I beat the Special Ed allegations

How a new school and a string of good teachers saved my life, and a glimpse at a parallel universe that too many young men get trapped in

1

Taking the unbent edge of my paper clip, my first-grade self began to scratch an inscription into my desk.

“Ms. O’Brien,” I delicately etched.

As soon as I finished my latest work of ersatz vandalism, though, I took out my trusty scissors. And I started stabbing her name as hard as I could — with the hatred that only a rage-fueled seven-year-old knows.

That was, until, I heard the disturbingly loud “thud” of Ms. O’Brien’s palm slamming my desk. At that moment, I knew.

My twelfth trip to see the principal had just been booked.

2

In my formative years, I was a textbook example of a “problem child”. And I don’t mean that figuratively or jokingly. What you can glean from that introduction is a mere snapshot into my behavior.

In line with my grandfather’s wishes, I went to a Catholic kindergarten; one of those ones where discipline is uncompromising and kids got touched (no, seriously). Severe austerity was the name of the game there, as if Pope John Paul II himself had risen from the dead to rule over our little brick schoolhouse.

But by the end of my first week, I’d beat a kid up for sweet-talking the girl I thought was my girlfriend. By the end of the first month, I’d mouthed off one too many times with Sister Debbie, who became my sworn enemy. And by the end of the first year, it was clear we wouldn’t be welcomed back for the next.

Little changed when I moved to our local public school for the first grade. I got placed into ELD, which is basically a program for immigrant kids who don’t speak English and need remedial help in other subjects as a result. There, I also began lashing out. But I met my match in my teacher, Ms. O’Brien. She was equal parts nasty as I was misbehaved.

Our war began when I traded a kid two silkworms for one ladybug. He regretted his end of the bargain, ratted me out, and cried. Ms. O’Brien called my non-English speaking mother and yelled words she didn’t understand. My mother got upset at the world, and me.

Fuck you, Chris K. Who cares if the silkworms were dead?

3

I joke about my childhood a lot, and I think it’s in good taste. All things considered, I think I had a pretty awesome one. But the first few years in America were rather rough.

We originally landed in Princeton, New Jersey, but ended up putting down roots in Los Angeles. My old man found a job in water purifier sales through a guy he knew there, and so began our journey in the Promised Land. But we quickly realized — as most poor, 2000s-era immigrants do — our boats arrived twenty years too late.

While I didn’t have the lucid knowledge that our home life wasn’t great, I’m sure I felt it. We were on every form of welfare imaginable, we were bouncing around a few places, and things weren’t the best between my folks. By the time first grade rolled around, my dad had gone to jail for the first time on addiction-related offenses.

Moving to another country is also just kind of shitty on its own. We didn’t know anyone, nor did we speak the language. When I threw up in preschool for the first time, and vomited pink because I’d taken so much Tylenol that morning (so my mom could go to work), some of my tablemates called me an alien. As the only non-white kid in that class, that’s what I felt like a lot of the time.

All that to say, I can’t imagine I was the happiest little kid out there. By the time I’d become of school age, my emotional balance had been forced off of equilibrium. And by the time I’d met Ms. O’Brien, I probably needed loving more than schooling.

O’Brien offered me neither. Yelling at me in words I understood only half the time was her modus operandi. Come time for parent-teacher conference, she told my mom in no uncertain terms that I was an “at-risk” student given my ELD status, and my “behavioral issues” were compounding this.

Then, she said that if this continued, she would recommend me as special needs. Imagine uprooting your life and moving across the world to give your children a better education, and then immediately being told that your firstborn needs special ed.

4

I’m sure I was a shithead to Ms. O’Brien, Sister Debbie, and every other middling educator in between. I’m sure my behavioral problems were hugely incommensurate for what they got paid.

But I’m also certain that every child in the public school system, irrespective of their home circumstances, deserves warmth and kindness. It’s also a foregone conclusion here that if we’re to only care for those with good behavior, we’re depriving a lot of already-underprivileged kids of the emotional support they especially need.

I sometimes think back to how it felt. In retrospect, she hated me in a way that no grown woman should hate a child in. Her sneers when I’d pronounce something wrong. The way she made me feel stupid, above all else. To this day, little makes me wince more than watching old people yell at kids.

It made me hate school, so much so that I refused to go. My attendance also became an issue, because while my mom would usually force me to attend, my combativeness in the mornings delayed us quite a bit. We even got a letter telling us that I was on considered a ‘chronic truant’ and that law enforcement would get involved if I didn’t shape up.

But I was shockingly lucky in the following years. After hearing about a better school in a neighborhood we definitely did not live in, and realizing that I could escape such a designation should we move, my mom made it so that we lived in that neighborhood that we did not live in.

5

It’s insane how big of a difference the schools you attend as a child make on your life. I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, because I go to college with a lot of people who have been primed for the intellectual-academic elite since the womb. The type of people who paid college tuitions for their elementary/middle/high schools.

