Stu Mack oh the marks – I don’t learn how school teaches nor in it’s time frame
that’s been bothering me for a lifetime
I would always get terrible marks in
reading or listening comprehension
my marks there were right in the area of guessing, like 40-60% – completely different from where the other subjects were at
I remember being furious in seventh grade wanted to talk to the guidance counselor about what was going on – what was wrong with me that this was so different
but the whole year went by and I was never called in
everybody else was. i listened over the loudspeakers. never heard my name.
I was so upset that I was teary-eyed one day and I stopped him in the hallway a couple of days before end of 4th Q, end of 7th grade.
“when are you going to call me in to talk? I waited all year.”
he gave that uncomfortable smile. “oh you didn’t have to see me. we worked together in the school play in first quarter. you are my right hand man. i couldn’t have done it without you”
_you should’ve called me in_, still sniffling
his eyes lit with understanding – actual lightbulb over the head turned on “oh we can talk, now, sure, sure.”
and I went into his office and sat down. There were boxes stacked up the wall because he was leaving in a few days to whatever new job he had coming.
we talked. about other things by that point.
summertime came, school was out and I got in the mail my test scores for the seventh grade standardized tests that were the same idea as the sixth grade evaluation test that bothered me
I looked at it and it had the same drop in the same place as I had in sixth grade, and then I remembered why I wanted to talk to him so badly
but I was part of an experiment in our school system where for a few years they decided to have the eighth graders go to the high school and ours was the first year of that experiment
navigating the insanity of high school with my other eighth grade classmates was chaos and a definitely a mistake on the school systems part
it’s spurned me to seek A different school system for high school, as I complained about things to my mother who found a multiple essay based scholarship in the back of a newspaper that I applied for a tiny little k-12 school i spent my high school years at
wasn’t till maybe 5 years ago that I really tracked down what that poor reading/listening comprehension meant