When I was growing up, the one sure way to guarantee I behaved was to threaten me with summer school.

Summers were for sleeping late, doing a few quick chores around the house and then spending the rest of the day riding bikes, swimming in a nearby creek, playing baseball until it was too dark to see and then catching lightning bugs until our parents forced us to come back inside so we could rest up and do it all over again the next day.

I’m pretty sure my teachers were as tired of me as I was of them by the time the regular school year ended, and the thought of spending even one minute of one day during the summer in a classroom learning something was enough to scare me straight.

So why, you might ask, at the age of 57 and 36 years into a career I love and hope to continue doing for a long time, did I sign up for four classes spanning two summer sessions at Kilgore College?

Because I said I would.

Those four classes — Texas Government and Music Appreciation in Session I and math and speech in Session II — will give me the credits I need to earn my Associate’s Degree from Kilgore College.

When I graduated from high school in 1984, I had every intention of attending East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, Tennessee, earning my degree and becoming a teacher and a coach.

Had the good folks at ETSU allowed me to earn credits for my visits to the watering holes near campus, I would surely have graduated early and with honors. Instead, I received a letter at the end of my first year suggesting I take a semester off and re-think my priorities.

I did just that, moving to Texas and enrolling at Kilgore College in the spring of 1986. The school newspaper, The Flare, already had a sports editor, so I became assistant sports editor and the staff’s editorial columnist.

During my second semester at KC, I visited the Kilgore News Herald and asked sports editor Mark Elwood if I could cover high school football for him that season. Elwood, of course, covered the Kilgore Bulldogs, but he paid me $10 per game to cover some of his area teams.

In March 1987, Elwood gave me the choice of covering Kilgore High School soccer or baseball for the spring, and I took baseball since I had never watched a soccer match up to that point in my life.

A month or so into the season, Elwood left for a job at a newspaper in Mississippi, and I was asked by editor Greg Collins to produce the sports section at the News Herald until they found a more experienced person to be sports editor. I did this while attending Kilgore College and working a full shift in the package pick-up department at Sears.

I maintained that schedule until August, but quit my job at Sears when I was offered the job as full-time sports editor at the News Herald at the age of 21.

I also dropped out of college, but told my journalism instructor — the legendary Bettye Craddock — along with my mom, my dad and anyone who would listen I would eventually go back to college and earn my degree.

“Eventually” started on Monday when the first summer session began at Kilgore College.

My classes are all online, but if I complete the schedule my advisor (a young lady I’ve known since she was a week old) put together for me, I will walk across the stage in August and do what I said I would do nearly four decades ago.

I said “if” for a reason, because I’m a little worried about my math class.

After nearly 40 years covering sports, if you need to know how many yards per carry little Johnny is averaging or what little Susie’s batting average is, I’m your man.

But if my math instructor starts throwing letters in where numbers should be, I might be in trouble. I’ll give it my best shot since I made a promise to my mama, but I sure wish they would leave “X” and “Y” the heck alone.

They obviously don’t want to be found if folks are still looking for them after all these years.