June is one of those strangest of months in school, sandwiched between May when most of the exams take place and July when the shutters go up and the teachers wind down. When I was a pupil at primary school, early June was a time for our summer tests and then it was on with the more important business of sports day on the local football field, the odd nature study walk in the nearby domain, collecting flowers for pressing between leaves of our textbooks and a few extra afternoons of PE and Rounders. The sports day was undoubtedly the highlight as the whole school tramped up through the village, the half mile or so to the football club pitch with senior pupils having the added burden of hoops, ropes, skittles, spoons and potatoes to carry. Once there, it was a matter of carefully making our way through the half broken gate that marked the official entry near the half way line, though there were any number of unofficial entrance points along the lengths of barbed wire fencing that ran the length of the roadside boundary. Strangely, unlike today, sports day was generally a low key affair, with no medals given out and with only an audience of a couple of gatecrashing pensioners from the cottages across the road or an inquisitive passer-by who would pause briefly by the footpath to view a race before moving on. Nowadays, parents take off work, reorganise their schedules and come armed with advice and video cameras, hoping to catch history in the making or else rerun a race they never won themselves.As a student, June usually meant freedom, with attendance at school only necessary on those days where exams took place and often meant hours of study at home, in the sunshine with too many revision notes and books and not enough coffee or chocolate biscuits for comfort. It was also the time when we never got to say goodbye properly to all of our classmates who had been our friends for the previous seven years, as different exam timetables left the end of term more than a little fragmented.
By the time I had moved to university, exams had already been safely negotiated and a summer job already filled the waking hours on a friend's farm, with the first rays of daylight often heralding the start of work in the silage field and the day's activities ending long after the sun had gone to bed.Yes June was a time that signalled endings and new beginnings, goodbyes and hellos, routines and relaxation, revision and revelling, showers and sunshine but, for some reason, it was all over before you knew it.
Today it hasn't changed as I view it from the other side of the classroom, for even though it's one of the busiest months of the year with loads of things happening and has mas many days in school as the other months, in an instant we will be giving out the trophies in our final assembly on the last day of term, saying a tearful goodbye to those who were in our care for the past seven years and wondering where the last thirty days had gone.
The writer of Ecclesiastes sums it up perfectly when he writes, 'there is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven' As we reflect on our roles as teachers in the month when many leave our door for the last time, let us again be drawn to that same writer who says, almost at the end of his musings, 'a wise teacher's words spur students to action and emphasise important truths.' Of all the truths they leave with, may the truth of the gospel of our Lord be the seed that is sown in their hearts to flourish on another day.
