From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Mon Jul 23 2001 - 01:33:31 MDT
At 03:06 PM 7/22/01 -0700, samantha wrote:
>> The private schools do this better.
>I mainly sat in the back and read science fiction. :-)
I did that when I could, but kept getting caught. The Christian Brothers
liked to snap the edge of a wooden rule down on your fingers. I'm surprised
that I can enjoy a book any longer without banging my hands painfully every
15 minutes or so.
>It is strange to remember it but until the 9th grade I thought I
>must be dumb. The reason I thought that was that I couldn't
>grasp the underlying logic or framework that made all the things
>being thrown at us in school hang together. I couldn't catch
>what they were getting at with the approach or the seemingly
>random collections of facts. My intuition said there must be an
>underlying system, a fabric of reality. I assumed that everyone
>else knew and I was missing it!
I might have blathered on about this previously, but I was regarded as
something of a retard by the early part of secondary school. My working
class parents scrimped and saved and between having more babies sent me
from fourth grade to seventh to a medium-level moderately expensive Jesuit
school, where I didn't have a clue. That's where I was derided in front of
the whole class by an old fart for asserting that humans one day would
travel into orbit. Not to the Moon or farther, mind you; to a space
station. Everyone laughed heartily at this stupid ide, and punched me
later. It was 1954.
In 1957, half a year or so before the first satellite went up (shit, who
was expecting *that*??!!), I was sacked from that school due my mental
inadequacies and sent to a technical school. I made one coat hanger out of
wood, a sheet metal dirtpan (rudely cut and soldered), and a nicely gnurled
punch.
When I was 15 I escaped sideways. God awmighty.
Damien Broderick
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