Self-Paced Learning

Before we all had ADHD and none of us knew what it was

Measured in self-paced reading booklets completed, I was at the head of my third-grade class. It wasn’t about vocabulary or comprehension. It was self-esteem.

When Miss Lang called me to her desk to tell me I would be going to Miss Dahlgren’s fourth-grade classroom for “accelerated education,” I thought it would be for more reading. The really good booklets must be in Miss Dahlgren’s room. But when I arrived for my first accelerated education session, Miss Dahlgren was teaching math.

Miss Lang bored me with math. But in Miss Dahlgren’s classroom I was terrified.

I worried that on the worksheets the plus and minus signs were unfamiliar: The pluses were tilted on their sides and the minuses had little dots above and below them. I feared asking Miss Dahlgren about that. Miss Dahlgren was pretty and younger than the other teachers. She looked like Cher. I didn’t want her to think Miss Lang was wrong sending me for accelerated education, so I stayed quiet, tried to look confident. I decided the different plus and minus signs must be part of the accelerated way to do math in fourth grade—like how in third grade we were learning to write in cursive instead of printing.

Meanwhile, with Miss Lang, I kept tearing through successive reading booklets, hoping the stories would get more interesting as I forged ahead. The quizzes we had to do after finishing the booklets were dull. I filled the answer sheets in quickly to get to the next booklets. But Miss Lang didn’t always release the next booklets right away. I grew anxious: I was frustrated at being held back in regular third-grade reading while struggling to catch up in accelerated fourth-grade math.

Miss Dahlgren set me straight on the new math symbols, but as soon as I understood the new math operations and started getting most of the answers right, the topic changed. Although I managed to barely keep up with the fourth graders, I never felt confident enough with one math topic before getting pushed to the next. I was a third-grade Goldilocks in Hell: Too easy, too hard, stop. Hurry!

My lifelong habit of picking at my fingernails germinated in Miss Lang’s classroom. Waiting one day for whatever was going to be next, I fidgeted with a worn area on the side of one of my sneakers. I picked at a layer of rubber sole that was coming loose. I was startled when a piece of the shoe came apart in my hand, a band of white rubber sloughing away from the inside edge. It was not unlike pulling an errant thread and witnessing an entire seam dropping out. I tried to push the rubber flap back. How could I make it stay in place? Elmer’s glue? Maybe the craft paste in that little tub we used for construction paper projects?

“Steven!”

Startled, I stared at Miss Lang. I pressed the pieces of my disintegrating shoe together, direct pressure on a wound.

She glared above translucent horn-rimmed eyeglasses. “Don’t rend your clothing! Your parents paid good money for those shoes!”

I dropped my foot, straightened my back, tried concealing my feet beneath my desk.

I already had new shoes at home that Mom had been telling me to wear, but they weren’t broken in and I preferred my comfy ones. After Miss Lang scolded me for rending my clothing, I started wearing the stiff new shoes. I also found a new fidget target.

My assigned desk was old, and, like the comfy sneakers I had rended, its laminate surface was coming apart. There was a chip on its surface that I couldn’t ignore. It was shaped like the state of Iowa. I noticed this while Miss Lang was teaching us about maps. She was standing in front of a wall map of the United States. While Miss Lang droned on, I considered that the Iowa-shaped chip on my desktop wasn’t quite straight enough across its top edge. With my fingernails I picked at the top of Iowa to give it a cleaner northern border, but a bigger chip than I meant to remove popped off its northeast corner. Suddenly Iowa looked more like Ohio, except that its southern border was too straight. I worked on the southern border, but each time I chipped a little piece of the desktop away to make the shape on my desk better resemble Ohio, too little or too much broke off. I kept trying. Before long it was looking about right, but when I sat back and looked again at the map that Miss Lang was still talking about, I saw that I’d gone too far, making Ohio taller than it should be. I referenced the map to consider other states that might fit and settled on Indiana, Ohio’s neighbor to the west. The height was about right, but both the southern and northern borders needed work.

