because, as they told me, I was showing signs of boredom at home. (They were right about the boredom, but it was probably due more to a lack of playmates than anything else.)
I remember taking the test in a library. The first part consisted of putting wooden puzzles together, something that I loved to do. The second part was a series of questions given orally because not everyone at that time had gone to kindergarten and reading was not taught until the first grade. I can remember only one question from the oral exam, but that one was probably an indication that the test was culturally slanted toward people like us. The woman giving the test asked, "Who was Faust?"
The fact that this was even a question on a test for preschoolers should have been a clue that something was not right. My response to that question should have been a dead giveaway that I did not come from an average home:
"Do you mean the character from literature or one of the operas?"
The test proctor did not indicate that this was not a normal answer from a five year old. She merely replied, "Whichever one you want."
"Well, there was an opera written by Gounod about a man who sold his soul to the devil."
I don't know whether it was my answer to the Faust question or my ability to put puzzles together that put me over the top. Perhaps it was something else altogether. All I know is that I passed the test—with one of the highest scores ever. My parents thought that this would put me on the fast track toward getting into a "good" college. I was just glad to start school and get away from my boring home life. Little did I know then that although I was certainly ready to do the academic work, starting first grade early would put me behind my peers in many other ways. I would be the one of the last of my classmates to qualify for a paying job and to get a driver's license. When I finally got into the "good" college that was my parents' dream, I was seventeen instead of eighteen. A few more months before starting school might have made a big difference because for a great deal of my early academic life I had a profound sense of not really belonging.
Years later, my mother admitted that it had been a mistake. At the time, academics were everything. If I could do the classwork, then I should start school. The social and emotional maturity aspects of the decision were never part of the equation.
I was truly blessed to have a wonderful first grade teacher, Miss Spenser, who moved on with the class to teach second grade. To have a seamless transition from the first grade to second was a real advantage. Miss Spenser was "old school" in the best sense. She taught us the basics in math and reading. Of course, some students were more gifted academically than others, but all of us learned to read well and do simple math. (There were about thirty of us in the classroom.) She treated us as if we were all great students and we became so. I will be forever indebted to dear Miss Spencer for loving her students and inspiring us to love learning. She set a pattern for learning that has served me well throughout my life. Even subsequent educational disasters could not quench the love of reading and writing that was nurtured so early in Miss Spencer's first and second grade classes.
Because of the burgeoning baby boom population, Burnside Elementary School, where I began my schooling, was joined by a new school, Marshall Street Elementary. The district lines were drawn in such a way that I was assigned to the new school. I loved the newness of the school and was fascinated by the fact that restrooms adjoined each classroom. (No one needed to get a hall pass to go to the restroom!)
In October of 1957, everything changed. The Russians sent Sputnik into space. Suddenly, our country, used to leading the world in every category, was behind in the space race. It seemed that our school changed overnight. Our curriculum got much harder. The message conveyed to us was that we were behind the Russians and we needed to catch up. We were constantly told that we needed to be challenged academically so we could ultimately beat the Russians. School became one big, long competitive event. (I was seven years old and in the third grade.)
My parents, both school teachers, bought into the system hook, line, and sinker. They already saw education as the key to everything else in life. Getting into a "good" college was the ultimate goal of first through twelfth grades. If one got into a good college, then that person could join up with all the others who had gone to good colleges, enabling us all to beat the Russians.
We all lived in fear of nuclear attack. Some families built fallout shelters in their basement and stockpiled food and other necessities. At school we were trained to "duck and cover". When a certain alarm sounded, we were supposed to get quickly under our desks, bring our knees up to our chests and then bury our heads as far as we could. Now I was certainly no scientific genius, but I remember wondering that if nuclear attack was as awful as everyone said it would be, how our little third grade desks were going to protect us from it. I also wondered what all those people in fallout shelters would do when they came out to find everyone and everything around them vaporized from a radioactive fog. Nevertheless, we followed the instructions the adults gave us.
Of much greater concern to me than nuclear war was the introduction of new math. I had been doing okay in arithmetic up until third grade. Marshall Street Elementary School was selected for a pilot program for a new math curriculum. Instead of just being able to do the math, we were supposed to learn to "think about math". I remember the books had yellow covers and typewritten pages –just the basics. There were no color pictures, charts, or graphs. Most of the material had to do with the solving of word problems. There were always trains coming from opposite directions which had different rates of speed. We were supposed to determine when they would meet each other. Mentally, I checked out. Early on, I determined that if trains were coming from different directions, I did not want to be anywhere in the vicinity when they met each other (i.e. crashed). I cared even less how fast they were going.
Third grade marked the end of when I stopped doing math altogether. To this day, I will pay any price to avoid figuring out much I owe in a restaurant. I pay whatever they tell me I should pay. I may have lost thousands of dollars by operating on this system (which is virtually no system at all). To me, that is money well spent. No math is better than new math. Unfortunately, I still had a lot more school to slog through in my life and none of my teachers ever bought into my system.
Even if school was mostly drudgery and tedium, it was still preferable to life at home. My mother thought that most children were terribly spoiled. She was determined that neither my brother nor I would ever fall into that category. To her, the only good parent was a strict one. Both she and my father wanted to be known as the strictest parents around. In that they succeeded. In my family, there were two main reasons why children misbehaved—constipation and brazenness. There were two remedies for misbehavior—enemas and spankings. I thought this was how it was for everyone.
In those days, there were no child protective services. What social services existed were intended for poor people, the kind of families who lived in the ghetto or trailer parks. Abuse was a word that was not used very often and when it was used, it was reserved for people who had no education and were very poor. Suburban parents with college degrees never abused their children; they "disciplined" them. I remember talking with some of my classmates about what kind of misbehavior would lead to them receiving a spanking. Some of them were shocked that there was such a thing as a spanking. They could never remember getting one. Others had been so horrified by their own spankings that they could recall in vivid detail everything leading up to the spankings and everything immediately afterwards. For them it was a very rare event and was the result of only very serious and intentional offenses. For me, it was an almost daily occurrence and on particularly bad days, I might receive more than one.
Ironically, although I remember being spanked a lot, I do not remember anything at all about what terrible infractions I had committed to draw such punishment. Most of the time, I did not even know what the rules were until I broke one. The other children talked about their parents saying things like, "This is going to hurt me more than it will you." My father never said that as he was removing his
