Chapter 13

The next morning after going through my exercise routine I had pretty well shaken off the dark thoughts of the night before and was looking forward to the school day. From our new home, it only took about ten minutes to walk to school.

When I came out of the front door there were several kids going towards school, so it was natural to join them. We kept picking up kids along the way till about ten or twelve of us arrived at school.

We had a casual conversation on the way to school. After we went through the front door of the schoolhouse I couldn’t tell you about anything we discussed.

School on Wednesday proved interesting in several ways. First of all, I have never felt so on top of things as in my classwork. I quickly learned that I only had to pay half attention to the lecture as they were going over material that I had studied the night before and felt comfortable with. I started reading the next chapter ahead. That worked very well.

At the end of Algebra class, I realized there was something I didn’t understand in the next chapter. Mr. Buckley our teacher gave out that night’s assignment in the last fifteen minutes of our forty-five-minute class session and told us to get to work.

If we had any questions we were to raise our hands. Since it was every other problem at the back of the chapter I had those done and correctly.

I raised my hand and Mr. Buckley came to my desk. I showed him what I didn’t understand. He started to get a little huffy about working the problems at the end of today’s chapter.

I quickly showed him that I had worked ALL of the problems. He got a great big smile and invited me up to his desk and showed me what I was missing on tomorrow’s homework.

I wasn’t able to finish all of tomorrow’s Algebra problems, but it wouldn’t take that long at home or study hall. I had two study halls on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Tuesdays and Thursday only had one because of gym class.

World History was a revelation. Mr. McMillian told us we could pick any one question at the back of the chapter to write an essay on. All the references quoted in the book were either in the school library or the study hall library.

Since I was excited about school work I decided to do every question that was at the end of the chapter. Fortunately, we were doing one chapter a week, so I only had to do one essay a day.

Mr. McMillian then really made my day by saying we would get extra credit for every essay we turned in over and above the one required.

One interesting thing other than schoolwork was girls. They noticed me! It was nothing exciting (other than to me) or sexual. Just that the girls that sat next to me in every class would say, “Hello” and make inquiries about my summer or the fact that I had grown so much. I gave nothing away about my summer and made polite conversation for the one or two minutes before the teacher started.

Thursday is when it all started. The beginning was when I got my English paperback.

It had the comment, “Well written but I did not ask for a work of fiction.”

The grade was an “F”. I was totally crushed and I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. Well, I guess I flushed very red because Miss Bales glared at me like she was waiting for me to open my mouth. She was well known for assigning detention. I kept my mouth shut.

After thinking very evil thoughts for a while I realized that the Bellefontaine Examiner article would make it clear that I was telling the truth. I would approach her with a copy of the paper and ask her to revise my grade.

The rest of the day went by quickly. I had to hustle to keep ahead in my reading and answering all of the questions. I was doing about twice as much as most students.

I say most students because I realized that other kids were in the libraries every day and working diligently in study hall. Until I had stumbled into that orientation session at Berkeley I had never known that this level of schooling existed.