“Huh. What about bug repellent?”
“A few bugs never hurt anybody. Just brush them off. Two seconds.” Grant grinned, showing teeth to make it a snarl. Walford glared at him.
For a few minutes they just watched the terrain out the window, feeling the vibration of the helicopter. Grant broke the silence. “What makes it worse is that spam is so stupid. Like my wife needs twenty e-mails a day for penis enlargement.”
Walford sneered. “Married to you? Maybe she does.”
Grant forced down a surge of anger. He’d been transferring prisoners for too long to let insults get to him. There were more subtle responses than physical violence.
“You’re kind of lucky. The peak of mosquito season has about passed. Their bite is like a hypodermic stick.”
Walford’s sneer faded. “But that’s passed?”
“Only the peak; there are still plenty around. Plenty of black flies too. They bite a chunk out of your skin, but they inject you with an anesthetic first so you don’t notice it.”
Walford seemed to relax a bit. “You’re shitting me, right?”
“Nope. Ask anyone who’s been up here.” Grant paused, then grinned his feral grin. “There’s more. That anesthetic is a nerve poison. It wears off, but if you get a few hundred bites in an hour, you’ll feel it. You’ll get confused, disoriented. Maybe want to puke. If you keep getting bitten, well . . .”
“But that’s a lot of bites, right? I mean, how many black flies can there be up here?”
Grant leaned forward and lowered his voice. “Let me tell you about a bad fly day. Mosquitoes will cloud around your head, whining. Black flies will crawl on your skin and clothes, crawl up your sleeves and down your collar, crawl into your boots. You’ll squash a hundred flies with one slap; your hands will be bloody. You’ll want to breathe through your teeth so you don’t inhale them. You’ll find dead flies in your pockets and in your hair.”
The color had left Walford’s face. “Just for a few e-mails?”
“That’s less than one fly per ten-thousand e-mails.”
“But, that’s on a bad fly day, right?”
The pilot broke in then to tell them to prepare for landing, and the whine of the rotor changed in pitch as the helicopter descended.
“Up here in summer, if it’s not howling with wind or freezing cold, it’s a bad fly day. Oh, the forecast calls for nice weather.”
The helicopter settled onto a low mossy rise, the rotor downwash kicking up spray from the surrounding puddles. The pilot called back, “I’ll keep the rotor turning to blow the bugs away. Keep your head down!”
Grant unlocked Walford’s restraints, but Walford held onto his seat in a knuckle-whitening grip. “You can’t make me get out!”
Grant unholstered his Taser. “We can do this the easy way, where you get out on your own, or the hard way.”
“Fuck you. All right, I’m going. Where’s my gear?”
Grant pulled a pack from beside the seat and tossed it out the door. It hit the ground with a rattle and clank.
“What the hell’s in there?”
“Your supplies. Water bottle and filter. Food for five days.”
“Canned food?”
“Hormel pork luncheon meat, to be precise. Now get going.” Grant held up the Taser.
“Canned Spam? You are a bastard.” Walford climbed out of the helicopter, ducking his head as he picked up the pack. He crouched below the rotor blades, reluctant to leave.
“There’s a GPS in your pack!” Grant shouted. “Head south to the river and follow it to town. It’s about a hundred miles.” He didn’t expect Walford to make even half that, but the formalities must be observed.
Walford crouched there watching as Grant slid the door closed and signaled the pilot to take them up. As they climbed and turned south, Grant looked back to see Walford pawing through his pack one-handed, the other slapping at his neck. Beyond, a wispy cloud, like smoke, drifted towards him.
The black flies were coming.
Copyright © 2011 Alastair Mayer
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A SEASONAL DILEMMA It’s long been traditional in the U.S. for the “school year” to run from approximately September to May or June, with summers off for most students and teachers. For a shorter but significant time, it’s been fairly common for various groups to advocate radically changing that...
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READER’S DEPARTMENTS
EDITORIAL
Stanley Schmidt
A SEASONAL DILEMMA
It’s long been traditional in the U.S. for the “school year” to run from approximately September to May or June, with summers off for most students and teachers. For a shorter but significant time, it’s been fairly common for various groups to advocate radically changing that practice, in ways ranging from assigning ever-increasing amounts of homework to be done over “vacation,” to flat-out abolishing the vacation and running school through the whole calendar. The most recent example to strongly catch my eye was the cover story in the August 2, 2010 issue of Time, with the chilling (at least for me) title “The Case Against Summer Vacation.”
