[Arch0wl]

Originally Posted by Reincarnate

How did you get expelled in fifth grade?

I was isolated socially from 3rd grade to 5th grade. When I was in 1st grade, this girl I was friends with (her name was Samantha, iirc) skipped a grade, and I honestly should have too -- the coursework was ludicrously easy, and both of us thought so. When I was in 3rd grade my teacher actually suggested I skip a grade or two, but the school gave my mom a huge guilt-trip when she tried and gave her a lot of doomsday hypotheticals. So they didn't, and I was typed as "the smart one" by teachers and other students, which led me to think that I was different on some fundamental level.

I spent pretty much all of my free time playing video games. I would have read, but I didn't know that advanced books existed. The only books we were able to read were encyclopedias and books calibrated to what our reading level was supposed to be. This was a school that was in a bad neighborhood, so it was relentlessly one-size-fits-all.

By the time I had gotten to 5th grade I was very overweight (here's a picture: http://i.imgur.com/RDNIHOv.jpg) and I had just moved into a new neighborhood. There was this kid who lived several houses across from me -- we'll call him X for the purposes of anonymity.

I don't know if he just had a really bad upbringing or if he's actually that way, but X was psychopathic. He lied and stole chronically. Before we met him, a kid in our neighborhood pointed to him and said "that kid's the devil." And on the first day I met him, he asked if I could see a Pokemon card. I showed it to him, and he grabbed it from my hands and ran off with it. I was raised primarily by my mom so where most kids would get violent over things like this, that course of action really didn't enter my head. I thought violence was unethical at that age, in part because I was raised to believe that.

I think X hated me because his father was absent from his life and my dad is 6'3" and ex-military. X was a bully, but I was roughly around the same size as him and probably taller than him by an inch or two, so he couldn't do anything physically. He'd do things like suck up to the teacher and then get a bunch of his friends to say that I did something or other. Or, he'd spread rumors about me. He made fun of my weight constantly, multiple times on a daily basis. One day in particular I remember -- we had a substitute teacher, so X got everyone in the class to throw shit at me, saying "hey everyone, hit the retard." I looked at the substitute like "what the hell are you doing?" but she just laughed it off in a way that if someone else was there, she'd point and say "haha, those kids being kids! No roughhousing now, children!"

It's important to note how X was able to win the favor of teachers. He was dumb, but he pretended to be even dumber than he was to teachers, so that when he did well on a test or whatever, the teacher would think "I'm a great teacher! Look at how good this kid is doing!"

He had stolen stuff from my house several times already and tried to pawn it off at a garage sale, so my mom hated him. In response, he accused my mother of molesting him. (edit: apparently this is not correct. see below.)

Toward the end of the year I started getting suicidal and X took that as an opportunity to spread more rumors about me. There was a Vietnamese kid a few years older than us who was the neighborhood boogeyman at the time; X's clique would fabricate ridiculous stories about him. One time during lunch they said he intended to break into my house with a gun of some kind, so in retaliation I said "if he does, my dad has a rifle."

Two of the girls at the lunch table misheard this as "I have a rifle and will shoot you" and reported it to the principal the next day, but I have reason to believe that they were egged on by X, because that very same day he was in the office writing some kind of statement. This was right after Columbine, so the school believed the two girls on their word for reasons similar to why they believed X. In addition, I fit the profile: white, smart, isolated, plays video games a lot.

The school expelled me due to an alleged "terroristic threat" and allowed me to come back only under the condition that I sign a form saying I had made said threat, and do three days of alternative school following the signing of that form. My parents refused to let me do this, so the school sued them on truancy charges. We eventually settled out of court, because the school's case was ridiculous and their testimonies didn't match up at all. (edit: apparently, this is wrong. see below. the school did mention truancy, but we were sued by the parents of the two girls, not the school.)

The consequence though is that I was homeschooled by my mother for three years and partially homeschooled for another two. My mother knows how to read and write well, but she doesn't know math beyond basic arithmetic. She's extremely loving and tried her best, but she could only teach as much as she knew.

The effects of that expulsion hit me even now. When I went back into public school, I didn't have adequate math knowledge for my grade level so I went to a ridiculously ghetto transition school for a period of time. When I say "ridiculously ghetto," I mean someone there killed a cop and no one was surprised. I had to learn Algebra out of a textbook in a self-paced classroom where 2/3 of my Algebra class was pregnant. The very first time I took the SAT, my score on the math section was 450/800. I self-studied, retook it and got 570/800. But for comparison, I was able to get 770/800 on the writing section without much study. If I had been in public school math from the beginning, I could have maxed out that section and my choices of colleges would have been very different.

Edit: some corrections to this, since I dug up some information:

- I wasn't sued by the school. The school was involved in the suit, but I was sued by the two parents of the girls who accused me. Apparently, we didn't settle out of court either; according to my mom's account, they had to issue an apology.

- X didn't accuse my mother of molesting him; he said she "threatened him" and he was purposefully late to school due to being "scared." She wasn't allowed on school grounds because I was expelled and she didn't have a student attending the school, not because of the accusation.

Originally Posted by KgZ

Why are you opening up all of the sudden?

I am no longer insecure about the things that have happened to me and feel like I can talk about them with the benefit of hindsight.