As I have mentioned elsewhere, I didn’t know I was autistic as a child, and my sixth grade year in Illinois didn’t get off to a great start. Soon, however, things took a turn for the better, due to two facts that were a cornerstone of my childhood experience. First, I was good at soccer, so the boys at school warmed to me. This would turn out to be key to my making friends all the way through high school, but this was the first time I’d been at a school where soccer was played.
Second, though, was that I made an enemy. Now, normal kids might not consider making an enemy to be a highlight of their time at school. But then, normal kids probably had other kids for their enemies.
My enemy was a teacher.
I was a bright kid, never needed something explained twice, learned things easily and quickly, read faster than anyone who wasn’t a dedicated, practiced speed reader, one of which I wouldn’t encounter until I got to college. As a result, I was a challenge for most of my teachers. Some teachers would just surrender and give me a textbook and tell me to teach myself. Then there were the teachers who were determined to assert their authority over me.
I did not respond well to that.
This enmity was born one afternoon when I was in math class. This was a pretty advanced school, so they taught geometry in sixth grade. The teacher, however, was subpar. This wasn’t a surprise to me, as at the beginning of the school year, when introducing himself, this teacher had mentioned he had an English degree.
Math class was one of my favorite classes. Not because I liked math, so much, though I was good at it, but because in math class I sat next to the cutest girl in the entire school. I had thought the girl who ended up not actually being my girlfriend in fifth grade had been cute, but this girl totally redefined the paradigm for how attractive a girl could be. She looked like she could be on television, or in the posters of happy, stylish kids on the walls at the mall.
One time, there had been a tornado that swept through the school’s playground, tearing a basketball hoop out of the ground and flinging it into the parking lot where it impaled the principal’s car. I was one of the students who sheltered in the water boiler room, with this stunningly attractive girl, for four hours. We talked, I tried jokes, she smiled and laughed, though whether she was just being polite was beyond my ability to discern.
It was the best four hours of my young life.
Sitting next to her in math class, I took every opportunity to admire her profile, hopefully without veering into staring, because even I knew staring was creepy. On the day in question, the teacher was fumbling his way though a concept my mother had taught me literally years before, so I was bored and reading a book, when the object of my infatuation leaned over to ask me to explain something.
If there is one thing I loved more than reading, it was being able to explain something, which might be how I ended up preaching, coaching, and teaching for the entirety of my adult life. I scooted my chair over and leaned close, so close I could have put my arm around her had I the courage and permission, so close I could feel her breath when she turned to look at me. It wa intoxicating. I explained what the teacher should have said, and while I was talking, the teacher abruptly cut off his lecture.
“Excuse me,” he said in an cutting tone, and I looked up to see him staring at me through his horn-rimmed glasses, “What are you talking about? What is more important than what we are learning?”
I explained that we were discussing what we were learning, that I was just helping her understand what he was saying. This is when things, from my perspective, took a turn for the better.
“So you think you can teach this better than I can?” the teacher asked.
I didn’t do well with rhetorical questions. I thought he was genuinely asking me if I thought I could do better than he was doing. And, well, I was already helping one student, making up for his shortcomings, so clearly, obviously, I thought I could do a better job. I told him as much, guilelessly.
“Well, why don’t you come up here and teach, then,” he challenged.
Again, if he meant to be rhetorical, he chose the wrong target. I took it as a genuine invitation and strode up to the front of the classroom. I proceeded to explain the topic clearly and succinctly, giving examples and answering questions. I even included a catchy song to help them remember. Class came to a close, and I assigned homework and dismissed the class, to a round of applause.
I smiled at the teacher. I’m not sure what I was expecting his reaction to be, but I certainly didn’t expect it to be handing me a detention slip.
At this point in my life, I was a pretty strict rule follower. There is every possibility that I would have just accepted the detention and served my time, except for one random coincidence: in history class we were studying the civil rights movement.
Now, I had never heard any of the things we were learning in history class. I had attended a small private school in Arizona, not exactly renowned for it’s educational system, and I didn’t have a single Black kid in any of my classes before sixth grade. My mom had made sure I had a good grasp on the history of our Native tribe (we literally had a children’s book titled Only the Names Remain, about the people we had to leave unburied on the Trail of Tears), and my dad had talked to me about a bunch of history, as he was a huge Civil War buff, so I knew the details of every major battle in the Civil War, but they had taught me nothing about the plight of Black Americans..
As a result, everything I was learning in history class was new, and it was amazing. I was in awe of the resilience of the Black people in the face of hatred, bigotry, and oppression. I was absolutely pumped, like, ‘Hell, yes! Justice! Equality!’ (except I said ‘heck’, because I was still a mild mannered Christian boy). I ravenously chased down any possible book I could find on the subject, rapidly catching up on everything from the slave trade and conditions of American slavery to Stanley Carmichael and the Voting Rights Bill.
Back to math class. It struck me that it was unjust for a teacher who invited me to teach to punish me for doing his job better than he was capable of doing. The civil rights movement inspired me to think that obeying unjust laws was itself a contravention of justice, so I declined to serve the detention, which earned me another detention, which I also didn’t serve.
As it happened, when standing up to a perceived injustice, I could be quite stubborn.
It turned out that standing up to teachers was exactly the sort of thing other kids admired, so I started getting encouraged by other students who, in the normal course of events, never talked to me. I decided to scale things up and began organizing coordinated protests. We started small. At, say, 11:47, everyone flipped their pencil toward the front of the class. At 2:11, everyone dropped their textbook on the floor.
Things escalated. Students in other years heard about what we were doing and wanted in on the action. I scheduled a sit-in, refusing to come in from recess one day, hundreds of kids sitting in a massive circle chanting about not going in.
Eventually, the principal summoned me to his office and asked me just what I was hoping to accomplish with these demonstrations. I declared that it wasn’t unreasonable for me, a sixth grader, to be taught by adults who at least knew more than I did. I mentioned that our math teacher didn’t even have a degree in math.
After a lengthy conversation, the principal agreed that teachers should be more qualified for the classes they taught. He agreed to support a change in the school’s policies, requiring teachers to at least have a minor in the subject they were teaching.
Then, because I was twelve, I also negotiated for five more minutes of recess on Fridays.
After our triumph of protest, I was no longer on the outside looking in at the social circles of our class. I made friends, and the astoundingly gorgeous girl in our class talked to me regularly, sometimes for no reason at all. Being gun shy after my disastrous initial foray into the dating scene, I never did ask her out, and at the end of the year, for reasons having to do with my dad’s job, my parents decided to move back to Sierra Vista, and I never talked to her again.
To this point in my life, my most successful attempt at making friends proceeded from a flagrant disregard for the rules. That was a lesson that I took deeply to heart, much to my parents’ later chagrin.
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