tiny.cc/v7b94 at www.langleyadvance.com