Parents and guardians, on the whole, are unabashedly relieved: much as they love ‘em, it’s time to get their dear little [and not-so-little] ones off their daytime hands for 13 or so weeks.
Schoolchildren, although not very willing to admit it, are ambivalent: there’s understandable reluctance to re-submit to such rigid time and place constraints, but there’s also the excitement of catching up and comparing notes with mates and bestfriends.
And teachers ?  The wimpish incompetents of popular myth are supposedly cowering at their kitchen tables, dreading the Day — see the journalistic cliché below.
Of course, there is some trepidation that the year-long routine of bells and lessons, meetings and yard duties, is on again; naturally, there is some regret at the loss of ‘owning’ their own time, but the effective, the committed and the knowledgeable teachers in the education workforce are able to look forward to each new year, with its new sets of learners, different slants on thoroughly mastered subjects, newly challenged to utilise some novel and exciting software program in conveying an age-old discipline.
Teachers who love learning — and shouldn’t that include all ? — look forward to that stimulating idea on a helpful website for presenting the Periodic Table of the Elements. Teachers who are excited by their subjects — and doesn’t that include most ? —  can’t wait to air the new DVD performance of Macbeth a pen-friend sent from Scotland. There’s the new training routine for teaching the skills of softball or cricket; there are just-released CDs of Music to Teach Music By. And that on-line Bingo-style spelling exercise, and the stunning new series from SBS on Pissarro and Picasso. And with 2005 being the 60th anniversary of so many pivotal events in our history, what an abundance of material will be available.
The touchstone of knowledge is the ability to teach

Five centuries before GBS’s slur, Geoffrey Chaucer showed far more insight: “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche” [The Canterbury Tales, the General Prologue, line 308]. Or, as one of the Auctoritates Aristotelis, mediaeval sayings compiled from classical and contemporary sources, put it: “The touchstone of knowledge is the ability to teach”*.
There’s lots of in-talk today about life-long learning and careers involving continuous training, as if such radical notions have just been down-loaded. Good teachers have always known this, and have put it into practice. An effective maths teacher may be teaching the binomial theorem for the tenth year in a row, but it will already have been taught nine different ways because the learners have been nine different groups; an energetic drama teacher may be starting Man and Superman for the fifth time, but the interpretation will be that one-fifth different in variation.  Roman Stoic L Annaeus Seneca put it in a way that every fair-dinkum teacher would immediately acknowledge, “People learn while they teach”^  [Epistulae Morales, vii, 8].
A former colleague who taught Physics for several years in Hobart used to use an image of a dozen cats’ heads nailed to a plank` to illustrate some very complex phenomenon, and the other day Bill and his cats’ heads came up in conversation. Good teachers know that Shakespeare’s Marc Antony got it wrong in Julius Caesar about the relative longevity of the good and evil that we do; they’d prefer to agree with someone they’ve in all likelihood never heard of, American ‘man of letters’, Henry Brooks Adams: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops”  [The Education of Henry Adams (1907) ch 20]. An awesome responsibility, which is perhaps one of the reasons why so many in our neighbourhood, in India, SE Asia, China and Japan, have so strong a traditional respect for teaching and teachers. They would have no trouble with what Thomas Szasz, Hungarian-born psychiatrist, wrote in his The Second Sin (1973): “A teacher should have maximal authority and minimal power”.
Effective, committed and knowledgeable teachers know where their authority comes from, and they don’t need the trappings and illusions of power that some other — besuited— professions seem to crave. But decent salaries would be nice.
GBS’s mal mot has been extended in way plenty of practising teachers would recognise:  “And he who cannot teach, teaches others how to teach”.
  Signum scientis est posse docere
  Homines dum docent discunt
  No cats were harmed in any of Bill’s Physics lessons
“The evil that men do lives after them; /  the good is oft interred with their bones” (III, ii, 77-78)
On the Mainland, which starts earlier and has different term arrangements, David Campbell, writer and ‘former teacher’, has this to say:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/The-dreaded-return-to-school/2005/01/23/1106415451002.html
Which evoked this next-day response:

Happy to teach
I appreciate David Campbell’s support of teachers (The Age, Opinion, 24/1); however the heading of the article, “Children may dread the return to school, but so do teachers”, is too negative.
Teaching is a demanding profession but it is also exciting and rewarding.
I, for one, can’t wait until Thursday, when I will welcome my new class for a year of learning and growing together.
Deb Simpson, Mitcham

Hope Deb has as good a year as she hopes for.

Get more of Leonard:
The terminally and habitually incompetent

George Bernard Shaw, famous for several perceptively amusing plays with many a quotable quote, is also infamous for one of the most offensive remarks about teachers ever uttered, and one which those who hate and despise that profession can be guaranteed to trot out in every diatribe they spout: “He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches”. [Man and Superman, Maxims: Education (1903)].
It’s Back-to-School time again, and there’s a variety of responses and reactions.
As those two Pommy schoolmasters who gave us the inimitable 1066 and All That wrote in its sequel — and if you’ve never heard of it, it demonstrates once more a point about sequels — “For every person who wants to teach there are approximately thirty who don’t want to learn - much” [Introduction to And Now All This (1932)].