Getting a Handle on School
By Judge David A. Barnett

One of the priorities in my family has always been the pursuit of a formal education, perhaps because my dad had little (eighth grade), and my mom had attended two years of college. Whatever the reason, there is an abundance of formal education among my siblings. I have my own theory about why we pursued formal education, at least as the same applies to my brother, James, and me.

As kids, we always had specific chores assigned on the farm. These would be our responsibility on a day-to-day basis, year around. However during the summer vacation, we would be assigned additional specific farm work, depending on what needed attention and on what we were able to do. For a number of years in the 1950s, James and I were most qualified to work at the task of “hoeing cotton,” so that was our recurring assignment. Roger, being the oldest of the boys, was most often assigned to drive one of the tractors.

The job of chopping the weeds out of the cotton crop doesn’t require a whole lot of training or intellect, and it is always tedious and hot. As kids are prone to do, James and I usually made the job more difficult by incessant procrastination and griping. We rarely missed an opportunity to delay our assignment and often prayed for an interruption by rain or storm.

 One particular cotton patch was on the Barnett home place, miles from where we actually lived. So, the agenda was for our dad to take us to the farm, get us started on our task and then attend to the work in another field or perhaps at another farm. As a result of the low level of supervision required, it was not uncommon for us to watch dad drive off, lay our hated hoes down on the ground and seek some diversion, such as playing on the creek, pulling legs off grasshoppers or swimming in the pond over the hill from the cotton patch.

We didn’t realize it, but dad was onto our agenda from the start, because the weeds were not disappearing very fast. On one of the days we decided to go swimming in the farm pond, dad circled back and didn’t find us in the field but eventually located us at the pond. After he had chastised us for swimming without adult supervision, he began to talk to us very directly about our assigned task in the cotton patch. I shall never forget the clarity of his promise as he said, “Boys, you can take as long as you want to finish this field, but in the fall, when all the other kids are back in school, you’ll still be chopping weeds.”

 Well, after he left us in the cotton patch, James and I discussed whether or not he would really hold us out of school to finish our job. We concluded that he would do whatever was necessary. All of a sudden, the dreaded first day of school was seen in a new light as we set about to finish our job. Education became an exciting endeavor, at least compared to spending the fall in the cotton patch with a hoe. We finished with time to spare, and actually took some pride in having completed the job.

I never forgot the lesson learned that day, and it has helped to sustain me in times when the “going gets rough” and especially in the sometimes tedious pursuit of higher education.

Judge Barnett is associate district judge in Tillman County.