A WISE teacher advised me never to ask the pupils to write out their plans for the summer holiday, it was too depressing. Their plans were always in such stark contrast to anything we had been trying to do with them all year - libraries would not be mentioned, nor reading nor finding out things.
Never would they write a happy, hopeful little essay saying they hoped to see the Treaty Stone or the Hill of Tara or any of the other million interesting things you had filled their minds with since September. They wouldn't say they would miss you, or that they had learned one single thing during the year that had held their attention. The key to their essays would be release, and freedom, and escape, and putting as much space between you and them as was possible in their little worlds, where so much was still denied to them.
I thought it would be pushing it a bit to expect that children would enjoy being cooped up at school, and that it would be false and hypocritical if they actually did write down how much they needed and appreciated us, we who had opened up so many windows for their souls.
But the wise teacher said there were other reasons why you shouldn't ask children their holiday plans - such as that it often told you too much about their lives, things that you would be better not knowing.
But of course, I knew better and I was always asking them to write down what they were going to do in the weeks and weeks of summer that lay ahead. And of course I learned things that made me sad.
They wrote of all the things they would not have to do: they wouldn't have to get up early; they wouldn't have to wear uniform; they wouldn't have to do homework, listen to boring things about people who were dead and gone and had nothing to do with these days. There would be no rules or timetables or bells; no places where you had to keep silent; no awful people talking on and on about irrelevant things and asking you to take your bag off the floor as if there was anywhere else to put it.
They didn't say what they did want to do, what they would like, how they thought the days might actually be spent. Just removing all the many restrictions that existed would be enough.
SOMETIMES you got a peep through the curtain at their lives, and their families. But even then it was pretty negative. There remained so many things that had to be escaped and avoided.
Younger members of the family were a particular sadness, with the demands they made on one, and the impossibility of avoiding them entirely from June to September (which seemed to be the ideal). Meals with relations were a bit of a trial too, cousins and aunts coming and sitting for ever at the table. The garden as playground was a concept not entirely understood by most of their families, it would appear - there were always some references to avoiding lawn mowing or hedge cutting. Nothing about how idyllic it was just to be in garden.
But then, they are young, they have years of liking gardens ahead of them.
There was a bit of wistful hope about a lot of going into town - but too often it was tempered with regret that they had to come home again just as it was livening up and getting interesting.
Pop concerts were spoken of too - but in the context of how dear they were, and how hard it was to raise the price of a ticket. The weather would be a cause for gloomy speculation. Of course, with their luck, it could rain all summer, the grass would be too soggy for this or the wind not strong enough for that.
They would be allowed to look at a lot more television than during term time of course, but the mother would have some terrible thing on, a soap or some cookery advice. The father, unless suitably distracted, would have endless golf and cricket, which was like watching paint dry.
I am long out of the schoolroom now but I can't stop myself, I still ask teenagers are they looking forward to the summer and what are they going to do. And the answers are never in any way satisfactory.
I know, I know she was right, the wise old teacher: children are much more entertaining articulate and revealing if you ask them to write or talk about whether Myra Hindley should be released, fox hunting banned or voting made compulsory. It's just that we are all so envious of those about to embark on what seems like an entirely carefree summer, we are dying to know their insights, their hopes and their dreams, and are so constantly disappointed at the lack of insight and awareness that we keep muttering about youth being certainly wasted on the young.
BUT I think I now know why they can't tell us how they'll spend the summer. It's because they don't know what's going to happen. It's almost too enormous to consider, all that Unknown ahead of them.
As one 15-year-old boy put it to me: "An old person wouldn't know what he was going to do for his retirement, would he? All he'd say was that he didn't have to catch the 8.10 train any more, and that he wouldn't have to go to boring meetings or whatever. It's a bit the same with us." It is, of course.
It's another phrase - like telling children that, they've grown - that we should never use again.