July 26, 2017
Terry Dickson
Terry Dickson: Summer’s almost gone, at least the scholastic version
BRUNSWICK, GA. | Most kids are still asleep when the sun clears the horizon and shines on their street or road. In just days, many will to have to roll out of bed earlier because school buses are going to come rolling down those roads.
Alice Cooper used to sing “Schools out for summer.”
The problem is, we’ve got too summers: the real one and school board summer. The real summer is still a three-month season, but local school boards adopt ever shorter scholastic versions.
Schools across Southeast Georgia will ring their opening bells starting Aug. 4 and the rest will follow three days to a week later. It just shows how things have changed in the rural south.
In the 1980s, Brantley County farmers lobbied school board members to change their minds on opening school before Labor Day. So what was the problem?
Teenagers were still needed on the farm because all the tobacco wouldn’t be in the barn when school started. Times have changed, though, and you can now drive a long way in South Georgia without seeing a single stalk of tobacco yellowing in a field.
The same was true of cotton up in the red hills. Cotton was and is picked in the fall so farm kids started to school and then missed a long stretch of classes to pick cotton.
Now, machines pick about everything and the crops are diversified. Whoever thought blueberries would be such a huge crop? All things considered, when it comes to eating a handful of what I’m picking, I’ll take blueberries over cotton and tobacco any day.
Charlton County schools open Aug. 7 with a calendar like that of many of their neighbors.
Schools will close Nov. 20 – 24 for Thanksgiving week, Dec. 21 – Jan. 3 for Christmas, Jan. 15 for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, March 16 is just a school holiday and April 2 – 6 is the spring holiday. There are of course various and sundry teacher work days scattered throughout the year.
Let’s compare that calendar to the days students still had summer jobs on the farm. They got Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving, the Christmas break usually started a couple of days before Christmas and the now week long Spring Holiday had another name: Good Friday. That’s a lot of days off during the year and thus the shortening of summer.
Air conditioning ruined the whole thing anyway. In summer, people got outdoors and found some shade in the heat of the day, because it was too hot in the house especially during the dog days. Dog days are supposedly the summer days when it’s too hot and still outside to move or even sit in a classroom. A little research showed me that the term dog days goes back a long way and refers to the appearance of Sirius, the Dog Star, in the summer sky.
Homer wrote this in
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
I’m thinking Homer was actually just having a reaction to a typhoid vaccination and not a real fever, but I’m guessing. How would you like to go back to school and have your English teacher start teaching “The Iliad?” I think I’d rather pick tobacco on some little farm on the high side of Trail Ridge or some cotton around Reed Creek up in Hart County.
If nothing else, picking cotton and tobacco makes you appreciate cool water running off your chin and down your chest as you gulp it with your eyes closed.
That beats sipping a Mountain Dew while playing World of Warcraft or some such nonsense.
Fair warning, kids. It’s almost over. Soon you’ll be gazing out a classroom window wishing you were on the other side of it.
Get outside even if all you do is sit in the shade or wade in a creek. And take your dog if you have one.
Terry Dickson
Terry Dickson: Summer’s almost gone, at least the scholastic version
BRUNSWICK, GA. | Most kids are still asleep when the sun clears the horizon and shines on their street or road. In just days, many will to have to roll out of bed earlier because school buses are going to come rolling down those roads.
Alice Cooper used to sing “Schools out for summer.”
The problem is, we’ve got too summers: the real one and school board summer. The real summer is still a three-month season, but local school boards adopt ever shorter scholastic versions.
Schools across Southeast Georgia will ring their opening bells starting Aug. 4 and the rest will follow three days to a week later. It just shows how things have changed in the rural south.
In the 1980s, Brantley County farmers lobbied school board members to change their minds on opening school before Labor Day. So what was the problem?
Teenagers were still needed on the farm because all the tobacco wouldn’t be in the barn when school started. Times have changed, though, and you can now drive a long way in South Georgia without seeing a single stalk of tobacco yellowing in a field.
The same was true of cotton up in the red hills. Cotton was and is picked in the fall so farm kids started to school and then missed a long stretch of classes to pick cotton.
Now, machines pick about everything and the crops are diversified. Whoever thought blueberries would be such a huge crop? All things considered, when it comes to eating a handful of what I’m picking, I’ll take blueberries over cotton and tobacco any day.
Charlton County schools open Aug. 7 with a calendar like that of many of their neighbors.
Schools will close Nov. 20 – 24 for Thanksgiving week, Dec. 21 – Jan. 3 for Christmas, Jan. 15 for the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, March 16 is just a school holiday and April 2 – 6 is the spring holiday. There are of course various and sundry teacher work days scattered throughout the year.
Let’s compare that calendar to the days students still had summer jobs on the farm. They got Thursday and Friday for Thanksgiving, the Christmas break usually started a couple of days before Christmas and the now week long Spring Holiday had another name: Good Friday. That’s a lot of days off during the year and thus the shortening of summer.
Air conditioning ruined the whole thing anyway. In summer, people got outdoors and found some shade in the heat of the day, because it was too hot in the house especially during the dog days. Dog days are supposedly the summer days when it’s too hot and still outside to move or even sit in a classroom. A little research showed me that the term dog days goes back a long way and refers to the appearance of Sirius, the Dog Star, in the summer sky.
Homer wrote this in
Sirius rises late in the dark, liquid sky
On summer nights, star of stars,
Orion’s Dog they call it, brightest
Of all, but an evil portent, bringing heat
And fevers to suffering humanity.
I’m thinking Homer was actually just having a reaction to a typhoid vaccination and not a real fever, but I’m guessing. How would you like to go back to school and have your English teacher start teaching “The Iliad?” I think I’d rather pick tobacco on some little farm on the high side of Trail Ridge or some cotton around Reed Creek up in Hart County.
If nothing else, picking cotton and tobacco makes you appreciate cool water running off your chin and down your chest as you gulp it with your eyes closed.
That beats sipping a Mountain Dew while playing World of Warcraft or some such nonsense.
Fair warning, kids. It’s almost over. Soon you’ll be gazing out a classroom window wishing you were on the other side of it.
Get outside even if all you do is sit in the shade or wade in a creek. And take your dog if you have one.
