Wednesday, August 30, 2000

By CAL BEVERLY
Publisher

For the first time in many years for me, it’s back to school time.
My first batch has long since graduated from lunchboxes and homework assignments to careers and grown-up things like mortgages and car payments, marriages and other such transactions.

But I have a later-in-life second family — a bride of one year and two boys new to Fayette County. They come from a far land, a place of well-tilled fields and small town sidewalks and no strangers. It is a place in east Georgia, where a certain sense of belonging is born in the blood and everybody knows who’s kin and who’s not.

They come to a virtual bachelor’s den of cluttered tables and well-worn paths in the 1970s shag carpet.

We are making over the place for human habitation; meanwhile, my new family is making the transition with much grace and multiplied wit.

My wife and I split the morning school delivery: I usually brave the McIntosh student deposit derby, while Joyce threads our fifth grader into the 15-minute window allowed for drop-off at the private school just across Line Creek in Coweta County.
Yes, we’re a split family, one public, one private, and that’s my topic for today.

Holding our 11-year-old back was a difficult, deliberate choice. He came out of a rural county fifth grade in which he seemed to be fighting to keep his head above the academic waters. Dennis learns differently, unlike his older brother, who breezes through standard school classes and wonders when he will meet a really challenging subject.

Those teachers in his hometown probably did what they knew to do in elementary school, but it just wasn’t enough. He seemed poised to sink like a stone in the deep new pool of Booth Middle School.

But we had heard about a new school and a concept new to me: classical school, first five grades. We interviewed them, they interviewed us. It was a match; this school promised individual attention unlike any he had experienced before.
Saturday we went to the book store to buy some books on the reading list: “Treasure Island,” “Old Yeller,” “Heidi,” “Island of the Blue Dolphin.” He had fun, and so did I.

Last week, Dennis read to me — not easily but with perseverance — from “The Red Badge of Courage.” Monday night, I read some of those durable words to him. That’s part of the nightly homework: Read aloud three times a week to a parent for at least 20 minutes from a book on the list. Twice a week, the parent reads to the student.

We attacked his weakest area, spelling. He and I worked on eight assigned words for nearly an hour. Over and over, duet and elastic and burglar and tablet and widow and furrow and recipe and clutter. Writing down the words I read, he made his first-ever 100 on any spelling test.

There are nine children in the combined fourth and fifth grade class; he is one of five in the fifth grade. His teacher, a gentle, retired Army colonel, prompts him to “keep your blocks straight” — that means, Stop slouching.

They have “uniforms” — khakis and blue pants and a rainbow of pullover shirts. They undergo a low-key “inspection” periodically — shirts tucked, belts in place, shoe laces tied, that sort of thing.

When another adult enters the converted library classroom, the children rise automatically, the way young men and women once were taught to do, out of respect and deference to those older and wiser.

They begin the school day with prayer. During assembly, the principal asks for God’s blessing and guidance for teachers, students and parents. They invoke the name of Jesus; they expect answers to their prayers.

The students are learning the time line of history; by year’s end, they will be able to recite and differentiate the 70-odd greatest events of the past 5,000 years. Two days a week, our fifth grader is learning Latin. I discovered in the past five days that “rufous” means “red.”

They are teaching him to write legibly. He says he’s the head of his class in math.
This school may not be for every kid, but ours is thriving in it. And so are we parents.

Last week, Dennis had to memorize some ageless lines from the foundational book of Western civilization. He brought home a grade of 100 on his assignment sheet for us to sign. His verse was Psalm 8:1, “Oh, Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above all the heavens.” His weekend homework assignment was to read 16 Bible verses, all about the names of God. Sunday night, for his 20 minutes of reading aloud, he begged to be allowed to read the Bible.

My wife and I sat quietly in front of a darkened TV while our earnest fifth grader read from Proverbs 10: “A wise son makes a glad father, but a foolish son is the grief of his mother....”

What a gift this year of back to school has brought to me.

Back to Opinion Home Page | Back to the top of the page