I have a secret

...I'm basically a completely self-taught reader and writer.

I was an eternally distracted and mostly absent student all throughout my school days and years.

I practically skipped the ENTIRE YEAR of 7th grade, but you could find me down at the sewer smoking or down at the dead end by Kim Martin's house. I was transferred the next year from there to Tilden. Suspended about 8 times for smoking, I got sent the next year to Leland. Then 'graduated' to HS, skipped a lot, smoked a lot and was placed in a private school in D.C. which was a hallway in the basement of a church where outcasts like me smoked most of the day in Rock Creek Park and enjoyed the most lenient flex sshedule of any school system with literally hours between classes. Got kicked out of there the start of the second year and ended back in the Hometown at WJ where I literally didn't know my schedule and didn't bother to find out. I ended up getting my GED the summer everyone graduated in my class and even snagged a class ring from WJ.

I actually learned to 'read' in third grade where I spent most of the time on the floor doing something other than whatever the rest of the class was doing; except when they passed out those boxes of primary color crayons and a sheet of construction paper (I got my first kiss underneath a desk in that classroom during a 'duck and cover' air raid drill).

I became aware one day that I was in what looked to me like a reading circle - and I hadn't bothered to learn letters yet, except for my own name which promptly got me in trouble on my first day in first grade when I pointed out to the boy named Harold sitting beside me that his name was almost the same as Ronald, my name, and was made to stand in the corner for talking out loud (where I discovered the front of the 'Puff the Magic Dragon" album cover which happened to be in in the trouble corner along with me).

All of the other children were being asked to read something or other from the book, like the one I'd left on my desk, and I panicked and caught a lucky look at the yellowing phonics chart hanging one side of the blackboard with the alphabet at the top and the vowels, a-e-i-o-and u, with the rest of the exceptions (sometimes y) on the other side, and I started memorizing it.

Just that simple. I couldn't actually process anything the teacher was saying, and words on a page in front of me just scrambled together and would put me right to sleep if I stared at them too long; did so for years afterward.

I eventually found a few books I liked and read them. I'd come to a word I didn't know, and I'd just pause on it and try and figure out what it meant in the context of what I was reading and moved on.

I'm sure that invention of mine was why 'reading comprehension' was my highest score on my GED, and what saved me from my barely registering math score which was the result of refusing to do any more math after my fifth grade teacher had the audacity to give us a test on long division two days before school let out in the summer, causing me to take an hour out of another perfectly good summer day to learn that and fractions out of a GED prep book the day before the test.

My mom was a grade school teacher for most of her life, and I couldn't actually process what she was saying to me when she tried to learn me either.