When The Screws Ain’t Lookin’ I’m Bustin’ Out Of Here

When The Screws Ain’t Lookin’ I’m Bustin’ Out Of Here


Are you with me? Tie your shoe.

2 thoughts on “When The Screws Ain’t Lookin’ I’m Bustin’ Out Of Here”

  1. Ha! Spent four years in a Benedictine monastery high school as a border. A little taller than the inmates you picture, but I can relate.

    jdkelly

  2. After teaching me how to read English at home, age 4+, Dad was called to the Korean Police Action, and I was left behind to experience the joys of school, as I had jealously seen my elder sister do, lo, these past several years.

    But when school came, my teacher handed out “The Dick and Jane Primer” and asked if anybody could read…

    I naively raised my hand, and was reading the pages when she snatched the book from my hand, and furiously declared (while TOWERING OVER ME) “I don’t know HOW you’re doing that, but WE HAVEN’T TAUGHT YOU TO READ, so YOU CAN’T READ!”

    Tears on the way to school, waiting outside the cyclone fence, hating to go in to be told that I was lying…

    Mom was pregnant with my last brother, and she was stunned when the teacher took the result of her emotional bludgeoning (that result? I began st-stuttering) and told Mom “He’s borderline RETARDED!”

    So they put me in the Gulag in the basement, I learned to read with the retards, singing “This Old Man”, and SWORE A BLOOD OATH to the Lord God Almighty, that:
    1/This was NOT the way to teach;
    2/There WAS a better way; and
    3/I’d use that better way; and
    4/I’d NEVER do to kids what was being done to 6-year-old ME!

    And I didn’t.

    I’ve taught Korean to adults, English to adults & children and honored that vow so long ago…

    (circa 1952-53; western Washington)

Comments are closed.

Comments are closed.