Claire Conger

As an eleven year old, I witnessed the carnage caused by a mother’s interference with her son’s placement. (See AP Article “Parental role in selecting child’s teacher up for debate” by Diana Marszalek that appeared 17 July 2009 in the San Francisco Chronicle.)

Our school had three sixth-grade classrooms and placement was made based on how smart the administration thought we were. (These were the days when sixth grade was part of elementary school and class assignments were based on “intelligence” evaluations.)

Little Johnny was in the “dumb” class and his mother wanted him in the “smart” class. (I don’t know how we kids knew this, but we did.)

About three weeks into the school year, one sunny fall morning as thirty of us sat in our “smart” class and watched, Little Johnny was brought in and shown to a desk in the back of the room near mine.

I felt sorry for him the moment he arrived.

We were about to take our daily arithmetic quiz, a rapid-fire verbal list of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division you could follow by only putting your mind in a zen-like trance and just writing down the answers. Our teacher had spent the first three weeks of the term bringing us up to this level—she’d started with just addition, slowly, and added the other operations one at a time.

As Little Johnny was given his strip of paper on which to write his answers, I wanted to reach out to him and tell him, No one could do this on the first try. Don’t worry, hang in there! Of course I couldn’t say anything. It was the midst of class, and we were not allowed to talk.

Little Johnny was in tears within minutes. Real crying. The whole class gawked.

There was quite a bit of whispering among us kids as we dove for the door at recess.

Little Johnny ran across the play yard and disappeared in a gaggle of boys. He didn’t come back to the “smart” class.

I expect everyone thought he was stupid when really he just had not had the opportunity to be trained.