What We Did On Our Summer Vacations

“OK, kiddos, now that we’re back at school, your first assignment is to write a report about what you did this summer.”

This obligatory tradition was something I grew to expect each year of elementary school starting about second grade when we could write complete sentences. And I looked forward to it. I wanted to tell all my classmates about the cool things I did over the past three months.

We were given time in class to write them. There was much snickering as we wrote what we thought was cool, funny stuff sure to be well received. The teacher had to shush us many times.

We then had to read them in front of the class which could take hours spread over a couple days. It took the place of show and tell during this time. Students often couldn’t read their own writing, pausing to decipher what they had written.

Some reports sounded like one really long sentence with disparate statements separated by “and then” such as “We went fishing on a big lake and then we got to go to the zoo and then one day it rained so we played Old Maid until we caught Jimmy bending the corners of the Old Maid card.”

These phrases could lead into a full description of another event, sometimes not even in the manuscript. It was tough to stay on track, especially once something overlooked but really cool was suddenly recalled.

My report always included our family’s travel adventures, usually out west or up north. To keep the attention of the class you had to shock them with something they had likely never done and get them to imagine what it must have been like such as when I floated over a dam on my back and survived to tell about it. 

You might say something like “We caught about a hundred lightning bugs and had them in a jar. They were really cool until they died.”

But too often some kids wrote what was much like the Cheech and Chong 1975 single “How I Spent My Summer Vacation.” Remember that one? The core of the report, read by Tommy Chong in a definite monotone, went like this:

“The first day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then I went downtown to look for a job. Then I hung out in front of the drugstore. The second day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then I went downtown to look for a job. Then I hung out in front of the drugstore. The third day of my summer vacation, I woke up. Then I went downtown to look for a job. Then I got a job keeping people from hanging out in front of the drugstore.”

I was in college when this came out but I could easily identify with it. Some of the reports I remember hearing in grade school were similar to this such as “on the first day of summer vacation me and my brother went swimming at Colvill Park. On the second day of summer vacation we went swimming at Colvill Park. On the third day of summer vacation it rained so we didn’t go swimming at Colvill Park. We played Candy Land and Yahtzee.”

The teacher often had to interrupt these monologues or they’d go on until the buses were waiting. You had to listen carefully to catch someone’s summer experience that was different than everyone else’s. Invariably it was on the order of “Mom made us play outside a lot.”

If I was reporting what I did chronologically, it started with Bible school just at the start of summer vacation and ended in mid-August with coming home from the cabin so my dad, a high school teacher, could spend most of two hot weeks doing “make work” stuff, as he called it. As an experienced teacher he said he needed about one day to get ready.

I saved the exciting stuff I did over the summer for the middle of my report. This is where you could embellish everything such as driving bumper cars at a carnival (“I really creamed my brother Warren!”), blowing up fireworks or watching a crane tear down an old building with a wrecking ball. If you were good you could make a street repair project sound like gold had been discovered under the street.

It was fun to brag about something you knew no one else would have experienced, like going to the World’s Fair in Seattle and taking the elevator to the top of the Space Needle or riding the monorail. But not everyone had heard of the World’s Fair or Seattle so it was lost on them.

What was a really important event to one kid was of no interest to another. A farm kid might proudly announce that their pig won a ribbon at the county fair. Well, kids who lived in town  couldn’t identify with this so it was not that interesting. If someone’s house burned down, now that was interesting.

The actual content of the reports was probably less important than the experience they provided in recalling events, writing them down coherently, and reading them as a speech.

And if you forgot to mention something important, you could always do that during show and tell later.