I personally find such proposals chilling because when I look back on my own life, I find that not only did summer vacations provide a much-needed change of pace, they actually contributed far more to my education than most of my formal schooling, at least through junior high and (with a few conspicuous exceptions) high school. If that’s true for many other people, abolishing summer vacation would represent a profound cultural shift and li
kely have a major impact on how our future develops—and not necessarily the one its proponents expect.
I think it is true for a good many people—but not, I’ve increasingly come to realize, for all. So my thinking has shifted a little since I wrote “A Requiem for Summer?,” which appeared here in July 1988. Not to the point of losing my reservations about whether such a move would have made my life better—I’m still convinced it wouldn’t have—but I’ve come to recognize that the dilemma of what to do about that season is more complicated than I thought. It’s also more complicated than many of the proponents of such schemes seem to realize, and it’s essential that they, too, grasp the complexity. Such a far-reaching change should not be undertaken lightly.
The central complication, I think, is the fact—simple, but too seldom acknowledged—that people aren’t all the same. My summer vacations were invaluable to me partly because the chance to go swimming, take long bicycle rides, or simply sit and watch clouds and lightning bugs provided a chance to relax and recuperate from the pressures of classes, homework, and other activities that adults had scheduled for me whether I wanted them or not. But I didn’t spend all my time like that, and those vacations were also valuable because they gave me the opportunity to read widely in an enormous range of fields, to read and write science fiction and music, and to learn to repair or build mechanical and electrical gadgets. I treated encyclopedias and dictionaries like primitive hypermedia, sometimes sitting for hours simply following cross-references wherever they might lead. In that way I learned of the existence of many subjects that had never been mentioned in my schools, and pursued ones that caught my interest in more depth. Sometimes I read whole books like Karl Jansky’s original monograph on radio astronomy and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s on orchestration.
The first illustration in the Time article shows two kids swimming in a lake, with the caption, “Summer outings like this one . . . punctuate a season of boredom.” To me, that sentence seems bizarre and utterly alien. I never found summer vacations boring—and I learned far more during them than I did in the early years of school, which generally had little new or interesting to offer me, but consumed a great deal of my time. Many creative writers, artists, and scientists have similar stories.
And yet . . .
Not everyone does. Many, perhaps most, people have little inclination to read or experiment with new activities on their own, and so they really do get bored and forget a lot that they’ve learned during summer vacation. While they, too, need time to relax and unwind, their educations do suffer when they’re left to their own devices and do nothing of educational value for three months. Might letting that happen be as unfair and counterproductive as imposing three more months of classroom drudgery on the imaginative and self-motivated would be? *
That last sentence is key: what’s good for either group may be bad for the other—so we should be wary of “one-size-fits-all” solutions. There probably are no such solutions, because different people have different needs and benefit from different kinds of approaches. So what we really need, if we want to optimize education for as many kids as possible, is the availability of more kinds of opportunities—and making sure that the kids (and their parents) know they exist.
The mere existence of opportunities, it seems, is not enough. I’ve always found it difficult to be sympathetic to moans of “There’s nothing to do,” because to me the claim seemed patently ridiculous. For me, there was always the library—both the relatively small one at home and the larger one a few blocks away (and, if I wanted something obscure, the really big one downtown, but easily accessible by bus). But then, I had the advantage of growing up in a house where I was surrounded by books from the start, with parents who encouraged me to use them and to make full and frequent use of the public libraries. Many kids don’t get that kind of encouragement, and it would simply never occur to them to go to the library, even though it’s just as available to them as to anyone else. That’s especially likely to be true of poor kids (though the correlation is far from perfect—my parents, with their house full of well-used books, grew up in poor families). Such kids, in homes where learning and the tools for doing it are at best out of sight and at worst regarded with contempt, clearly have very different needs from those who grow up surrounded by materials and enthusiasm for learning.
And any radical changes we make need to make allowance for both kinds of needs.
