May Days!

May Days!

Across much of the nation, such words are uttered from student, teacher, and parent alike.  With mere days of school left for millions of Americas, a brew of emotions percolate.  It is a mixture of stress, anticipation, apathy and giddiness, none of which, if we are honest with ourselves, are suited to the task of educating our young people.

We can almost fix, this, though, if we simply remove what makes us all giddy in the first place:  summer vacation. 

Now, I realize this is a dangerous idea at any time of the year, and is especially so right now.  Considering I will spend much of this week surrounded by exhausted high school students and their wearier teachers, I might wear a helmet. 

However, let’s face it.  No task is suited to walking away from it for eleven weeks.  It’s dumb.  Besides that, the nine month school calendar was developed when America was a mostly agrarian society.  Although we can still consider ourselves the breadbasket of the world, very few of us actually still make the bread.  According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, only two percent of Americans actually still live on a farm or ranch.  Why, then, do we still operate schools as if large chunks of our youth are needed as manual labor for three months at a time?

Education is a process, and stalling that process for almost three months seriously impedes that effort.  The edges of our school calendar are frayed.  August and even much of September is spent reviewing while May is often seen by many students as a joke.  Instead of discussing the merits of year round schooling, though, let’s instead consider the arguments against it.

Some might ask the question, “how would we organize extracurricular activities?” After all, scheduling events with other schools is already an arduous task.   Keep in mind, though, that many sports are already a year-round investment.  Students do not have to be in attendance to be in sports.  Students are often not in school already while they are participating in school-sponsored activities.  Think about holiday basketball tournaments, for example.  Think about summer practices or camps.  The idea that the sports calendar runs parallel to the school calendar is a mirage, anyway.  After all, many athletes will still be competing after graduation, while many sports begin before the school year even starts.

For some, the sanctity of the summer family vacation is cited as a good reason to keep the school year as is, but an entire calendar should not be influenced by the traveling habits of a minority of people. Family vacations are great. I love family vacations, but I would love them whether are not they are in the summer.  I would probably, in fact, love them better in the fall or spring, when many destinations feel less like a swamp.

Besides that, keep in mind that “year-round school” does not mean fifty-two weeks of actual attendance.  Breaks would still exist, but they would be dispersed more evenly in two or three week segments.  The sabbatical surrounding Independence Day, for example, could be weeks instead of months, which would be much more conducive to education in the first place.  This point, actually, leads us to a final argument against year-round schooling:  increased cost.

 If a school district decided to implement year-round school and actually added school days to the calendar, then it would stand to reason that the budget for salaries would also need to reflect that increase.  However, I am not arguing for more time in front of students.  Trust me.  I am simply advocating for a more logical scheduling of that time.

Year-round schooling would not, of course, fix everything, and it may even bring headaches of its own.  Regardless, we can make May a much better month for learning, and, as much as it pains me to write this, we could start by going to school in June.

"Long Before That..."

Harper Lee turned 89 this past Tuesday.  Because we read her classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, in sophomore English, many of us celebrated by eating too much sugar and dressing up as some of her characters.  I wore a rather old suit jacket, in fact, trying to invoke a Depression-era, Alabama lawyer but, in truth, probably looking more like Reagan-era, Miami Vice. 

In between snacks we watched a documentary on Miss Lee’s life.  A number of authors, many of them fellow southerners, read passages from her tome, offering commentary on particular phrases that touched them personally.  One such writer, journalist and memoirist Rick Bragg, read from that succinct opening paragraph in which Scout, our narrator, ruminates on how best to begin her story.

“When enough years had gone by to enable us to look back on them,” Scout begins, referring to her brother’s football injury, “we sometimes discussed the events leading to his accident. I maintain that the Ewells started it all, but Jem…said it started long before that.”

 “In the south,” Bragg suggested, “all of our stories begin, ‘Long before that.’”

It did seem a bit weird, celebrating the birthday of a woman who, more than half a century ago, wrote perhaps the most important novel of the Civil Rights era, while Baltimore remained on curfew.  We could also ask the question today, “When did the chaos in Baltimore truly begin?  After the funeral?  In the days leading up to it?  Right after Mr. Gray’s death?  Right after he was arrested?”

1729?

I have tried to write about American race relations before, and I will not be insulted if you put this column down or click on a different link, because, to be honest with you, I agree.  It is getting old.  It is a topic much discussed, much debated, a story that truly did begin “long before that.” 

I have also used the following analogy before, but it’s the best I have, so I’ll use it again.  I believe that slavery did brain damage to our collective American psyche.  Like an all-star quarterback clobbered by a three hundred pound lineman, America is still groggy, still throwing interceptions with blurred vision.

Granted, we have our moments, of course.  We do things like elect black Presidents and then we hear voices from the sidelines say things like, “See, it’s all better now.  That concussion don’t even bother him at all, anymore.”

Nor am I suggesting that the criminal mobs looting and burning their own city are somehow justified in their actions.  In fact, if I may borrow another phrase out of the novel, this one by Scout’s father, Atticus Finch,

“A mob’s always made up of people, no matter what…Every mob in every little Southern town is always made up of people you know—doesn’t say much for them, does it?”

No it does not.  Mr. Finch, of course, was referring to the mob who had gathered to lynch the accused black man and Finch’s client, Tom Robinson. Historically speaking, though, an angry mob is an angry mob, composed of individuals no longer thoughtful enough to stand alone.

As many of you remember, Tom was accused of raping a white woman, a capital offense.  After the jury of his white peers found him guilty of a crime he did not commit, the accused did not wait for “justice” to be handed down from the state.  Instead, less than a week after the trial, Tom tried to escape and was instead shot to death by prison guards. 

Despite Atticus’ insistence that they had a good chance with an appeal, despite leaving his family behind, Tom sprinted to his death in a fit of self-destructive hopelessness.

Self-destructive hopelessness, as we have found out in very recent history, can lead to a great deal of bad behavior.  It can lead to being shot seventeen times by prison guards, for example, or burning down your own neighborhood.

In closing, I am most likely not the right guy to pen a column about race relations in 21^st century America.  With my background, what real experience do I even have? 

What I do know, though, is that Harper Lee is a great writer.  When she was in her 30s, she wrote a tremendous story that changed the dialogue about race in this country.  She changed the conversation in a profound and positive way.

However, in less than a year she will be ninety years old, and something tells me we will still be talking about old football injuries.