Soon, it'll be a new school year! "What?" you say, "There's no falling leaves, no ambered-hued, god rays cutting through the forest. The breeze does not push upon my brow—feel outside, it's an oven!" You know, that furnace/humidifier aesthetic remains in West Tennessee well into fall. Purely on principle, I may mow the yard once in October.

Coming on July 1, I will be kicking off the 2024-2025 homeschool season! This year, I'll be teaching a 5th, 7th, and 10th grader. Truth be told, despite creating syllabi for textbooks, I have never fully scaffolded a school year. It's actually challenging to do because I could teach all 4 years of high school math in one year. In the upcoming days, I'll share what a school year with Master Bill looks like!

The public school I attended had too much filler packed in. There was way too much emphasis on line formation. "3 blocks away! 3 blocks!" I literally pounded my head on a concrete wall in a line. A volume-monitoring stoplight was in the cafeteria at Ellendale to keep things orderly when I ate lunch as a kindergartener through 3rd grade. And until Mom's intervention, I technically failed kindergarten because I couldn't skip. Seriously! Forget Calculus, when am I ever going to use hopping on one foot?

In that span, there was playtime on an Apple ][; there were naptimes and recess. The thing is, why the waste, why not just send me home? I'm reminded of the line from Office Space (1999), "I'd say in a given week, I probably only do about 15 minutes of real, actual work."

In time, naptimes and recess were replaced by...making broken pottery and watching the junior high music teacher's sweaty armpits throwing on a square, floppy record of Shiny Happy People...then study hall, Channel One, lunch periods, P.E., hallway locker interludes, parking prologues, and...

• the Physics of chess
• a class play on World Geography
• the Spanish checkmark
• the economics of Home Economics

Couldn't I have just went up to high school for an hour and then worked at the family business for the rest of the day? I had already been working part-time and summers since I was 11. I'd be up on current events with Rush Limbaugh and Paul Harvey, listening to things like If I Were the Devil (1965) that still ring frightfully true today. Plus, there was Shoney's, Blue Plate Cafe, or Dixie Cafe for every lunch! "Sorry, Bolton, you just CAN'T make the grade. And Brandon, those two burgers just ain't worth stealin' every day!" It would have been far more valuable to have dropped out completely to skill up in printing. Hey, I could throw an afternoon in to pass a GED if I needed more jobs to add to the job I had.

The things we bend ourselves for Benefits.

Written in 1978, I absolutely LOVE this scene in the noisy and corrupt city of Winoka from Little House on the Prarie with Michael Landon playing Charles:

Charles: He's being a fool going back to Walnut Grove. Nothing there but a dead town.

Caroline: Well, like you said, they'll have a roof over their head. They won't starve.

Charles: And hand to mouth, nothing to look forward to.

Caroline: Why do people have to have something to look forward to? Well, that's the trouble with folks here. There's always looking forward to tomorrow, missing today. And hurrying to make more and more money to buy something better tomorrow. But tomorrow never comes. Huh. Oh, listen to me ramble on. I must be tired.

You want to go home, don't you?

Charles: No.

Caroline: Who's lying now? You do. We all do.

Charles: Well, we can't. It wouldn't be fair to Mary. Nothing for her in Walnut Grove. She's got to teach. We can't ask her to give that up.

Caroline: Charles, we wouldn't ask her to give it up.

Charles: We're a family. We stay together.

Caroline: Charles...

Charles: Things are going to get better. You wait and see. It's not always going to be like this. We'll work. We'll save some money. I'm going to build us a little place outside of town. It'll get better, you'll see. Something better.

Caroline: Tomorrow.

Verily, the scene speaks unto me.

Looking back, the only value I found in high school was in my semester-long typing class, BASIC, Pascal, and AP English, pursuits that were largely self-study. I had the highest average of 250+ students in the required, standard U.S. History course because the teacher was witty and my AP peers were off the list. I was not gunning for that mark, never studied. But, I liked the subject and even toyed around for a bit as a history major at university.

Honestly, like so many others, high school history could be replaced by a month and an armload of good books to earn that wedge in Trivia Pursuit. 'Cause let's face it, school is the place that after teaching literacy in maths, language, and dare I say coding—that would have been a powerful class for my peers to take, to understand logic and detail—high school ought to be hands-off with a heavy focus on directed reading, because knowing what to read, well, that's the real kicker.

"What use do I make of the Monroe Doctrine?"

"Just put that in the corner with 1000 Points of Light, Obamacare, and—Millard Fillmore, what are you doing—get back to your corner!"

As to the enrichment of the classes themselves, well, I used to raise my hand over the years because I'd feel sorry that nobody was answering the teachers' questions. After a few, I'd pause a measure or two to let someone else answer.

Funny how a long-forgotten memory comes to us.