The US public school system can be a nightmare for some. My entire school life had been a torture chamber all its own. As I entered the high school it just got worse. I started making terrible grades, and even failed one grade. It was not because I did not want to learn but because I was afraid to go to school. The people that picked on me before were just during breaks and before or after school. Now it had come to a point that when the teacher was writing on the board someone might use me for a punching bag and threaten my life if I said it was anything but my own stupidity that I fell in the floor. The final straw that broke the camels back was when the Physical Education Teacher looked me square in the eyes and said, " I wish you were a little older so I could beat you to a pulp."
Something I have never forgotten or forgiven the US school system for is not being able to graduate properly. It was not that I was not smart enough. It all was due to the fact I did not want to hurt someone else even to defend myself. It hurt me more inside when I hurt someone else's feelings; it hurt me more than him or her. I came to accept that this was OK and that I was not wrong. It was the people whom were adults, always telling me I had to defend myself that was wrong. I believed because Jesus was whom I had decided to follow and he never hurt anyone, not even in his own defense. Due to my many problems with fellow students I was afraid to even go into the gym. This was where I always became a punching bag for some big bully. But the one thing I can not forget is the day that the coach at the Laurens High School looked me straight in the eye and said he wished I were older so he could beat me to a pulp. I went to the office and called my mom to come and get me. I cannot remember what I told her to get her to the school. I am not even sure to this day that I told her about this. I did tell her that I would not go back to school. She had said then that I would have to get my education somehow. She says now that I did live up to my promise of that day. It just makes me so mad when I here about the problems we have in the schools. They need to take these kinds of people and put them in a special school early on. At that school the supervision should be really strict. This would let people like me get a decent education. The school system just suspends them and puts them into the streets to become criminals. It just makes me so mad every time I think of that day. This was not a student but someone trusted with our children's education.
I graduated from the first 12 years of school March 1980 by taking a special state opted test that proves I was educated to a desirable level.