"It's No Vacation For Me

Is it just me or is the summer getting shorter?
I mean-- when I was a kid, you knew, by the dwindling of the August calendar, that school was just around the corner--the September corner. August was still summer. There still were days for walking barefoot and sleeping in and--oh yes. for school shopping.
Now, you don't dare spend that extra hundred on vacation...school starts two weeks later and supplies come out of the same check. You can't just decide to take off for the cabin for one last hurrah---the kids have to register and go to two-a-day sports practices.
Maybe it's global warming that's to blame. The polar ice caps are melting causing a sense of impending doom. We must get this new crop of high schoolers educated so that they can save the world. Maybe the higher ozone level has warped the time sense of the entire teaching establishment.
Maybe it is something simpler. A glance at the school calendar shows TWO no-school days in September ( teacher inservices) TWO in October ( teacher inservice and parent-teacher conferences) ONE in November ( teacher inservice) as well as a seperate no-school day just for the elementary) ONE in December ( inservice) THREE in February ( inservices) TWO in March, and ONE in May. BESIDES VACATION DAYS! That's twelve days.
That's two school weeks PLUS!
SO, maybe teachers really DO need all those planning days. Maybe it's harder to teach these days. Maybe the kids are smarter ( or the corollary--the faculty is not.)
I think if it was justified by the need to have more days to pour knowledge into all those empty little skulls, I might understand. BUT it isn't. It isn't about the children at all. It is about teachers who want to get paid for their prep time. And it probably was unfair that teachers once made out lesson plans on their own time--at home or after school. Or they grabbed a few hours during the week while the kids were in the library or at study hall.
But teachers are different these days. I got a note one day from a teacher, and there were more misspellings and grammar errors in it than I find in my sixth grader's essays. When I mentioned it to a school board member, I was told that English was not that teacher's subject. But wouldn't you think that high school teachers would have at least a high school competency level? Social studies instructors can't do basic math. Math teachers don't know what country borders Iraq.
Anyway. back to my main rant--school pictures are being taken the second day of school. When a lot of students will be still on vacation with their parents--who WILL NOT be penalized by cutting their own summers short. Some people can only take vacations late in the summer. Some people have jobs where they can't change everyone's schedules so they can have an in-service.