But the school I went to the the following year, in second grade, was not even one of those elite schools. It was just a marginally better public school than my previous one, where the class sizes were just a little smaller and the parents were just a little more involved.

That margin of change, though, made a world of difference. The following year, in second grade, I mostly stayed out of trouble. My teacher felt like a teacher and not an enemy combatant, and my terrible grades turned into not-terrible grades. If life is a game of inches, the changes in my classroom behavior after moving schools were proof of it.

Third grade was even better. My English had finally fully caught up, and I had this incredible teacher named Miss Basinski — a soft-hearted nonconformist with a penchant for teaching nine-year-olds about progressive causes. And she was the first teacher who had ever gotten me interested in school, because she spent half of class talking about climate change, which I found interesting.

But most crucially: she gave me individual attention and a support system. She was the first teacher I’d had that would stay late after class to answer my questions. She led an after-school recycling club on campus, and that carved out a little space for me to make friends (of which I had few). She even gave me a nickname.

By the end of the year, I had undergone a pretty spectacular turnaround. My not-terrible grades turned into decent grades, and more importantly, I felt smart for the first time. I showed up to school without dread and with an eagerness to listen.

6

This confidence carried through to the next year, where I didn’t just feel smart, but I was smart. My fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Magerkurth, was every bit as good and caring as Miss Basinski. And the opportunities that my new school had to offer began to come into play.

There’s a program called Accelerated Reader (lovingly referred to as AR), developed by a Google-backed software company named Renaissance Learning. Basically, students take comprehension quizzes on computers to verify that they’ve read a given book. In return, you get points (based on the length/difficulty of the novel, and your accuracy on the quiz), and those points can be traded in for various prizes. Used in 35,000+ schools across the country, it was popularized around the time that reward-based learning/educational gamification came around.

Symbolically, I think AR was emblematic of the differences between my old school and my new school. It was one of those programs that my old school couldn’t afford, that my new school could. And even if my old school could’ve afforded it, I imagine the cultural structures underpinning it would’ve rendered it obsolete. Expanding pricey edtech to schools where the trifecta of students, parents, and teachers are largely uninterested in reading, is like giving a teenager an ugly sweater for Christmas. Unfortunate at best, wasteful at worst.

At first, I tried AR because the prizes were cool. Extended lunch time and small trinkets I could share with my younger brothers were enough to get me to read. The bigger prizes — restaurant dinners with the principal, or $50 gift cards to the book fair — were even better.

But as time went on, I hit this realization that I cared about AR independent of the prizes. I liked it because I was good at it, and people recognized I was good at it. For a kid who largely grew up without it, it helped me feel as if I had some self-worth.

Mrs. Magerkurth recognized this early on. My dad had just been laid off, but if there was ever a book I wanted to read, she spent her own money to get me it. She would pull me aside, and had me add whatever books I couldn’t find in the school library to her Amazon cart. Her reasoning?

“At this rate, you might have the most points in the entire school!”

And that, I did. By Thanksgiving, I had a sizable lead on everyone at Thomas Jefferson Elementary. By winter break, I had a sizable lead on everyone in the school district. And by the time summer came around, Renaissance Learning reached out. The 300-or-so books I’d read that year, and the near 1,500 points I’d amassed, were a nation-wide record.

7

I admit that I may be curve-fitting what I think to be true as I recount this history. But what I do know for certain is that I was never bad at school again. One competition, two teachers, and a new school transformed me from a kid on track for ‘special behavioral intervention’ into someone who wasn’t terrible.

The point here is not that I won some stupid elementary school reading competition. It’s that young children are extremely malleable, and conform to others’ ideas of their academic dispositions. Told for three years that I was unintelligent and misbehaved, I refused to go to school. Told for two that I was excellent, I loved school, and that never changed.

I think this is applicable especially to young boys. The modern pedagogical consensus just isn’t built for them. At risk of making essentialist claims about humanity, the idea that academic excellence is defined by how long you can sit and listen quietly is rather Puritan, and counterintuitive to what young boys have historically been wired to do.

I am one of the lucky ones. I somehow ended up with a mom who trusted her gut, a string of teachers that cared enough, and a school that let us get away with lying about our address. I got intervention at the exact right moment, before they prescribed me medication or wrote me off. At any moment, I could’ve slipped through the cracks. I ended up at Harvard.

But I grew up with many of the unlucky ones. In the worst case, I grew up with dozens of guys that couldn’t finish high school, or had to go to continuation school for their diploma. In the best case, even for those who didn’t fail, the National Clearinghouse says less than one in three kids from my high school goes to college. In a transformative era where the barrier to enter the labor market is this high, I grew up with a group of guys that in twenty years, will be stuck. They will be unable to live in even the working-to-middle class neighborhood we grew up in, because buying land here is hard even for those with advanced degrees. They will become disheveled voters blaming minorities for their problems, and many already have. They were never given a fair shot.

