If Mrs Bitch made 4th grade difficult, it was nothing compared to 6th grade with Mr Schiesekomph. Mr S (whose nickname among the students was 'Adolf') had no business whatever in the teaching profession, and some years later, I found out---well, we'll get to that.
Meanwhile, that single school year stretches for glacial epochs in my memory. Adolf didn't haul us out into the hall to paddle us like Mrs B did, although behind classroom doors he was known to slap us around. His usual punishment was to have us copy a page in longhand out of our English reader. (I never managed more than one a day---my handwriting was a painfully slow process, thanks to being intimidated by Mrs Bitch.)
Here's the thing: If you didn't finish however many pages it was by the next day, he'd assign an additional page. So, if you didn't finish your homework because you were frantically trying to complete all your pages, bang! You had another page to do. It was a very vicious cycle, and I spent most of the year trying to get out of it. I even tried carbon copies (Caught---double pages.)
He'd keep you in the classroom during recess, gym and art classes to work on them. I didn't mind missing gym so much, but I loved art and missed that very much. My father pitched a fit when he found out about that---"How the hell do you get a ZERO in art?!"---went in and had a talk with the principal about how much tuition cost and how he wasn't paying for me to copy schoolbooks like a medieval monk. I didn't tell him until many years later that we were also slapped when Mr S was frustrated---my dad said if he'd known that, he would've gone up to the school and beaten the hell out of him.
Had I but known! To me, grown-ups all stuck together, and if I'd told my parents I was in trouble at school, I would've been in more hot water at home. I heard from a classmate after I'd moved away, who said that Adolf had been forced to resign, because another student's parents were threatening to sue the school otherwise. He'd be in his mid/late 60s by now, and I hope wherever he is, there are no children nearby. Between the physical and psychological abuse, the stinking asshole deserves to be locked in a small room and kept away from anyone with a soul.
He once confiscated all the non-textbooks I had in or around my desk---this included two library books that I ended up getting fines on. (The rest of the class, watching me burrow through texts and notebooks and papers to retrive book after book, laughed.) He took points off a paper of mine because it was only two sentences long, although he admitted in front of the whole class that I'd gotten the point of the assignment.
To make it worse, because my near-sightedness was really bad, I ended up in the front row. This was the year I got glasses, because even in the front row, I couldn't make out the writing on the chalkboard. THAT was an experience! Mom took me to the optical department at Korvettes (which was a big department store, back in the day), got my eyes examined, and went back for my glasses a week or so later. I'll never forget the first time I put on glasses and was told to turn around and look over there---I could clearly see the sign hanging over the mens' department, fifty feet away. It was a revelation---you mean other people can see this way all the time?! Wow, lucky them!
This was also the year where we got The Talk. The guys got sent out to play basketball, while us girls stayed in the classroom and watched a filmstrip. Adolf was out with the boys, the projector was operated by...it seems to be they imported several women: a teacher and/or librarian, someone's mother...but anyway, the filmstrip was sponsored by Kotex, and was all about the joys of becoming a woman.
I'll never forget how one of our adult mentors asked at the beginning of the session if any of us had gotten our periods yet, and when we all said 'no', she breathed, "Thank goodness we got to them in time!" The filmstrip itself primly explained about the mess that ensued if an egg wasn't fertilized, but carefully steered clear of HOW it could get fertilized. I considered this a major gap and asked, and was brushed off, although they were carefully answering what I considered to be dumb questions about things the filmstrip had covered at length. Later, someone on the playground filled me in, and I was nonplused. Oh, fucking. Well, why didn't you just say so?
Toward the end of the school year, my mom's cancer was first diagnosed. She spent five weeks in the hospital after surgery, and it was touch-and-go for a while. I didn't know until years later that the doctors told my dad they didn't know if they'd gotten all of it. That news was what triggered them to start house-hunting in Florida. They wanted somewhere that wasn't too far from Mom's aunts, but was far enough that said aunts wouldn't be inclined to just drop in or expect us to run down there to do their bidding.
That was the shape of things to come.
.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}