Welcome to my Wild West!

In a private grade school, the curriculum gets repeated thanks to a limited budget. The school I went to lumped three grades into one. If you started in first grade with a teacher, you got a preview of second and third grade. By the time you got to those upper grades, if you paid attention all along, you didn’t have to study.

Fourth through sixth grade was even worse for geography and history. We had the sixth grade curriculum in fourth grade and again two years later. We also started fazing out the practice of journaling that Mrs. W had started in first grade.

Bored out of my mind, I spent the “lecture” section writing. I’d escape into fiction for a few seconds and step back into reality for a moment or two to orient to what was going on, and duck back out.

By the time I reached eighth grade, I perfected the ability to look like I took notes while actually scribbling fiction. Then, one day, my science teacher caught on. She was my “best friend’s” mom, and said friend was fiercely competitive, so much so that tattling and hamstringing wasn’t beyond her ken. For a pastor’s kid, she was rather viscous. She remains the reason I won’t watch Mean Girls.

Anyway, this teacher walked up to me while we were writing out “terms,” the vocabulary in the back of the chapter. She demanded I turn over the notebook I’d been writing in while she was giving the lecture. Being an obedient child, I turned it over and lost several stories I’d been working on for months, believing I’d get it back at the end of the week.

My “friend” grinned at me with her beaklike nose turned up in the air with a wiggle as she laughed to herself and turned back to her schoolwork.

Emotionally chafing, I bowed my head to my notebook and wrote out the vocab and definitions. At the end of class, I asked for my notebook back. She told me she was going to destroy it because it was an unnecessary distraction and that I should respect her by paying attention to her class.

I argued against it, and she sent me to the principal’s office for it. Sitting there, copying a text from the Bible about respect, I wondered how after years, I suddenly got caught.

I realized my friend outed me to her mom, the teacher. More than once, I told my “friend” I wanted nothing to do with her. Ours was a complicated relationship with her gaslighting and bullying me, then following me around like a puppy dog when I went my way. This incident followed one of our spats that usually rose from my getting a better grade than her on a test.

The rest of the day, I concocted a plan to turn the tables against my friend, at least through the teacher.

Two days later, I sat in my usual assigned seat against the wall, one of my preferred spots, third from the door. As Missus M. started her lecture, I pulled out a notebook and pretended to scribble on the sheet at regular intervals, the same way I would if I was taking notes or writing.

After the lecture, the teacher walked over to my desk and asked, “Where is it?”

“Where is what?” I asked, though I knew what she referred to.

“The paper you were writing on. Hand it over.” 

I flipped open my new notebook, tore a blank sheet out of my notebook, and placed it in her hand. She looked at it and her scowl deepened.

“No. Give me the paper you were writing on,” she repeated.

“That is the paper I was writing on.”

“But there’s nothing on it.”

“I know. I pretended to write on it.”

Her jaw dropped, and she sputtered for a moment.

“You’re disrupting class by not paying attention!” 

I glanced around at my classmates, who looked on, disturbed by her outburst.

“No one noticed or cared until you made it a big deal,” I retorted with my heart pounding, embarrassed by this public humiliation.

Angered, the teacher crumpled the paper and dropped it on my desk before walking away.

While this set me at odds with this teacher, it left me with a lasting sense that writing was a source of humiliation. My friend mocked me for it at every opportunity, telling me that was why I was too dumb to get grades like hers.

My grades weren’t absolutely perfect, but I sat in a tight second on the GPA rankings. I never could focus in class, and I learned to scribble to keep me from talking too much.

Reinforcing this was my parents’ insistence that writing was a waste of time because it could never provide a viable living. Maybe they were right, but I’ll never know.

I suck at talking about my stories, and I hate making videos. In my mind, no one cares about my hobbies, especially my writing. You’d think this would be easy to get over, especially since I talk about nothing important in my blog posts.

My goal for the next year is to work past this. I’ve started on TicTock with some miscellaneous videos. Currently, I have no hard copies of my books on hand, but they are on order. When those come in, I’ll start making some videos talking about those and eventually work into my next book when it gets closer to publication.

Childhood experiences form us, but they don’t have to define us forever. At some point, I hope my former science teacher sees my books. I wouldn’t mind if she saw this post and learned that she didn’t stop me.