8

When I was in the seventh grade, I took advanced math. I got seated next to this guy named Seabass, who was pretty smart but despised school. Seabass was a fascinating figure. His parents weren’t all that present (his dad got deported?), he didn’t come from money, and he hung out with the wrong kids. But despite all of that, he had tested into advanced math, which he had a strong conceptual understanding of. The following week, he stopped showing up. He got expelled. I’m not sure why.

The next time I saw him was a year later. I was hanging out on the field well after school had ended. On the other side of the field, there was a baseball game going on. I wasn’t paying much attention, until I saw Seabass on his bike.

I headed over to him, but he headed away from the field toward this one kid that was sitting alone. It was this Indian kid who had just moved to the States, and he was holding a baseball. I presume they hadn’t let him play. Seabass hopped off his bike, and started showing this kid how to throw.

The last time I saw him was in high school. It was in front of the mall, and he looked different. He started talking to me about his life, and showed me this nasty thigh scar he’d gotten from being shot. He was having a kid, and his ‘business’ was booming (he was an entrepreneur of the ‘drugs’ persuasion).

9

I wrote that to gaslight you emotionally into caring. I’ll be honest. But think about it! There’s probably a million young men out there that are naturally gifted that become drug dealers. That’s not particularly profound.

But I do not think this is a problem without solutions. This is probably idealistic, but I think a fundamental reconceptualization of the American classroom is in order. And I think that making school an environment that provides more validation than the alternatives is a great place to start.

Here’s what I mean by that. In the status quo, young boys are told to sit tight and listen. If they don’t do so, they’re punished. They grow to hate school, completely independent of their academic ability. They find validation in other circles, whether it be sports (they will not make the league) or selling drugs (they will make it to jail).

And the way that American public education decided to solve this problem is fascinating. We decided to label those ‘misbehaved’ as ‘ADHD’ and pump them with speed/amphetamines (in my view, far more addictive than cocaine), in hopes that they would conform and become lifelong Big Pharma subscribers. Those who don’t have healthcare? Get fucked. I realize this makes me sound like RFK Jr., but trust me, I have every vaccine ever (including Pfizer x3). I don’t think that ADHD medication/the science is ineffective, I just think it targets an artificial problem. The numbers show that nearly one in five young men is diagnosed with it now. Insane.

In my mind, there are a million things that we could do today to change this. That being said, I don’t want this to be a policy dossier, so I want to describe the shift in values that I’m imagining. And really, it comes down to retraining educational institutions to be less disciplinarian. Maybe this is a really stupid idea, but it works in my head.

In essence, we should scrap the idea of discipline. I think classrooms should look like social hubs, with books strewn out everywhere, computers available for random research, passion projects as the only homework, and minimal instruction on literally everything else. It really doesn’t matter if a kid understands what’s going on in Because of Winn-Dixie, as much as it matters whether or not that kid wants to come to school tomorrow. And if you think this looks like anarchy? It’s exactly the point.

As an aside, I think this is also the problem with a lot of academic ‘tracking’ programs, where kids are assigned to specific groups (gifted and talented education, or advanced math). And it’s not because of ‘gifted kid burnout’ or whatever. I think that’s stupid as fuck. You probably weren’t that bright to begin with. On the other hand, I think these systems are fucked for the kids who don’t get labelled gifted. Telling a kid that the book they’re reading is stupid is enough to get them to quit reading the book. Telling a kid that they aren’t fundamentally as smart as other kids seems to operate in the same way.

So why not uproot the entire thing? No one is smarter than anyone. Everyone just uses it as a space as they see fit, and it keeps kids out of the streets. It’s like applying the pedagogical freedom of college to young kids, with even less structure. Kids are already failing math and English, and it’s because they don’t give a fuck. They don’t want to read your 1970s garbage. They want to read about stuff that matters to them, so let them. Let the kid who plays baseball spend English time reading about baseball analysis on ESPN as opposed to some old book. I’d bet they test better at the end of the year.

Aside from finances, the prevailing attitude of people who don’t go to college, it seems, is that academia is too rigid for them. I think this changes that too. Making it a place that people actually want to be is the first step, and letting kids roam free in the classroom with tools that actually interest them, alongside interactions they enjoy, seems like a better model than the clusterfuck we have now.

10

I was lucky. I knew others that were not. But maybe none of us should have been either. Maybe academic success shouldn’t be locked behind the veneer of being able to sit still in a chair seven hours a day for over a decade, or having the right ‘motivation’ or ‘luck’ to keep you there.

So this is for the dudes that dropped out and now rant about hating ‘college aged queers’ on Facebook, the Seabasses of the world, and even the girls that became strippers at 18 and now publish way too much on the internet. This cruel winner-takes-all system failed you.

— SJY, 05.24.24