When I entered junior high, my grades plummeted.
I couldn’t understand why because I gotten decent grades in elementary.
What I couldn’t grasp was that in elementary, the teachers were like arm-floaties in the pool. They reminded us to turn in assignments and gave class time if we didn’t finish.
In junior high, they just dropped us in the deep end of the pool, expecting us to be responsible for ourselves. No reminders to turn in homework, just quiet depletion of my grade average for my missed assignments.
My first progress report made a thud on the kitchen table and my step dad exploded.
Boy! Get in here!
Yes dad?
You want to tell me what your grades are?
Wha… I don’t know.
You’re failing half your classes. Now tell me why you thought it’d be okay to fail your classes?
I don’t think it is.
You don’t think. That’s your problem.
I didn’t know I was failing.
That’s no excuse. Your teacher doesn’t give you grade updates?
I don’t think so.
She does or she doesn’t. Now which is it?
I guess she does.
You guess. You’ve got a real piss poor attitude, don’t you? Don’t you?!
Yes.
What?!
Yes!
Over the next few weeks I tried to do better, but I couldn’t seem to improve.
As afraid as I was of my step dad screaming at me again, I was equally paralyzed and unequipped to turn my grades around.
When I ran into roadblocks in school work, I felt overwhelmed. The teacher would ask for a homework assignment and I would suddenly realize I hadn’t done it. I forgot. Again! Or I wouldn’t understand the assignment, and I assumed that, like my step dad, the teacher will yell at me because the assignment is perfectly clear and I’m being stupid and difficult and wasting their time,
Learning is a skill. And mine was not developed.
I was asked if I had homework but no one worked with on how to manage and do homework.
- How to overview my tasks and break things into doable steps so I didn’t feel overwhelmed.
- How to prioritize so I don’t panic when I’ve run out of time for important things.
- How to find answers or even feel safe to ask questions so I didn’t feel frustrated and hopeless.
Apathy came as a result of this muddy pit. It was not the root cause of it.
Reading, in particular, was hard for me. I consume the world visually and reading has always felt like labor and I’ve always been slow.
Years earlier, my step dad noticed I didn’t read on my own.
Sit down, I want to talk to you. You see how I’m always reading?
Yeah.
You should be doing the same thing. And since you have not taken it upon yourself to do so, I’m going to make sure you do.
He puts a paperback novel on the table. It was Tarzan. A several hundred page paperback book written for adults.
I’m giving you two weeks to this read this. And you had better get it done because I’m going to quiz you.
For me, reading wasn’t stepping in to a fantastical, magical world like I hear other people say it was for them, especially as kids. For me it was a place of stress, inadequacy, and shame.
I would read a couple of pages, and realize I didn’t grasp what was happening. I felt like my step dad was watching over my shoulder with his face slowly turning red. I’d go back to re-read and a couple paragraphs later I realize my mind had been elsewhere as my eyes moved over the words. I’d re-read them and the same thing would happen. My mind was trying to climb up a slippery snow bank. I felt exhausted and lethargic. And the clock was ticking.
This pattern was still in place with my junior high homework. And when my report card came, and nothing had improved, my step dad implemented a new rule.
Since you are unable to police your self, you are forcing me to do it for you.
I am putting you on academic probation. You will come directly home from school every day. You will not see friends, you will not go to cub scouts, you will not do anything.
When you get home, you will do your homework before you watch TV or anything else.
If you do not have homework, you will read out of encyclopedias for one hour.
What I needed was help. This was punishment for not knowing how to do what I didn’t know how to do, by the person responsible for teaching it.
It was one of the bright ideas he picked up in rehab, from another asshole.
I thought rehab meant everything would be better from now on. But he was worse after rehab. Instead being high and oblivious, with the occasional weekend of rage and throwing things, he now had focused attention on what the rest of us were doing wrong. He implemented a long list of these extreme and suffocating rules.
I got my grades up to barely passing.
But by then, like my allowance and all his other promises, his attention drifted away and he left me to my mediocre grades in peace.