Early Education

When I was four, we moved. Far away, to a big house in a tiny town called Colo, Iowa. It was a good move-- for the first couple years.
  Mom tried to be a good mom. She read to us at night. Well, mostly I think she was reading to Tammy, the oldest, who was a slow learner because she was born premature, but the rest of us got in on it. Mom read out loud, underlining the words with her finger as she read. It didn't take me long to figure out how she was reading.
  The word was "what". It dawned on me that Mom said "what" as her finger passed under a particular clump of print, and if I could find that same clump further down the page, she might say it again. I scanned the page, found another clump like the first, and waited. When she got there, she said it again--"what". Aha!! The clumps all stood for a word, and if I could learn the clumps, then I, too, could read!!
  So, at four years old, I tried to memorize each story, then go over it the next day, trying to "read" the story as I remembered it. It worked. I taught myself to read, and somehow the phonics of the letters fell into place for me. It wasn't long before I was reading whatever I could get my hands on: newspapers, magazines, books, the Bible. It became my favorite pastime.
  Once I mastered reading, I wanted more. I begged Tammy and Vicky to teach me math. So when they got home from school, we played "school", where they taught me math. I practiced while they were in school, and I got addition and subtraction, but was baffled by multiplication. But I memorized some basic multiplication, even though I didn't get how it worked.
  Lonny, who was just one year older than me, was struggling in school. By now, mom was too busy for us kids, so I started helping him with his schoolwork--he needed the help, and I needed to be helpful. Plus, since I had just recently learned it myself, I figured I could teach him how I learned it. It didn't quite work out that way, because he didn't learn the way I did, but we cobbled along together and it became a regular activity-- him settling in to do his homework with me perched next to him, helping him. When the next parent-teacher conference came around with his teacher Mrs. Fickess, she accused mom of doing his work for him. His homework was fine, but his tests were still consistently low. (It should be noted that Lonny was, much later, diagnosed with Dyslexia.) Mom told the Mrs. Fickess that I was the one helping Lonny, not her, and she became outraged that mom would lie to her face like that. Mom said, "Test her if you want-- she really is teaching Lonny." So Mrs. Fickess arranged for me to come to the school one morning and run through a series of tests. She pulled me aside and asked me if I had been helping Lonny, which I answered yes to, and asked me where I learned to read and do math. When the test results came back weeks later, Mrs. Fickess was not happy. She really seemed to hate our family, and I think she was unhappy that her accusations against mom were proved wrong-- I was reading at a 9th grade level and doing 3rd grade math.
  Unfortunately, this incident colored the way Mrs. Fickess treated me. When I finally started school, she was my first and second grade teacher. She was cruel to me, singling me out for unjust punishments. She mocked and mimicked me in front of the other kids. When the other kids talked, she would snap at me for it and punish me, even though it was obvious to the whole class it wasn't me. I got in trouble for what the other kids did. And when I went home and told Mom, she wouldn't believe me. I tied to tell dad-- he wouldn't believe me, either.  Worse yet, when I got in trouble at school, I got punished at home.
At this point in my life, I hadn't fully realized the concept that all adults are there to let you down, drag you down, hold you back. I hadn't fully experienced it yet, so I still held out hope that good would conquer evil, right would trump wrong. I was wrong.