Sixth grade wasn’t any different. In fact, it was worse than fifth grade, because my sixth grade math teacher and my sixth grade science teacher both resorted to publicly shaming me for “doing the math/science wrong”. Of course, that emboldened my peer bullies (who’d already deemed me a target because I was too sickly, small, and quiet to do anything about it), made those teachers into bullies, and made me despise math and science completely. At that point, I’d been convinced by multiple teachers across multiple schools that I was completely hopeless at math, and I’d never amount to anything if Cystic Fibrosis didn’t kill me first.
Predictably, seventh grade wasn’t any better. In fact, I had to leave that school in the middle of the year for greener pastures at a school in downtown Denver, due to the bullying and my failing grades. While life wasn’t perfect at that school, it was still significantly better than my previous school. I went from an F-average student to a C-average student with a B in Pre-Algebra by the time I got my first report card back.
Unfortunately, my experience at my previous school had physically beaten me down so much that, just after Christmas break, I ended up hospitalized with a severe MRSA infection. Being in the hospital sucked major ass (of course), but I’ll never forget the night my algebra teacher, on his own time after school, drove twenty miles to Anschutz Medical Campus where I was to make sure I was caught up in math and didn’t fall too far behind. That was the first time a teacher had ever shown me any real, genuine kindness, and to this day, thinking about it brings tears to my eyes.
In other words, things weren’t all bad for me in K-12, though had I and my family known our rights more thoroughly back then, I’m sure we could’ve sued multiple schools for screwing me over as they did. Hell, even now I’d be well within my rights to write some scathing pieces naming and shaming every school and teacher that ever wronged me. But that’s super petty and just asking to stir up tons of needless drama. So I’m just gonna take George Carlin’s advice by not sweating the petty things, or petting the sweaty things.
