All I’m going to do this week in my column is echo what countless parents have said for many years when contemplating their child’s high school graduation. My oldest son, Jack, walks through the line Friday night.
I guess it always went in one ear and out the other when parents would make comments like “time flies” or “in a blink of an eye” or “they grow up so fast”. Until it happens to you, it really doesn’t hit home.
It’s not until you start thinking back to when they were little kids that you fully appreciate what a momentous time of life graduation really is. For most parents, it’s the first major milestone in their child’s life. You’ve finally gotten them through high school. You can take a breath.
For Jack, school was like pulling teeth. I can speak freely since he never reads my articles. He didn’t mind going to school. It was doing the school work and the whole “learning” thing that he tried to avoid when all possible.
I can still remember his math sessions back in middle school with his mother around the dining room table. They’d be hard to forget given the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth. Try as she might, Jack just wouldn’t get it, sending my wife into a frustrated tizzy that would ultimately end in yelling and crying – and that was just me.
The frustration wasn't confined to school. I had many a teacher come to me at wit’s end, all with the same opinion: “Jack is a smart boy and a very likeable student. He just needs to apply himself.”
Their opinions didn’t fall on deaf ears. Jack was very much like me in school. I also underachieved, especially in math, but I was able to pull up my grade when I had to, not only in high school but in college. Don’t get me wrong. I was serious about Jack’s grades. His academics is one reason I’m well on my way to being bald.
As his father, I did my fatherly duty when confronted with the opinions of his teachers – I yelled at him. Hey, before you laugh, yelling and threatening worked once in a while, although they were generally just stopgap measures that got him on the straight and narrow for a certain amount of time. And, before you become all high and mighty, I always offered my help provided I was good at the subject matter.
I remember one year, and I won’t give her name, there was a teacher who came to me at the end of the third nine weeks and raved about what an improvement Jack had made academically, asking me how I motivated him. She said she had never seen such a turnaround in a student before.
However, the same teacher, at the end of the fourth, nine-week period, stopped me as I was picking up Jack from the last day of school to suggest I have him medicated given his nose dive the last reporting period.
Anyway, graduation finally comes Friday. Hit "Pomp and Circumstance" and bore me to sleep with the commencement speech. One down, one more to go.
Standard reporter Duane Sherrill can be reached at 473-2191.