ImPerceptibility

Today I was thinking about the moment I became a homeschooler. It wasn’t when I mailed the NOI or when I decided to homeschool my kids. That was the moment it became official. I was thinking about the moment the thought became a primitive idea. It then grew, like the science experiments in my childhood closet, into something real and tangible. I was in seventh grade.

Mr. W. was my teacher and he was well known as a loud man. We would hear him yelling so loud that our teacher had to close the door. Tales of him picking up a student and his desk and slamming it up and down on the floor was a common recess story. Him grabbing a stack of comic books from a disinterested student and tossing them out the window was another. I don’t know if these stories were true but we believed them. We were all afraid of him by the time we got to seventh grade. I think he liked that.

He was a properly raised southern man. He called all the girls darling and all the boys young man. He demanded the boys keep their shirts tucked in and the caps stayed off in the building. He never yelled at the girls. Sometimes when we were particularly annoying you would see his nostrils start to flare and he would look up the sky and yell at god, but he never yelled at us. I remember being afraid that one day he would snap and kill us all. I had a crazy imagination like that. I suppose I still do.

Anyway, the moment I started my journey to become a homeschooler started in his classroom. It was the day after we had a substitute teacher. When he returned he told us the substitute has written that we hadn’t behaved well while she was there. I looked at him and knew he was lying. I knew the substitute hadn’t written that because it wasn’t true. I sat there angry as I had ever been. One after one he bullied my friends into raising their hands and admitting they had misbehaved while he was gone. I decided I was not going to raise my hand.

Eventually only me and two people who had been absent the day before were left. He then tried to get my friends to say that I had misbehaved. I sat there staring at the wall across the room and holding my hands tightly in lap to keep them from trembling. They sat there with their hand half-heartedly raised staring at their desks. He eventually realized I wasn’t going to raise my hand. He told me I’d learn a valuable lesson when I had to leave the room knowing I wasn’t taking responsibility for my action when everyone else was being honorable and staying for detention. I sat there looking at his wild eyes and flaring nostrils wondering what was wrong with me and thinking I was screwed. I did walk out of there and every step was like torture.

Once I made it outside I ran with my backpack bouncing against my back and I hated him. I hate school. I hated every person in my class. I hated my parents for making me go to school. By the time I crossed the main street I decided he was terrible person and I was going to tell him so.

The next day I dreaded going to school but I did. I found three copies of the answer to a test question tucked in my desk. He had given it to the students to reward them for their honesty. As he passed out the tests he mentioned that the people who had stayed after school wouldn’t have any problems with question number five. He turned around and looked at me. I was a quiet, well-behaved student. I never got in trouble. I knew how to play the game. But something inside me changed that day. I told him I didn’t need the answers to his test because I already knew the answers. I knew all the answers. I didn’t even have to study. Then I sat there scowling at him. It wasn’t quite the tirade I had planned out in my mind but it was something.

He stood there with his mouth hanging open for a minute then he went and sat at his desk with his head in his hands while we took the test. I was worried that I wasn’t going to make it home alive.

Now, all these years later, my hands still tremble just a little when I think about that. There’s a little lump of anger and I keep pausing to rub it with my fist. It’s located directly under my xiphoid process. I know that’s the correct name of the bone because after that Mr. W. would photocopy pages of his college text book and let me draw diagrams of bones and muscles in my notebook while he taught the lessons the school board decided we needed to learn. When I think about that, the lump changes to something else. I’m not sure what. Maybe that’s my homeschooler lump. I’m not sure.

6 Responses to “My Homeschooler Lump”