How much — or how little — a student achieves is directly proportional to a teacher’s trust in their ability to master difficult lessons. Students will usually live up to — or down to — your expectations of them.

Buoyed by your trust in them, students will usually reach a level of achievement far higher than even they imagined they could reach.

Ugh. I was trying to help out my Gentleman Friend, who is a band teacher at our local high school.

Even the dog has taken to sitting and staring at us, ears on high alert, playing some type of staring contest where only he knows the rules.

Quitman was the legendary high school basketball coach who led Maine South High School to an Illinois state championship in 1979, beating powerhouse schools like De La Salle with a smallish bunch of suburban boys. Team after powerful team they beat, and each team went away knowing that they were not outplayed; they were outcoached.

Even after being home for a couple days, I’m still feeling mellow and happy in my post-vacation glow. Here are my top five takeaways from vacation:

1.You’ve

Oh, I know that there’s plenty of warm weather left before the air chills and the leaves tremble orange and red, but when you’ve spent your life hopping from square to square on a school calendar, the start of August means the beginning of the end of summer.

Once I entered kindergarten in 1953, I didn’t leave school for more than a half-century.

I keep the single socks. What else can an optimist do? Admittedly, I have looked up articles like, “37+ Unusual Uses for Lonely Socks,” but I just wasn’t really in need of a sock puppet or golf club covers or windshield wiper cozies.

The grand prize, of course, was the cherry bomb. Its waterproof wick meant that it could be used to sink the ships of yuletides past.

Every Christmas we asked Santa for plastic model kits of the great ships of America’s proud naval history.

I know that’s a crazy thing to say, unless you’re an ambulance-chasing lawyer or a psychiatrist who sees dollar signs in other people’s misery. But I’m neither of those things, so go ahead — call me crazy.

Still, it was the rush-hour slow-down at a four-way stop sign that brought a smile of contentment to my face.

Like everybody else on the road, I had someplace else I would rather have been.

The statement raises important questions on all sides, regarding what, exactly, our Founding Fathers meant by it. By “Arms” did they necessarily mean “guns,” or would swords, knives, and spears suffice as arms? If they were talking specifically about guns, did they give any thought to what type of gun might be a bridge too far, given the horrors future technology might bring?

When I was little, my philosophy was “Let someone else break it.” It worked like this: If I was tossing a ball around in the house and broke a lamp, I would painstakingly reassemble the pieces and then tiptoe out of the room.

I, on the other hand, lift my head groggily from my pillow as I always do, trying to formulate full sentences to communicate to someone my dire and immediate need for coffee.

Because it turns out there are more than 50 varieties of Ken dolls out there — Cali Cool Ken, Tropical Vibes Ken, Hip Hoodie Ken, and more. And now they come in a variety of skin tones and body shapes that include slim, broad and original.

The parking lot was nearly full, but as we navigated up and down the rows looking for an open space, the other drivers were surprisingly patient, politely waiting for each other.

Along the way, we often run into a handful of others that we pass with a smile or a wave, but after meeting them time and again, we think of them as “the usual suspects.”

At, least, it felt like five minutes: the time it took for the elevator to arrive to take us up to our seats in the nosebleed section, where our seats were located at Ohio State University’s Schottenstein Center in Columbus, Ohio. We were there to see Elton John perform live for his Farewell Tour.

We were relieved, my friends and I, to see there was an elevator operator, who had an air of authority perched on a stool in front of the panel of elevator buttons.

A few weeks ago, Carol Pavlik wrote in this paper about her attempt to adopt a cat, only to be thwarted by a woman sitting behind a desk who peppered her with stern questions. What was her policy on declawing? Did she have a vet? What would the cat be fed? She answered carefully and thoughtfully, because she had “nothing but good intentions for our hypothetical kitty!”

We were in our early 20s, starting our jobs that we hoped would turn into careers, living in a sunny one-bedroom apartment. We had to download forms off the internet, fill them out, and take them to an office where a woman looked at us sternly from across her desk. She asked us if we had a vet.

A vet? No, we don’t have a vet. We don’t even have a pet.