Jonathan is the hardest square peg
about whom I will write as his tragic story strikes very close to
home. He was placed in a special education class because the
administrators of his high school couldn’t figure out what to do
with him. Everyone agreed he was very bright. But his long purple
hair, his black, Johnny Cash wardrobe, and his penchant for being
non-compliant and disruptive demonstrated to these folks an outright
defiance of the uniform school and an adolescent in need of
discipline. I caught up with Jonathan when he was in the tenth
grade. Over our time together he told me of his grade school
experiences which were horribly familiar.
Printing and scripting were very
painful, he said. Homework, almost all writing, took an average of
six hours nightly. He said he continually had poor grades as all
tests demanded hand writing. Teachers continually scolded him, and
complained to his parents, about his “laziness”. He also said
teachers kept on telling him he was dumb for being unable to read
aloud. He read silently with excellent comprehension but was always
placed in the slowest readers’ groups. Even middle school teachers
considered him a slow reader because he stumbled through reading
aloud, in spite of the fact, as he pointed out, that many of his
seventh and eighth grade classmates had him to thank for passing
their English tests without having read the books: he said he read
the books at home passing along over the phone a daily in-depth
synopsis to each classmate calling.
He complained about the boredom of
elementary school and the trouble he got into. He said he would
complete enough of in-class assignments to let him know he knew the
lessons. Then, he would want to do other things. Teachers would
refuse him additional things to do until he “finished” his
assigned work. He would roam the room or drum on his desk or talk
with classmates instead of returning to the assignments. Teachers
scolded him into returning to his seat or ceasing drumming or being
quiet, but no matter the volume of voice he refused to return to his
work hearing from teachers an implicit judgment of being stupid and
in need of relearning lessons. One day in first grade, he said
angrily, he became so bored he immediately switched from the spelling
drill and practice the teacher required the class to be doing to
working in his math workbook. He said at the time he liked Math. He
finished the remaining pages, well over half the book! The teacher
finally discovered the project. She had him erase all he had done
from the end of the book to the place where the class had left off.
She scolded him loudly in front of the class saying she had not given
him permission to go beyond the class nor had she given him
permission to do something other than what the rest of the class was
doing! This same teacher, he bitterly reported, couldn’t
abide by his way of using his fingers to get correct math answers:
she kept on calling it “baby” and scolded him for it. Thus, he
said, by the middle of first grade his pleasure in Math was destroyed
and he had begun a long resistance to doing math correctly. He had
many more such stories.
Jonathan arrived at high school broken
and beaten. He blamed himself, after all the uniform school
demonstrated to him how stupid he was for all his years in school.
Yet, he knew deep down he was very bright and capable and the way he
was treated since the first grade was very hurtful and wrong. He
turned to alcohol, marijuana and cocaine to cope with the inner
conflict and its awful pain, and they eventually destroyed his brain
turning him psychotic, a state within which he must live for the rest
of his life.
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