Well, I learned a lot, just not the things I was supposed to learn. I was in that guy’s class with that woman’s daughter as my classsmate, and two of the other people mentioned also had kids my age in my class. Most of what happened though, happened after I had moved on to the 5th grade. Add to the picture, the guy looked like a thin Gene Shallit. My school experience was just unreal. My parents moved around a lot before I started 1st grade, it was my 7th home when I moved to this school district (my dad was first in the military then in retail management), then in the summer between kindergarten and 1st grade, my parents moved to the house they still live in to this day. They didn’t want to be “in town”, despite the fact that the “town” in question had all of 5,000 residents and not one single chain store (well, there was a DQ, so one single chain store). It was a small, close knit mining community (if you saw the movie North Country you probably got a feel for the mentality up there, and in the opening scene you can see a house situated on the line between “in town” and the township where we lived). My parents bought a home on 8 acres of mostly undeveloped land 4 miles out of town, which they thought would be good because 2 of the other 3 houses on the block had boys in my class. However, they were both grease-monkey types and I was an egghead, so they were never that close to me, and the fact that I wasn’t really anyone’s neighbor, didn’t have any connections via my family to other families in the town, and wasn’t a member of one of the main ethnicities up there, so I more than just “kind of” an outsider.
As it turned out, I was also the last person on the bus, and all the seats were taken by the time I got on, that or no one would move in and let me sit by them, so I’d stand on the bus. And having a bus that basically brought kids from K-12 to school, we had high school seniors who had no qualms about picking on first graders, especially ones that stood out a bit, for example someone who was standing on the bus every day. One day when getting off the bus, I was hit in the temple by a class ring thrown from the back of the bus.
To make matters worse, my first day of first grade, I went in to class, and didn’t know where to go. Fortunately, the older sister of one of my classmates (one of the two who lived on the same road as I did), brought me in and showed me how to find my name on the list outside the classrooms. She said we should start with her 1st grade teacher, but my name wasn’t on that list. Then we went to another teacher, my name was no on her list. Then we went to the last 1st grade teacher, and my name was not on her list. So, we went into the classroom of the teacher this girl had for 1st grade, explained the situation to her, and she said she didn’t want another student, so we did the same thing with the other two teachers, same answer, so we went to the principal (the guy in the court filing). He decided I should go into the class with the 1st teacher we’d checked with (the first one who had rejected me).
Well, from that day, she took a dislike to me as if I had something to do with it. And she would find a reason every single day to reprimand/punish me…her chosen method of punishment was to send me to the coat room. As you walked into the classroom, there was a rack of hangers to hang one’s coats on and a bench…it was the length of the classroom, but only about 2 feet deep, and if you misbehaved, you would get sent there. Problem was, I was a real straight arrow, I never did anything to provoke her, but because I was already a target for some of the kids in class which was very cliquish and word spread quickly that I was the punching bag. So, it didn’t matter that I wasn’t doing anything, once the kids caught wind of the teacher punishing me for anything that went wrong, they found ways to get me in trouble. I remember one time it really irked me, someone threw a paper airplane at me, it hit me, bounced off my head and hit he floor. She sent me to the closet for throwing paper airplanes, I didn’t even know how to make paper airplanes. Funny thing was, I couldn’t even tie my shoes in 1st grade, much less make an airplane, and she knew that, it was one of the things that really pissed her off when early in the school year I asked her to help me with an untied shoelace.
Unfortunately, people didn’t listen to kids in those days, my dad’s answer to being picked on was to learn to fight and kick some ass, and my mom’s answer was to go to the guidance counselor (the Superintendent from the legal filing), who pretty much told me it would get better as I got older and did nothing about it. So then when the other kids would pick on me, start to push me around, which really started to happen a lot in 4th grade, I’d get in trouble. Here’s how they did things…there was a little alcove where there was nothing but radiators and locked doors that separated us from the school…in the mornings before the first bell and after lunch/recess, but before the 5th quarter first bell, we would essentially be expected to stand in that little hallway, boys on one side, girls on the other. And it was the janitors who paced back and front of these doors looking for signs of trouble, and ultimately unlocking the doors. So, if someone decided to push me or hit me and one of the janitors saw it, he’d grab us both and drag us down to the principal’s office, and we’d BOTH get in trouble for fighting, even though all I was doing was taking a beating.
The Principal didn’t believe me, or my overbearing mother who always had the worst ideas of how to help me, like the time she tried to take care of the issue of me standing on the bus by having the police pull the bus over…I of course didn’t know she was the reason it happened, but it was a small town and everyone else did know it was my mommy….that was a few dozen more ass whippings for which I ultimately caught hell.
By the time I hit 4th grade, having one of my teachers rape and belittle the other one was de rigeur.
Composing members:
0