One point on which I remain convinced is that three more months of the kinds of schooling we now consider normal are not best for anybody. Aside from the fact that I personally found them frequently stultifying, it’s pretty clear that, on average, they don’t work very well. That Time article contains a painfully telling graph comparing the number of school days, number of classroom hours, and students’ math scores for 14 industrialized countries. The U.S. ranks low on days, extremely high on hours, and embarrassingly low on measured performance. Time presents these statistics in support of its contention that summer vacations are harmful; I submit that they could equally well support the view that our school days are excessively long and our methods ineffective. My strong suspicion is that there’s at least enough truth in the latter to raise fears that three more months of conventional school would do at least as much damage as indolent summers off.
But unconventional school may be a different matter, at least for some students. My wife participated in some special “enrichment” programs that really were both fun and enlightening, and I can easily imagine (but was never offered) some that I might have viewed in the same way. That same Time article describes several programs now running in widely scattered and quite different cities, in which kids from all kinds of backgrounds can have a great deal of fun and learn a lot too—a combination regrettably rare in conventional classroom curricula. These programs are voluntary, so they have to be run in such a way that students want to participate in them; but they’re also structured so that a lot of learning is built right into the fun. And they work—in some cases producing more measurable improvement in skills like reading than an academic year of regular school.
This doesn’t surprise me in the least; I’ve seen it happen before. John W. Campbell told me of a teacher—one of his daughters, if I remember rightly—who brought “incorrigible” readers up several grade levels in a single year by leaving comic books lying around the classroom (and was scorned by colleagues for her unorthodox methods, even though [or because?] they worked). One of my own best teachers, in a later job, did the same (and got the same reaction) by noting that many students wanted to learn to play the guitar, so he wrote and used a guitar method that tricked them into learning to read in the process.
It seems to me that there’s a loud, clear lesson in all this. We don’t need three more months of the same kind of education we now have in most of our classrooms; we need more use of methods that will make students want to learn, and enjoy the process. Summer enrichment programs have to do that—and regular classes during the “normal” academic year might be more effective if they did a lot more of it, too. As John Campbell said fervently during that long-ago conversation, “Teaching ought to have more circus in it!”
Teaching is way too important to rely on applying still more of methods that have already been demonstrated, over and over and over, to not work very well. What we need to do is find out what does work well, for which kinds of students, and make as many options as possible available—and attractive—to those who would most benefit from them. I’d like to see that include strong, effective summer programs like those in Baltimore and Indianapolis. I realize that financing them can be a challenge, especially in places (like the one where I live) where school taxes are already oppressively (some say obscenely) high. But places like Corbin, Kentucky, which has involved many community businesses and organizations in the effort, have demonstrated that it’s possible to find imaginative solutions to the funding problem.
And I’d want these programs to remain voluntary. Much as I’d like to s
ee them available, I’d also want to keep the long summer vacation available as one option for those who prefer it and can make good use of it. Some may say, “But a good organized program could be even better!”—but I’m not so sure. I think our culture is obsessed with organization, and it’s also important for people, at least some of them, to learn to fend for themselves without always depending on organized support from others—especially if they know what they want and no organization is available to support it. In my own case, for example, I knew that one of the things I most wanted to learn to do was write science fiction. That meant I needed to read a lot of it and start trying to write it—and at that time, science fiction was so uniformly scorned by the educational establishment that I doubt I could have found a teacher to give me any support.
So a perfect solution to the seasonal dilemma probably doesn’t exist, but surely we can come up with a better one—or package of them—than we have so far. Meanwhile, I’ll toss out two morsels of food for thought:
1. As Joyce pointed out during one of several conversations in which we were kicking these ideas around, many kids these days spend a lot of their free time playing computer games. We already know that those can do wonders for developing hand-eye coordination; might they not be a huge untapped opportunity for other kinds of education as well? In an unpublished story called “Thinkertoy” that I wrote a long time ago (during my allegedly boring summer vacation between eighth and ninth grades) I imagined a rebellion being fomented by an underground that distributed cheap little computers that played games with people to trick them into learning the skills and attitudes they needed to pull it off. Might that idea have real applications in our own immediate future? When I wrote the story, nobody had any idea how to make such tiny, cheap, powerful, widely distributed computers. Most people, even in the field, would probably have said they were impossible. But now we have them! Couldn’t some really talented, sneaky programmer/educators be writing games that will be so much fun that kids will want to play them, and inevitably learn reading and math and science and languages as an integral part of the process?
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