My Elementary School Nightmare: I Was the 'Bad' Student Even When I Tried to Be a Good One

I felt trapped. The stiff wooden chair ground into my back and legs. The desk smelled of sour maple mixed with marker ink and dirt. There was barely any room to move, which made focusing even harder. School felt like a wooden prison disguised as a place to learn.

The lights were searingly bright, illuminating the drab walls and leaving little for my imagination. The blackboard was covered in yellow chalk words and numbers. For that, I was grateful, because it meant I wouldn’t have to endure the stabbing squeaks of chalk scraping across the dark monolith.

I told myself over and over:
I have to focus.
I have to pay attention.
I have to do my work properly.
I have to stay still.
I have to avoid daydreaming.
I have to be a good student, like all the others.

It was established early on that rocking in my seat was bad. But so was doodling or fidgeting with my pencil. My hands were supposed to stay on my lap. My eyes on the teacher. My body still. “This is how you learn.”

This was considered a good moment for me at my private elementary school. 

So, every day I repeated my mental chant: don’t rock, don’t fidget, don’t doodle, look at the teacher, sit still. I poured all my energy into remembering those rules and holding back my natural urges to move. I wanted to be a good student. I wanted to learn, even when it wasn’t clear why we were learning these things.

“Christopher, can you please answer the question?”

Her voice jolted me out of my chant. I was looking at her, but my mind was somewhere else. She said if my eyes were on her, I must have been listening. I didn’t understand how those were the same thing, but I learned my lesson about asking questions.

Why was daydreaming bad?
Why couldn’t I rock?
Why did Adam and Eve only get clothes after they sinned?
If a platypus could fly, would it still be a mammal?

My head was full of questions, but I learned that asking them was “disruptive,” “defiant,” “wasting time.” I thought school was where you were supposed to learn, but I quickly figured out that curiosity was dangerous.

I didn’t dare ask her to repeat the question. Instead, I scanned the blackboard, the desks, the book in front of me; anything to guess the subject and the answer. Sometimes my gamble paid off. Other times I was met with laughter from classmates or scolding for “being silly.”

And then came the punishment I knew well: no recess.

Recess was my salvation. Fresh air. Running on the field. Climbing the elephant-shaped bars. Diving into imaginary worlds with my best friend or quietly sitting together in our own thoughts.

But recess also meant being heckled for being “weird.” Pushed. Mocked. Reminded I was “dumb.” I couldn’t tell the teacher because that would make me the worst thing of all: a tattletale. So I soaked every insult as a truth and waited for the bullies to get bored, so I could slip back into my imagination.

That was only if I earned recess. It was a “reward” for sitting still, following all the rules, and finishing the dull seatwork on time.

At home, my mom noticed I was falling behind in math. She created elaborate games with cutouts, one was a tree with falling leaves and Mickey Mouse raking them up. I’d return the numbered leaf to the branch with the right answer. It felt like play. I got lost in the world. I could move. And I improved. Almost as if learning worked better when I wasn’t stuck at a desk all day.

At school, the chalkboard sometimes blurred together, the words smearing into yellow clouds. I’d get headaches and aches in my legs and shoulders. They thought it must be my eyes. But after I aced my exam, I overheard the optometrist say I was probably pretending for attention and faking bad eyesight to get glasses like my friends. Another line added to my chant: don’t pretend the board is blurry.

Midway through the year, I was pulled out for one-on-one work. The aide was kind and gentle, and I preferred her to the overwhelming classroom. On good days, my brain soared and I impressed her. On rough days, especially after loud, chaotic mornings, I froze. My answers hid from me. I was lost.

Soon, my main teacher said I was “pretending” not to know the answers for special attention. I can't know it one day but struggle the next, I'm wasting the aide's time. She scolded and spanked me. She was the teacher. She must be right. Maybe I really was imagining my struggles.

The one thing I always loved was creative writing. Sometimes we had a prompt, but it didn’t matter, because my imagination could transform anything into something magical. But just as my story poured out of me, the sharp announcement came: time’s up, put your folders away. It was math time now. My body was still in the story, but the class had moved on. I never understood why we couldn’t finish what we started before switching to something else. How was I  supposed to do another subject when all I could think about was that unfinished task?

Then came the “special day”: the Teddy Bear’s Picnic. I imagined hiking into a cool forest, luscious apples above, birds singing, teddy bears dancing, magical caverns to explore. Instead, we sat on the classroom floor with our stuffed bears, ate a single cracker with honey, and watched Winnie the Pooh.

Not long after, my teacher told my parents I wasn’t “reaching my potential.” I was “choosing” when to work hard. I was “inconsistent.” I was “disappointing.”I tried to follow the rules. I tried to figure out when to raise my hand. I tried to manage my bladder until she finished speaking. I tried not to be weird. But the rules kept shifting. Like how sometimes I was scolded for asking a question and another time for not asking.

And when it all got too much, when the lights burned, the noise pounded, the rules blurred, and I felt like I was failing, I’d get headaches, dizziness, stomachaches, nausea, jabs in my shoulders. I started missing school once a week. At home, allowed to rock, talk to myself, and act out adventures, I’d recover within hours.

My teacher said I was faking it. That I didn’t care. Another recess lost. Another scar of shame.

I started feeling anxious before the bus ride. Would I be called on? Would I get recess? Would I be bullied? Would we ever have a real Teddy Bear Picnic? Would we ever discuss flying platypuses or why unicorns and dragons weren’t real?

Sometimes classmates yelled at me for staring. I didn’t mean to. I was studying them, trying to learn how kids were “supposed” to act. People-watching became more educational than class. When the yelling got too much, I turned to movies and shows, studying characters and mimicking them.

At the time, I thought masks and disguises were for Halloween or imaginative play. But I was already wearing one every day. It didn’t make me an ace student. It didn’t make me fit in. But it was good enough. I had “potential,” even if I didn’t reach it.

I may never have become the “proper” student. But I did learn how to survive.

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