What The Duck – First Day Of School – By Aaron Johnson

Transcript

• Box 1: Hurry up! Let’s get a first day of school pic before the bus comes.
• Box 1: What’s the point?
• Box 2: To document the beginning of a new year. A school year full of hope and promise. To capture the start of another journey toward academic excellence!
• Box 3: and to let clients know my days are free again.

Vocabulary

• Pic (n.): short and familiar term for picture
• What’s the point? (Phrase) same as asking “What is the use of it?”, but it indicates that the speaker thinks that it is pointless (that is is useless)
• Capture (v.) /ˈkæptʃər/Here, to record it.
• Journey (n.) /ˈdʒɜːni/when you travel from one place to another
• Academic (adj.) /ˌækəˈdemɪk/related to education, schools, universities, etc.

Context

There are several interesting things here:

• Notice that in box 1, the children question directly the purpose of taking a picture. In Western cultures (and probably many others), children often questions openly why they should do this or that, questioning the authority of their parents.

• In box 2, the father comes up with a respectable explanation, but this is contrasted with box 3, where we learn the real reason: to let his clients know that he will not be as busy since his children will be at school during the day and that he will have more time for his job (we can deduct that he works for himself and that he probably took take of the children during the day during the holidays)

Language Feature

Let’s pay attention to the grammar of this sentence: Let’s get a first day of school pic.

• It might not be easy to understand the structure of this sentence at first. To analyze the different elements, we can remove some to make it clearer: Let’s get a pic. What kind of pic? “a first day of school” pic.  In other words, the phrase “a first day of school” works as an adjective for the noun pic.

• Note that a phrase is used as an adjective as such, it is usually better to use hyphens between all these words. This sentence would be more explicitly written as: Let’s get a first-day-of-school pic. Note that American English users generally drop such hyphens in such compound adjective.