There’s no better place than the North Georgia Piedmont in April. The dogwoods are spectacular. The temperatures are balmy in the afternoon and crisp at night and the dreaded summer humidity has yet to make an appearance. If heaven ain’t a lot like Georgia in the spring, I will probably be disappointed.
My son, Jackson, is one of the luckiest guys I know. He has gotten to spend the last five Aprils as a student at the University of Georgia. The general magnificence of spring increases exponentially as it reaches Athens, in general, and the UGA campus in particular.
There is always something going on. There is baseball at Foley Field, tennis at the Dan Magill complex — not to mention all sorts of intramural sports. The streets are overrun with joggers and, unless things have changed tremendously since I was asked to walk under the Arch and keep going, four decades ago, there are beautiful coeds in skimpy attire acquiring beautiful golden tans beside apartment complex pools and on dormitory lawns as far as the eye can see.
It is little wonder Jackson didn’t want to leave when he graduated last May. I wouldn’t have wanted to leave either. He is slated to graduate again in a few weeks — with a master’s in math education, of all things. I have asked Dr. Adams to make sure Jackson engages in gainful employment before he is admitted into whatever graduate program comes next.
I am actually shocked that one of my children majored in math. He certainly didn’t get his aptitude for figures from me. Come to think of it, his mother’s not that bright, either. I took exactly one math class during my undergraduate days. It was college algebra from Colonel Stanley I think he must have earned his rank under General Lee in the Army of Northern Virginia. I wasn’t a real good math student but Colonel Stanley agreed to give me a D if I agreed never to take one of his classes again. It was a win-win for both of us.
Jackson didn’t enroll in college with the intention of being a math teacher. He started out in landscape architecture. One spring evening I got a late-night call from my cousin Carolyn, whose son, Howell, had earned an LAR degree from UGA. We lost Howell in a tragic automobile crash and my cousin endows a scholarship in his honor. She had been to the annual banquet to do just that the evening she called me.
I was surprised to learn that my son’s name had been on the agenda that night. He was to have received an award as the top sophomore student in his program and, according to Carolyn, was not there to receive it. I immediately called him to ask him why.
He stammered around a bit and finally told me that he had changed majors and didn’t feel right accepting the award when he wasn’t going to stay in the program. “Why didn’t you tell me you were changing majors?” was my next question.
“I didn’t want you to yell at me,” was his response.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Why would I do that? What did you change to?”
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He told me education. I yelled at him.
And then I asked him why he wanted to be a teacher. His explanation humbled me.
He said that all they talked about in business classes was “making money” and he said that making money didn’t interest him that much. That’s an easy position to hold when your parents have always given you all the money you’ve needed.
He went on to say that he started trying to figure out what would make him happy, and make him feel like he was making a difference in the world and he started listing the people he knew that seemed happy — and the people who had positively impacted his life.
They were all teachers.
He specifically mentioned his band director, Greg Gajownik, and his stats teacher, Maggie Tramantano, and one of his social studies teachers, Jim Hauck. Then he said, “Everywhere we go people come up to you and say you taught them at this school or that school and they all seem to think so much of you and they all tell you what a difference you made in their lives. I want to make a difference in people’s lives, too.”
What could I say to counter that?
You are right. Nothing.
So now Jackson is about to begin his career in education, and I know two things for certain. I know that I am glad Jackson stayed in turf grass management long enough to figure out how to get the weeds out of my lawn. And I know that when next school year rolls around, some lucky school is going to have a great new math teacher.