NO! NO! NO! I did NOT like school! School was hell!
I started out as a painfully shy, quiet unsociable little girl. I didn't have any idea how to deal with anyone my own age because I was always around adults. I acted older than my age and I had a pretty extensive vocabulary for as young as I was and this made me different from the other kids. So I was avoided. And picked on relentlessly. Kids would spit in my food at lunch or dump their lunch on me, kick me, punch me, make fun of me any way they could find. My mom would say "tell the teacher." My dad would say "kick their ass." And he'd show me what to do. He'd get furious with me when I wouldn't do it.
My report cards would say "Terri does not play well with others. Terri does not socialize with the other students." Like it was my fault.
About the second grade they started hauling me into the school psychologist's office to "run some tests." It was fun at first because it got me out of class but nobody bothered telling me what they were testing for so I thought there was something wrong with me. They sent a letter to my mom telling her what my IQ was and recommending I be put into the "gifted" class. NEVER do this to a kid! You will ensure he or she never has any friends except at test taking time! So they yanked me out of my regular class (seriously: pack up your books and let's go) and stuck me in this class with kids three grades higher than me. I did not fit in there either. I didn't fit in anywhere. The class was meaningless as I remember and was based around that crappy psychology movement that was popular in the 1970s.
So kids still beat my ass on the playground and then sucked up to me at test time and I still allowed it. My parents decided it wasn't working out and we lived in a bad part of town so they moved us out here to Arizona.
You would think I could have started fresh, but no, that damned gifted crap and all my test results were sent ahead of me so the teachers knew what they were getting.
I had one chance to be with the In Crowd but I blew it because I was told not to be friends with some girl no one else liked, which I already was, and I told them nobody was going to pick my friends for me. So that relegated me to the sh*t list again. Couldn't get a seat at lunch, would get shoved out of my seat on the bus, got threatened all the time, couldn't use the bathroom without fear of who would get me in there; it was always some damn thing. I got tired of it and one day one of the popular girls smacked me over the head with a book and I turned around and decked her. hard.
And it felt good. And I wasn't sorry.
Then things started getting a little better. This guy Tony who always berated me for everything, shoved me one day and instead of taking it like I always had, I pushed him and his desk over and he went to the floor. He called me a b.itch but he gave me a Valentine that same year too.
We were friends after that.
People still ragged on me but they stopped *handling* me so I was okay with that.
The worst, most humiliating thing anyone did to me, which now as an adult woman means nothing, but as an eleven year old girl meant a hell of a lot, was go through my purse one day when I was in the back of class and make a big issue that I had Kotex with me. I liked to died. But then later they went to the guy I liked and said "Hey Butch! Terri's on the rag! HA HA HA!" And he was sitting right next to me on the bus. He looked right at me. I was so freaking mortified. No girl wants a guy to know that. But he was cool about it and just shrugged and said "so what?" And he never treated me any differently. I LOVED That guy. But it took a long time for me to forgive those catty b.itches who did that to me.
Junior high came around and was pretty much no big deal. They stuck me back in the gifted classes but I had some friends in there so that was cool. This was when talk of my POTENTIAL started. All I heard about was my POTENTIAL. My potential for what?! I have immense problems at home, I get no direction at school, I have no idea what I'm even doing, I'm getting Ds and Fs in everything so who cares about potential?!
High school wasn't that bad. Freshman year was but that's normal. I was no longer considered untouchable, just kind of weird...but really smart.
My problems at home were worse than ever and as much as I hated school, I didn't have anywhere else to go to get away from home. I cared about nothing when it came to assignments, I was just there to see my friends (all underdogs like me) and my Crush of the Month. My teachers would start yapping about how I was wasting my potential. I got sick of hearing it. I had no decent grades for college, didn't want to go anyway and made that pretty clear, so once I did that, I got relegated with the rest of the blue collar students in the back of the class, while the jocks', geeks' and socialites' college preparation took precedence because they were obviously going somewhere whereas the rest of us slobs were going to work in factories all our lives. I deeply resented that. Deeply.
So when I graduated, what the heck did I know? I knew about the Seven Cities of Cibola and what the Arizona flag stood for. I knew Shakespeare. I knew about the properties of mercury. And some other meaningless stuff.
But I didn't know how to balance a checkbook, how to rent an apartment, how to properly get interviewed for a job, how to make change (I'm serious on that) how to run a household or any of the stuff a person needs to know to survive in an adult world.
But hey I graduated.
So no. I hated school. It was a complete and total waste of time and energy. I learned nothing. Everything I know I learned from life or because I went out and educated myself about it. I have one teacher, now dead, who I do give credit to because she took it upon herself to care about me when I felt no one else did. She was my writing teacher and she did everything she could to encourage me to be a writer. Obviously I'm not but I still use what she taught me from time to time and she still sticks in my mind because she went the distance for me.
I'm just going to finally shut up now but suffice it to say no way in hell would I put my child in the public school system. Ever.
This was cathartic. Thanks.
