An Indifferent Student

I seem to recall myself as being a rather clever student.  I learned to read early and was a voracious consumer of, well, anything.  Big stacks of books from the branch library at Jordan Junior High.  But....was I as smart as I remember myself being?  A case study, based on artifacts dredged from the basement of my parent's house.

Looks promising.  It contains among other things my report card from 3rd grade.

Now, back in that era you got either an S for satisfactory or an N for needs work.  That's it.  No Excellent or anything like that.  Opening it up I find that I got Needs Work for:

First half of the year, Works Well with other Children, Follows Directions, Works Well Independently, Begins and Finishes Work on Time, Uses Time Wisely, Listens Attentively, and Reads Independently for information and Pleasure.  OUCH.

The only thing I got an "N" for both halves of the year was for Writes Legibly.  Hey, I was destined to write prescriptions, gimme a break!

A bit of a come down.  I did get recommended to move up to Grade 4, and to my credit only was absent 1/2 a day, while turning up to be a mediocre student a full 176.5 days.

The Report Card was signed by my teacher, Mrs. Schwaub, and by both my parents.  My M.D. father's signature was very poor penmanship indeed.  The card was also marked with a stamp from Arthur T. Nelson, the Principal.  I remember him being chased down the hallway by a kid with a knife, who actually lived on our block.  Ah, the idylic 1960's.

I'm not sure what to make of this one.  In faint red ink up at the top it says "Please use your pencil".  Was this an instruction from the get go that I impudently ignored?  

I gotta say, in black Crayola crayon my penmanship, or shall we say penchildship, was pretty darn good.  You can see through the paper to some black crayon math that young "Timmy" as I then styled myself, absolutely crushed.

More stuff from "Timmy" age 6 1/2.  Now that I have a grand daughter about that age I can say, hey, that's outfit's a bit much, don't ya think?

 

Geeze, I hope this was from high school.  Geometry was the only math I every actually liked.  I got 18/20 on this page.  The preceding page was more word problems.  For example: Consider two simple closed curves which intersect at points A and B.  Consider a point C which is in the interior of one of the curves.  Various options were given, to each of which I had to respond True or False.  

21/30.  Guess I never really got to the Truth of Mathematics.  And for what it's worth I got out my pen and paper and tried to puzzle this thing out.  I think the teacher marked me off a couple of points incorrectly.

Subsequent finds of report cards from other years of grade school and Junior High did not, alas, show any sudden flourishing of academic genius.  And high school?  Lets not talk about high school.