Here Comes Trouble - Michael Moore [16]
After the weather box and pollen count, it was on to teaching me to read the front-page headlines, and after that, the daily astronomy forecast, followed by the sports scores. My mother didn’t teach me the ABCs. She taught me words. Words connected to other words. Words that had meaning to me and words that had me stumped but eager to learn what they meant. Every word on the page became a puzzle to solve—and it was fun!
Soon, we were going to the library once a week and I would always check out the maximum limit—ten books. Usually I would try to slip an eleventh into the pile, and it was my good fortune that the kindly librarians were either poor at math or, more than likely, they saw what I was doing—and the last thing they wanted to do was discourage a kid who wanted to read.
Now here’s where the child abuse came in: my parents sent me to school! I was instantly bored outta my cotton-pickin’ mind—but I was careful not to let on to the other students that I could already read and write and do math. This would have been the kiss of death, especially with the boys who would have constantly beaten me up; for safety, I tried to sit by the smart girls like Ellen Carr and Kathy Collins. If the teachers suspected anything, they would have issued an Inquisition to find out who was teaching me all of this OUT OF ORDER.
So I played along, and picked up an additional skill set: acting. As the other kids sang “A-B-C-D-E-F-G,” I “struggled” right along with them, while secretly reading Dr. Seuss under the cover of my desktop. Oh, the places I would go, as long as Sister Mary didn’t know!
“Where did you get this book?” the friendly nun asked me the day she caught me.
“A third grader let me look at the pictures,” I said, with a face so straight it would’ve made Beaver Cleaver proud.
But the nuns were on to me, and yet far from condemning me for being literate, they did the only reasonable and nurturing thing they could do.
“Michael,” Sister John Catherine said to me one day before the morning bell rang, “we’ve decided that you already know what we’re teaching you in first grade, so beginning today we’re moving you to second grade.”
My eyes widened with victory.
“Now, you know, if we put you in second grade, you won’t be the smartest boy in the room like you are here. Do you think that will be OK?”
“Does this mean I won’t have to sing the ‘ABCs’ anymore?”
“Correct. There will be no more ‘ABCs.’ In fact you’ll have to learn cursive penmanship right away. Are you OK with this?”
“Yes, Sister, thank you!” It was like the warden telling a prisoner that he’s being moved from solitary to, I dunno, Disneyland? I couldn’t wait to get home to tell my parents the good news.
“They did what?” my mother quietly shouted, not believing she had just heard what I told her.
“They put me in second grade! I spent the whole day in second grade! It was great!”
“Well, you’re going right back to first grade!”
“What? No! Why?!”
“Because I want you to be with children your own age.”
“But they’re only a year older!”
“And a year bigger and a year ahead of you, and if you stayed with them you are going to get shortchanged a year in your education.”
I could not understand this logic. Years later my sister Anne would say it was because Mom was a traditional Republican and she figured, I’m paying taxes for a full twelve years of schooling, I want my kid to get the entire twelve years! But we paid tuition to go to a Catholic school. Had I known anything then about family finances, I would have pointed out to her that skipping me a grade meant that