Tyrades! by Danny Tyree

Pay no attention to the seemingly frozen clock in sixth-period trigonometry class. Time is moving way too swiftly.

My son graduated from high school four years ago, and I have yet to sit down and fully appreciate the work he put into the yearbook. (Cut me some slack. The turkey picture that Gideon had traced around his hand *mumble mumble* years earlier called “Dibs!” on my spare time, after all.)

In light of such regrets,I call upon students, teachers, staff members, bus drivers, parents and grandparents to savor every fleeting moment of the 2025-2026 school year.

(Well, not the fleeting moment of the Dodgeball Ambush of the Century, you masochistic freaks. Or the time that Mikey became so enamored of “dead poets” that he decided to MAKE some more. The other moments.)

Trust me: in the blink of an eye, young scholars will transition from “What I Did On My Summer Vacation” essays to mid-term exams and on to caps and gowns and “always stay cool (especially when I bump into you in five years and can’t remember your name).”

Romances, cliques, alliances and petty rivalries come and go; students should seize the chance to make new life-long friends, especially among the unpopular outcasts. That’s good practice for the school fundraiser, powered by the catalog of Crap Nobody In Their Right Mind Would Ever Purchase Without Being Guilted Into It.

(“Thank you for ordering two steam-powered shoehorns, Mr. Green. Coincidentally, I learned that your ancestors gave quite a lot of orders to my ancestors, if you know what I mean. Oh, five more steam-powered shoehorns? Thank you!”)

Wallow in the time-honored civic-pride traditions of the homecoming game, by promising to smash, whip, pulverize, destroy, annihilate the team from Springfield. This, of course, is good preparation for when you eventually take a job in Springfield and have to tell everyone, “Have a nice day.”

Make the most of the winter “holiday party,” where the air is filled with festive remarks such as “No, your mother can’t help decorate because she’s a manager, and that sounds too much like ‘manger,’ you little religious bigot.”

Educators, grin and bear it when slackers whine, “When will we ever use this information in the real world?” (“Oh, wait — dissecting frogs, dissecting congressional districts. Never mind.”)

Family members should take it in stride when whippersnappers getting ready for “dress-up days” are disappointed not to find powdered wigs and knee breeches along with the platform shoes, bell bottoms and disco ball in the back of the closet.

Kids, keep on smiling through the sentence diagrams, footnote citations and pop quizzes. Someday you’ll laugh about it (especially if you land a sweet job selling “mystery meat” contracts).

Students, never forget abruptly-departed geometry teacher Mrs. Veeblefester. Maybe she couldn’t pound words like “hypotenuse” or “isosceles” into your noggins, but even the slow students learned the word “statutory.”

Parents, don’t balk at chaperoning a field trip (unless it’s a lame-o tour of the Museum of Lost/Wadded/Snot-soaked Permission Slips). If worse comes to worst, maybe you can volunteer for the autumn festival dunking machine and fill it with poison ivy lotion.

I hope these words have inspired y’all to make the most of the coming year. I’m inspired to dig into the turkey drawing and the yearbook and…

Hey! Who made all these oddly spaced pencil marks on the door frame???

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Copyright 2025 Danny Tyree, distributed by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Danny Tyree welcomes email responses at [email protected] and visits to his Facebook fan page “Tyree’s Tyrades.”