Dear Teacher of My Ranch Kid, Four Years Later,
Well, here we are again. Four years ago, I wrote you a letter apologizing for my ranch kid. I warned you that after a summer spent on the ranch instead of buried in books, there was a chance they might walk into your classroom a little behind.
I owe you an update.
The ranch kid has grown up a little. The ranch has continued its very unconventional educational program. We still don’t do worksheets. We still don’t have a summer reading schedule. And I can confidently say that nobody has ever handed my ranch kid a packet and said, “Complete problems 1–25 before lunch.”
Instead, the ranch has continued teaching lessons that don’t come with a grade. For starters, the ranch has provided an advanced course in responsibility. Cattle don’t care if you’re tired. Calves don’t care if you have plans. A broken fence doesn’t care if it’s 100 degrees outside. Hay certainly doesn’t care that you were up late the night before.
Apparently, this is one of the ranch’s favorite lessons because it always seems to be taught when no one really wants to learn it. If we were to give a grade, we might not have quite earned an A+ yet, but thankfully we can be sure we are always enrolled in that class.
The ranch kid has learned that hard work doesn’t always look impressive as much as they try to glam it up. Let’s be honest, as some of the youngest ranchers on the job, they get the grunt work. And that’s on purpose. The only way for them to truly appreciate the air conditioned tractor is by racking up countless hours in the hot sun from the seat of an open cab tractor. Or jobs like moving hand lines, picking rock, and pulling rye. It’s character building, at least that is what grandpa used to say.
The ranch has also provided a practical education in problem-solving. I can’t say that all of the problems were of natural happenstance. Yes, cows get out of their own accord, and equipment has their own break downs. But getting stuck in the mud because you were sure the four wheeler would make it through 8 inches of mud could definitely be avoided.
Out here, there isn’t always an answer key and dad is rarely available to come to the rescue, if you even want him to know there is a problem. We may laugh at the amount of used barbed wire, baling twine and duct tape is used to fix a problem but this is what we call critical thinking.
This summer has also offered an extensive course in agriculture economics. The ranch kid has learned that money doesn’t magically appear because you need something. Or especially, when they just want something. The bumpy field can’t just be dug up, smoothed out, and replanted. Renting a rock picker is much more expensive than the free labor of ranch youth. Buying a new swather really would be nicer than fixing up the old one but just isn’t in this year’s budget. And maybe not in the next five.
When in doubt, fix it up and make do. I return to the bailing twine and duct tape.
We had a more advanced course in consequences now that we are taking on more responsibility. These lessons were not the theoretical kind. More like the immediate kind. Leave a gate open on the coop? You get to gather the wild chickens. You stay up late playing? The work still starts with the sun and now you get to do it tired. Haphazardly drop your phone in the storage tank? You get to go swimming for it.
The ranch has a… lasting way of making cause and effect remarkably clear.
One of the most needed lessons on the ranch has been the ongoing course in patience. We need to retake this class. Breakdowns, breachy cows, and consistently overdrawn timelines have provided plenty of class time. Most test days proved that patience is short and had an inverse effect on language. In essence, less patience resulted in more curse words and yelling. I’m going to turn to you for lessons on more appropriate synonyms, better grammar, and complete sentences. I don’t know if that will help our course in patience but at least communications might improve.
There has been a fair amount of science, too. Not always the kind with goggles and carefully controlled experiments. Usually ones like- the purpose of locking a trailer to the hitch is to keep it secured and avoid bouncing off as we drive across the bumpy range. Another has been to painstakingly following the path of electricity to the broken taillights to find why in tarnation they aren’t working. Getting older has also meant a more advanced class of reproduction. Let’s just say we solidly know where babies of ALL species come from and could even explain IVF.
Perhaps the most valuable lesson the ranch continues to teach is confidence. Not the loud, “I know everything” kind. Yes, we still have some of that. But I’m talking about the quiet kind. The kind that comes from being trusted with something important and realizing you can handle it. A ranch kid who once followed someone else around eventually becomes the person a younger sibling now follows. The kid who once needed every step explained eventually gets handed a job and told, “You know what to do.”
That lesson doesn’t fit neatly on a report card. Neither does learning to show up when you’re tired. Or to finish what you started. Or to take responsibility when something goes wrong. Or to keep working when the job isn’t fun anymore. Or to recognize that the work you do today may not pay off for months. Those are lessons the ranch teaches exceptionally well.
So, Teacher, when my ranch kid walks into your classroom in a few short days, I may not need to apologize quite as much as I did four years ago. The summer reading list may still have been more of a suggestion than a schedule and the handwriting may still leave something to be desired. And there is a very good chance the backpack contains something that should have been thrown away several months ago.
But my ranch kid learned. Teacher, I’ll let you handle the books, the essays, the equations and everything else that happens inside those four walls. We’ll keep working on the things that happen outside them. Between the two of us, I think we might just have this education thing figured out.
Sincerely,
A Still-Proud Ranch Mom
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