I was enrolled in
Sam Case Elementary school, in the
Fourth Grade.I had Mrs. Beyerle for my teacher. She was tough and took no excuses for poor behavior.
This was the year that we were introduced to "Corporal Punishment"
at school. Mrs.
Beyerle had no qualms about grabbing a boy by his ear and dragging him
out into the hallway and giving him a "hack" or "two".
We were introduced to the "New Math" at Sam Case Elementary School. We
had workbooks that we were supposed to take home and work on in our free
time.
There were now time limits and schedules that we had to comply with.
This is where I began to realize that my brain was wired differently than most of the
other students. I sort of got it but I didn't comprehend this new
environment or the material that was presented. I was now ducking and
hiding from questions and scheduled assignment completions. I took my
workbooks home but my folks didn't have time or really "get it"
either. I started to fall behind but I was just able to scrape by and
hide in the back of the classroom. I would learn, many years later, that
I'm dyslexic and I have super ADD. These issues were not understood,
back in the 60's, and I would have been classified as retarded and ended
up in "Special Ed". Most of the kids who were in Special Ed. actually
mainstreamed after they were released from their Special Ed. sentences.
My brother was naturally smart and had no problems with the school
environment. It was very frustrating, for me, to try to compete with
him. It didn't seem to matter how hard that I tried, I couldn't compete
with anyone. Eventually, I just gave up. I tended to hang around with the other kids who weren't
doing well. This was not my best option but I didn't know any better.
About this time my parents had some problems and my Mom ended up packing
her suitcases one day and leaving my dad, my brother, and I, alone and
on our own. Dad was working days and always came home after we arrived home from school
My brother and I skipped school a couple of times, for a day or two at a
time, wrote our own excuses, and got away with it. We used to hang around
in the house and just play. This led to worse choices. Eventually, we skipped school and went down to the
beach and goofed off nearly everyday for about a month. Most of the people
in our neighborhood worked days and it was pretty easy to come and go
unnoticed. One day we went
down to the beach and went wading in our clothes. We went into a log
fort and started a fire
and put our clothes on sticks and hung them over the fire. We went back
in, wading in our scivvies. When we got back to the fire, the sticks our
clothes were on had leaned over and our clothes were pretty much burned up. Now, we had to
get back to the house wearing our burned up clothes and pretend like
nothing was going on. We hid our clothes in the attic, upstairs, off my
brothers bedroom, but you could
still smell the smoke from the fire.
Once we had passed the one or two day threshhold, skipping school, we became afraid to
face the consequences of our actions. About three and a half weeks into
the school skipping adventure we heard a car pull up in front
of the house and a lady got out of the car and was looking intently at
our house. My brother and I went out the back door and went over the
fence and hid behind the next door neighbors house and watched. She
knocked a few times and looked through the windows trying to see if
anybody was home. After about ten minutes, she got back into her car and
left. We hid for a few more minutes and then went back into the house
through the back door. We knew that something was going to happen. That
evening Dad got a phone call and it was the
School Nurse asking why my brother and I hadn't attended school for
the last month. The look on his face told us that we were in serious
trouble. When he hung up the phone he started asking questions about why
we hadn't been going to school and what we had been doing? It was a very
long evening. There was no corporal punishment involved but we knew how
disappointed he was in our behavior and that he was in almost as much
trouble as we were. Dad worked out a deal that got us back into school.
David and I had to make up the work that we missed plus keep up
with our classes on the current assignments.