For the next few days, between reading booklets and cursive handwriting practice sessions, I picked away at my desktop. The delaminating area of my desktop grew larger each day, evolving through several states, each larger than the last. I think I intuited some things about how borders are formed and regional compromise: I got the southern horn of Texas pretty well established around the same time that Oklahoma had to relinquish its panhandle. I resolved to make a map of the entire United States on my desktop, and then I could pencil the outlines of all the states inside the map. I was excited about the project: Even Miss Lang would be impressed when it was finished.

When I had to leave the room—lunch, recess, advanced math—I would casually leave something on my desk to cover my work in progress: A reading booklet splayed open as if to save my place, or the windbreaker I had started wearing to school mostly for this purpose. I’d pretend to still be a little chilled in the morning and not put it away in the closet, then toss it on my desk before going off to the lavatory or PE.

By Friday afternoon, my map was too big to cover with a book or even an incomplete construction paper craft project, so I forgot my windbreaker, draped it across my desktop before running to catch the bus.

I was surprised Monday morning when my windbreaker wasn’t where I’d left it. Also, my desk wasn’t where I’d left it. Third row from the front, one from the back, one place from the right, an open expense of gray gleaming floor tiles. I walked to the space where my desk belonged and I looked at Ann, who was seated beside me in her assigned desk. (Decades later, Ann remembered this whole thing with me during cocktails at a reunion.) In third grade Ann didn’t know any better than to shrug at me, and her shrug was comforting, a little oasis of empathy.

“Steven?” Miss Lang announced.

I looked at Miss Lang.

“We’ll have a conference in the hallway.”

I’d never had a conference in the hallway. I’d seen other boys summoned for conferences in the hallway. When that happened, they were in trouble. I followed behind Miss Lang.

Mr. Edward, the custodian, was waiting in the hallway. He was tall and wore denim overalls. I liked Mr. Edward and I always felt bad for him when someone threw up and he had to come with his mop and bucket and that bag of sawdust that he would spread on the spot after mopping up the vomit. My desk was sitting in the hallway behind him, and my windbreaker was draped over the desk’s seat, my unfinished map of the United States revealed. Beside the desk was an empty cardboard box and a steel-frame chair.

Mr. Edward explained that he had found the damaged desktop when he came in after school on Friday to mop the floor and wipe down all the desktops like he always did. He was calm, his voice reasonable, but pained. He said he’d spent the whole weekend thinking on how he might be able to fix that desktop. He had a metal can in his hand and said that when there’s a little chip on a desktop, like sometimes happens, he could almost always fix it with this repair compound. “But the damaged area here is too big,” he said. He looked sad and shook his head slowly while he talked. I felt bad for him. “I could lay down a lot of putty, but I’d never get it smooth and level enough to write on.”

“Steven,” Miss Lang said, and then she talked for a painfully long time about how I had disrespected Mr. Edward by defacing my desk, how I had ruined school property, wrecked the desk that had been entrusted to me for the year, and that nobody else would ever be able to use it again.

Mr. Edward said maybe he’d be able to find a replacement top from an old desk that wasn’t being used any more, or maybe get one from a different school building, but he didn’t know how long that might take. At least a week, maybe the rest of the school year.

I looked again at my desk, back at Miss Lang and Mr. Edward. “I can still use it,” I started. I thought it worked just fine, I was going to say.

“No!” Miss Lang cut me off. “Steven, take your things out of the desk.” She said Mr. Edward would take it to his shop and try repairing it so that maybe someone else could use it next year. “Put your things in that box,” she said. She grabbed the chair, carried it into the classroom.

Mr. Edward watched while I emptied the crayons and pencils and paste and glue and the one Peanuts book that Miss Lang had said I could keep at school, and I dumped them all into the cardboard box. He handed the windbreaker to me, and I stuffed it into the box.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

Mr. Edward nodded. His nod meant an awful lot to me. It still does. Then I watched him carry my desk away.

I shoved my box of things close to the door, propped the door open with my foot. Miss Lang was talking to the class and when I came in, she went silent. I lifted the box and carried it past three rows of classmates. Everyone watched me carry my box to the steel chair where my desk had been. I put my box down in front of the chair. I sat. I tucked my feet away. I stared hard at Miss Lang.

Miss Lang nodded. She resumed talking about whatever the lesson was.

I looked past her to that map of the United States. I imagined fitting in, in any of all those states.