I missed my first grade teacher, Miss Floy Bridges. Her parents
owned the house where we lived when my parents broke up. I also
missed all my school mates. Now I had a new teacher, Miss Annie
Stewart, but it wasn't long before I fell in step and had made a
whole new set of friends.
At the end of my second year, I was so far ahead of all the
other students in my class that this new school didn't know what
to do with me. For reasons I still don't understand, schools
seem to think it is wrong for a student not to have to struggle
in order to learn. So the teacher and principal convinced my
mother that I should skip the third grade entirely and go
straight from the second to the fourth grade.
From that point on, until my Senior Year in high school, I was
never happy in school. My problem was a social one more than
anything else, because I was trying to compete with kids much
older than me. In high school, it was even worse. I entered my
senior year at age fifteen and had just turned sixteen when I
graduated.
I was so determined to succeed, that I made all the sports
teams, including basketball, baseball, tennis, football and
track. I was not great in any of them, but I was pretty good.
Our baskeball team won the local championship three consecutive
years, and I lettered in football two years.
Like everyone else, we walked about two miles to our little
country school, called Mt. Joy, and I enrolled in the second
grade. My sister and aunt (who was actually younger than my
sister) were in the fourth grade.
Get your own Free Home Page
