Suddenly life awareness changed for me late in the eighth grade of school in 1936. Up to that time, I had been treated like all other students in the school except for those (mostly girls) who fitted in with the teachers (all women). Ideal students gave appearance of serious mien, students who seemed to qualify as interested, responsive and potentially effective persons, who would be successful in life and society. Everything was measured by the results of testing, and a final grade at the end of each semester. When I transferred to this school four years earlier I was nine years of age, and was deemed ahead of the class level at my new public school. I was skipped into the next grade, the fifth. My classroom grades began to decline, but I believed I could squeak through. My performance had eroded so that there was some discussion in the school whether or not I should be held back a year. They felt they may have made a mistake to advance me four years earlier. Even so, it was decided that I would take the tests that all eighth graders were to take before being sent on to high school. It was in early experimental days when schools were beginning to adopt testing programs to show a student’s readiness for advanced education.
The tests were scored, results were in. Of a sudden the teachers took greater notice of me. My mother was called in for discussion with the teachers and administration. I was seated at the end of the table feeling alone as the ladies, including my mother, sat a few chairs away. After a bit of banter, the Assistant Principal began: We have a new program of general testing of students before sending them on to high school. We had thought of holding Mark for another year in that his grades did not suggest that he was ready for high school. But in the general testing we find that he has the highest scores in all the subjects, except history where he scored second, and that he has the highest Intelligence Quotient (IQ) of anyone in the class. On this basis we feel that he go on to high school, but something is missing. We are trying to find out why we were going to hold him back, when he is intellectually ready to go on. What do you suppose is wrong with him? (This latter sentence struck me, and I wanted to respond, but I wasn’t asked. I don’t know what I would have answered then, but I wanted to say something.) My mother daubed at her eyes with her handkerchief, paused for a moment, and said, I came here hoping that you would have the answers to what is wrong with him. I have tried. I know that he can do better, but I don’t know what to do. Mother was deeply troubled. I sat silently staring into space. The teachers seemed interested and concerned, but it was as though they were on a different planet than the one I occupied. And, they talked to each other as though I was not in the room. If I were to go back to that day and be given privilege to speak I would begin: Have you ladies ever thought of boy puberty, of values, of the conflicts of right and wrong in a young male, of the lack of maturity in youth, of being as well as doing? During my senior year in high school, when I became a Christian, I found that I could achieve my potential in the life and society God gave to me. Then I addressed life issues. Those ladies would be pleased that I earned graduate degrees. Comforted in faith and meaning, I found applications for mature living and learning. My mother and I never discussed the event of the principal’s office. I now wish we had so as to know how she emerged from her distress, and became my most fully devoted cheerleader in our rooming and boarding house, where persons made natural life an ordinary experience with no meaningful idealism that would challenge life. I liked them all, and considered them family, but never found in any a model among them that I would follow. This context seemed standard for all my buddies. They were decent persons, but holding no transcendence that I could detect. If there were ideals and faith beyond the ordinary in our community they were not obvious. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020