Many people have fond memories from school, and indeed I had friends there who I remember fondly and I enjoyed some of the experience. But that’s not how it started.
It started, of course, on the first day of first grade.
I spoke. And perhaps I walked. That was all it took.
The teacher – I can still remember her face – took me by the hand. She walked me to another classroom, and left me there. I later learned it was called the “retarded children’s class”. There were no euphemisms for it back then, no kinder words. And there was no diagnosis. Only a teacher’s unspecialized opinion from a moment’s observation. They weren’t teaching us to read in that room.
Eventually, my parents caught on that my description of the other students in my class was unusual. Lawyers were involved, and the school was forced to have me examined. Back then IQ tests gave you a number more than a diagnosis, and my number was high.
But I was handicapped. I had a motor speech disability and coordination issues, and perhaps what they now call ADHD. The manual process of writing was painful for me, I had a really good memory, perhaps I developed it in compensation. Half a lifetime later a CT scan revealed that I had a neural tube defect, hidden away in my skull. Back then, there was no clear diagnosis.
In 1962, not many people believed in mainstreaming the handicapped, or even held out much hope for their potential. There were schools that were more to keep them out of the way of normal students than to help them. My parents, correctly, insisted on my being mainstreamed, and even used political connections to make that stick. This was not taken well by a few of the teachers of Lido Elementary School.
I suppose that the teacher who dropped me in the retarded class had some small reprimand, but continued in her role. I was returned to her class, after missing the time all of the other children there had to start learning. There was no remediation. That teacher took her resentment out on me.
As I describe this, remember that we’re talking about a 6-year-old child. I can still see these, and other school events, in my mind today. Every time I got a question wrong, or otherwise interacted with that first-grade teacher in some way she didn’t like, she explained to me that this was happening because I did not belong in her class. She did this in front of an entire class of first-graders, who were thus taught that I was retarded. Obviously, this did not help me to socialize with the other students, and the label “retarded” persisted with my schoolmates for years.
Today, a student in a similar situation would have an IEP: an individualized education program, designed to help them remain up to speed with the other students, and educational specialists to help them. There was no such thing. Later, in Junior High School, they hired a speech therapist for a couple of years, and then, in liew of real therapy, had me repeat a public speaking class every year until 12th grade. Although this did not help with my speech impediment, which I fortunately surmounted around the time I entered college, it made me a good public speaker.
Memories that persist include the math teacher who was made so nervous and unhappy by a classroom full of students that I am surprised anyone was actually taught, certainly it wasn’t me. And the music teacher who was so in need of anger management help that he, in one of his frequent emotional tirades, slammed a piece of classroom equipment hard enough to destroy it. This was a school in an affluent town in New York. A generation later, my son’s teachers in Berkeley’s primary school had quirks, but were able to manage their own behavior.
Over time it became obvious that I was normal or perhaps even gifted, though always an indifferent student, and I was treated as normal by my peers. I generally tested well despite not doing much work in class, due to my difficulty with writing. This was another cause for teacher resentment.
So, while things improved, the scars remained, hindering my emotional development, and leaving me somewhat innumerate compared to my later peers in computer science and engineering. And I was inspired to work on means of learning without teachers, still an interest for me today.
Despite my beginnings, I eventually reached some emotional maturity, had, and continue to have, a tremendous career and even some notoriety, met a wonderful woman and we’re still joyously together more than 30 years later. Our son is an every-day hero, a paramedic in the town where we live.