My Early Education

As a young child I was absolutely in love with learning. Before I ever started school, I wanted to be prepared. I read on a second grade level before kindergarten, knew how to do basic math and was learning my multiplication tables through pestering everyone around me to teach me things that I knew were associated with school. My parents, instead of answering my questions told me to not bother them, but to look it up, pointing me toward the dictionary for reading and the math books that they bought me to keep me quiet, for math.

So when I entered kindergarten, I was very disappointed that there was almost no learning done; instead we were set to play projects. We built forts with the building blocks. We did crafts much like those done in vacation bible school. We learned games. There was some attempt to teach the alphabet.

Then came first grade. Here we actually got to learn. Not only that, but we could do so at our own pace. For those of us who were faster than the rest of the class, we were allowed to advance and actually begin the coursework for second grade. In this advanced group were three girls, myself, and my best friend Jerry. Jerry worked at it more because I wanted him to advance with me, and the fact that the cute girls were in the advanced group. Jerry and I both had an early attraction to girls. If we had continued living in that school district, I would have advanced past the second grade and straight into the third. But we moved.

I remember when I first moved into the community where I now live. It was less than a quarter the size of the place in which I had lived my entire young life up until that point. The new school system that I found myself in did not support grade advancement. (Of course, they would happily hold back young boys as many years as they liked to have them big and powerful when they got to high school football.)

So I started second grade, happily looking forward to more learning. What I got was the worst school experience of my life. I had become accustomed to working at my own accelerated pace, and doing independent reading. Yet in my new class if I finished work before the rest of the class I received a paddling. I was told that I was disrupting the class. At first, when I finished my work I would ask for more. I got paddled. So then when I finished, I would try to get something to read. I was paddled. Then I bought my own material to read. I was paddled. Next when I finished I would try to sit quietly. I was paddled. I tried, when I was finished, putting my head down. I was paddled. I even tried writing after I was finished. I was paddled. I was paddled every day, four to eight times a day, the entire school year. My mother spoke to the principal about it and was told that there wasn’t anything that she could do and that the teacher was within her rights.

I had other kids in the class see how the teacher treated me, and felt that it was okay for them to treat me poorly as well. That was fine by the teacher. No one ever got into trouble, unless I tried to stand up for myself, or fought back. Then I got paddled. One time the teacher left the room and left a student as class monitor. He felt that he could come over and hit on me. I ducked my head under my elbow and his pencil broke on my elbow. I got paddled.

I have always been large for my age. At my new school, and with the apparent disregard that my teacher had for me, many of the boys saw me as a target to make their reputation on. I had been taught all of my life not to fight. Yet every day on the playground one bully or another decided that I was going to fight them. I never fought back, but I also never went down. I took punches, kicks, chokeholds, sticks, rocks, and once even a brick, but I never fought back, and I never went down. Yet each day after recess it would be reported to the teacher, or the teacher would have watched, and I received a paddling.

At the beginning of the school year I had been accepted by the kids in my school, especially due to my joining the games of football. They all wanted me at first because no one could tackle me. But it was not long at all before I was no longer accepted on anyone’s team and I was shunned by all the other kids. I had become the outsider. The boy that was in constant trouble. The boy that was paddled in the hall several times a day. No one wanted to be associated with that.