Well, That’s Just, Like, Your Opinion, Man

When our younger son was a little boy, we sent him to school like good citizens do. We didn’t think the public school would be very scholarly, or up to the task of educating either of our boys at the level they were capable of. We felt like our children were a sort of gift we give to the world, and that we should share that gift with our neighbors.

That was back in Massachusetts, which I do not miss. Our younger son was hounded mercilessly by his public school staff, although he was a quiet, intelligent, well-behaved, cooperative little boy. Eventually, the school administrators wanted to essentially take him away from us. They said he was defective, and needed their careful ministrations, and maybe some drugs, and god knows what else. Finally, when our boy hugged one of his classmates because they were sad, they claimed he was violent. We learned later that the school system would receive an enormous extra sum for every pupil they could label as defective, and we suspected this was their true motivation. Or maybe their anthracite hearts were giving them dyspepsia, and their loose shoes were making their cloven feet itch. One or the other.

We went to meetings with the school administrators, where they relentlessly tried to make me lose my temper, so they could say I was violent as well, and they could no doubt call the cops on me to get their way. That didn’t work. Finally, exasperated by our reluctance to flip our lids while speaking to them, one snidely blurted out, “So, what are you going to do? Take him out of school?”

Well, that’s exactly what we did, right then and there. The administrators stamped and fumed while our boy’s teacher wept, because unlike the others, she still had a soul hidden in there somewhere. Shortly after that, we moved away to an unheated hovel in a mill town in western Maine, where my wife doggedly taught the boy his lessons at an ancient school desk we bought at a flea market for ten bucks, sometimes with his breath visible in the air in front of him.

I’ve been writing on the internet for a long time. Fifteen years ago I wrote down exactly what they said was wrong with our son:

[He is]unable to express ideas in front of a group, unable to selectively listen for sounds, follow multi-step directions, and unable to to complete assigned tasks in allotted time.”

Let’s take them one at a time, shall we?

Unable to express ideas in front of a group

Unable to selectively listen for sounds

Follow multi-step directions

That last video won him a Physics prize at his charter high school, where he graduated as the Valedictorian. He composed the music in the background, too, by the way, and cut all the floor tile in the bathroom on a tile saw while I mortared them in.

Unable to to complete assigned tasks in allotted time

Well, you’ve finally got me there. That’s him shaking hands with the President of his university today, graduating summa cum laude, I think, if they were still keeping score in Latin. He got a Bachelor of Science degree in Cybersecurity. He was on the President’s list for his entire tenure at college.

But I have to admit, he didn’t do it in the allotted time. It only took him three years.