First Day of School 2022

(WARNING THIS POST HAS BEEN BANNED ON NEXT DOOR READ AT YOU OWN RISK!) 

Proudly blocked by @CharMeckSchools and dimbulb @MollyGrantham on Twitter.

Charlotte Country Day students reported to school on Wednesday August 17th and Charlotte Latin students the day after, Thursday August 18th.

Now more than a week later, Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools will begin the 2022-2023 school year, today Monday August 29th. 

And with the start of school, countless parents will suffer the "slings and arrows" of having school aged children during the next 9 months.

They will suffer through the fear of gun violence, questioning the point of critical race theory, coping with attempts at LGBTQ+ indoctrination, worry about social acceptance and dread academic failure. 

But there is hope and strength in knowing you are not alone. Your kid isn't as dumb as some of those CMS teachers will try to tell you.

Take this story to heart, take it all in, for this is the truth:

Jack Curtis -

The summer of 1929, my father grew rich selling Fords, trading oil leases, speculating in stocks and farming marginal land. Mother had a gas stove, a fur coat, her own car, went to the beauty parlor once a week and played bridge.

In a small town in central Kansas, my father was a very big frog, and that summer when I was eight, I assumed he was so successful because he was so smart.

And because I had failed to pass the third grade, there was never any end to hearing how capable my father was compared to his lazy, stupid, stubborn son.

Why couldn't I do arithmetic? Why couldn't I read and write? Why did my classmates bedevil me?

In those days, none of the geniuses in psychology or Ph.D.'s in education had discovered dyslexia; nothing is known about it now except that as many as twenty percent of children have some degree of it. It's symptoms are mirror writing, reversing numbers, awkwardness and an inability to understand the usual codes of communication. The only cure is to circumvent it with special close training.

But in the summer of 1929 it was called mental retardation or brain damage and those unlucky enough to have it were soon taken out of school and put in the back room for the rest of their lives. The educator's solution to it progressed from contempt to thrashing and, finally, banishment.

From the Short Story "Grandfather" (Circa 1978)

Jack Curtis was born in 1922. As a child he battled dyslexia, and was told he'd never amount to anything.

But life is odd and Jack Curtis grew up to become a heck of a writer. Writing scripts for some of television's top westerns including Zane Grey Theater, Have Gun Will Travel, Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, Rawhide, Big Valley, The Outlaws, Cimarron Strip, and Wagon Train. Curtis went on to write a dozen novels about the west and was one of Sports Illustrated's most prolific fishing and hunting writers.

This writer too can recall the day at South Meck High School, when a vice principle suggested that I drop out of school and take a job at Florida Steel located in West Charlotte, as a welder or laborer. I honestly think he was on some sort of recruiting commission arrangement with the company.

To this day I struggle with 6s, 9s and people who say their telephone or credit card numbers without hyphen'd pauses. But once you understand dyslexia it is all pretty easy to work around it. Imagine, that for 27 years I've worked with numbers in the banking and investment business. Spent more than 6,000 hours in aircraft that routinely required multiple numerical entries every few minutes and have successfully sailed enough ocean and intracoastal waterway miles to twice circumnavigate the globe.  And my math skills be them as they may, have yet to fail me.

So take heart parents without honor roll bragging rights, your gold starless child will survive this, another school year. Understand that 6 x 7 is 42 for most, but also equals 24 for some.

And while "turn left" is often followed by "no your other left" you too will survive.

The best you can do as a parent is to let them know they are loved and that "I can't" or "I quit" is not an option.

Jack Curtis died in 2002 at the age of 79 a life well read even backwards.