1/9/95

When Daddy was a Schoolboy

'He's not stupid, actually.'

    I still suffer twinges of the September One Syndrome. The relentless countdown to the termination of summer vacation and the dreaded start of another school year: the end of fun and freedom, the beginning of martial misery. Yeah, I know I'm too old to still get melancholic about this, but now that I have children gearing up for school, it's all coming back.
    Obviously, I hated school. School was not so crazy about me either. Years after I finished the primary grades, one day my mother bumped into a lunch mother, one of those volunteer ladies who tried valiantly to control a couple of hundred hyperactive children in the school cafeteria. Apparently, I'd left a lasting impression. Pityingly, she asked my mother: "So how did that boy of yours turn out?" 
    I did not exactly distinguish myself scholastically, or behaviorally.
    Right from the beginning, I gave notice that I was going to be trouble. On the first day of nursery, my mom handed me over to the school-bus driver. I wrenched free and raced down the street, with the two adults in hot pursuit. They carried me kicking and screaming into the bus; I kicked and screamed all through the school day and all the way back home. It was many days before I surrendered.
    My teacher was named Miss Tink. She didn't like me, probably because I always called her Miss Stink. From that, the school system should've recognized I had a way with words, but alas, my early genius was never appreciated.
    I had to repeat nursery.
    It didn't take much to gain entry to prestigious Chomedey Talmud Torah Day School: I had to be Jewish.
    I had the same classmates throughout the next seven years, and soon established myself as class president among the Back Row Idiots. We were three or four dim wits among about 20 very bright students, and the only hope my parents had to cling to was that I was number one in unfulfilled potential. Three times a year for seven years, at every parent-teacher meeting, my mom and dad heard the same recording from every harried teacher who ever tried to tap into me: "He's lazy, disruptive, aimless, bored, unattentive, unresponsive, a buffoon, doesn't do his homework, he's in danger of failing. But he's not stupid, actually."
    I didn't exactly look forward to report-card time and the inevitable repercussions: the fatherly lectures, the motherly guilt trips, the punishments: no TV, no allowance, no bicycle.
    I came to think that maybe if I didn't hand over my report card, my parents wouldn't think of asking for it. But my two younger sisters, model students both, never failed to present their glowing reports, which amounted to despicable sibling finkery.
    One time, in utter desperation, I resorted to brazen chicanery: I changed all the F's (Fail) on my report card to E's (Excellent). Well, I thought I could fool them. The fuss they made. Only due to my parents' benevolence was I not sent to jail. (Again the system failed me: I should've been lauded for initiative and creativity.)
     About my only aptitude was in math, but nobody knew, because I kept it secret: from early in grade six I spent the bulk of my learning hours carefully calculating exactly how many days, hours, minutes and seconds were left until I could be finished with school forever (I never imagined they'd make me -- or let me -- go to high school). Each morning for two years I reconfigured the formula anew, and on my very last day at ol' Talmud Torah, I was near tears as I watched the clock consume the final moments of my misery.
    That last year was the worst. We were the seniors, the pride of Talmud Torah, and we were expected to set an example for the rest of the school. I did not start off on the right foot.
    Our teacher for Hebrew subjects was Mr. Nahumi, an Israeli who didn't know a soul in the country. They must've told him about me as he came off the plane. On the first day of grade seven, the first thing he did was ask us our names. As each student did so, he nodded and smiled -- until he heard "Shmaryahu Orbaum."
    "You're Orbaum? Get out."
    Kicked out of class on the first day. For saying my name. I swore to my parents that I didn't do anything wrong, but frankly, why should they have believed me? They didn't.
    I passed one test that entire year, but they graduated me with the lowest possible mark, I assume just to get me the hell out of Talmud Torah.

CLEARLY, I could not proceed with my classmates to Herzliya High. Instead, I was enrolled at the one institute of higher learning that would take the likes of me: Lubavitch Yeshiva High School.
    Nothing could make a mensch out of me, not even an encounter with the Lubavitcher Rebbe himself. (I was despatched on a pilgrimage to his Crown Heights headquarters, to a spiritual farbrengen, and when he swept through the dense crowd he stepped on my foot.)
    Even when I tried, I failed: I thought it would show good intentions to sport peyot, but they just wouldn't grow.
    How bad was I? My teachers punished me so many times with "lines" ("Orbaum! Write 'I will not disturb the class' 500 times by tomorrow morning!") that I took to using class time to build up a bank of lines for every occasion. I was much too busy to actually learn anything.
    I got so good at it -- taping 10 pens together to write 10 lines at a time -- that I felt I had enough to start selling them to my classmates. I got so cocky that I made trouble on purpose, got the requisite punishment, stole the lines back from the teacher when he wasn't looking, and then, just to test what I could get away with, made trouble again to see if he'd notice that I was recycling the same sheafs of lines over and over again.
    To my horrible shame, I had to repeat the year -- because, ironically, I failed math.
    I barely graduated grade eight on my second try, and my beleaguered parents, with no options left, yanked me out of there and tossed me into the public school system. They figured that if I wasn't going to learn anything anyway, at least they shouldn't have to spend heavily for it.

SUDDENLY, I woke up. I was plucked out of my Jewish milieu for the first time, tossed in among the goyim at Chomedey Protestant High School, the largest in the province of Quebec.
    I was the only one out of 3,000 students wearing a kipa.
    I was The Jew.
    I was skinny, small, weak, alone and terrified.
    I awoke, because I had to.
    In grade nine, I finished top of the class in math -- the very subject that caused me to fail grade eight. I sailed through with a 98 percent, putting me in the top .5 percent of the  entire province. I excelled in every single course, and more amazingly, I was the teacher's pet in most.
    I faced up to the occasional antisemitic incident with verve and chutzpah, fearful though I was. I managed to win the support of the mostly-Jewish senior wrestling team (provincial champs in 1973), who promised to protect me. But I had to fend for myself in the tough floor-hockey league, especially with a muscular German-Canadian named Helmut, who hated me. He knocked me around, but I got in my hits too. I think we both learned something from each other.
 Education became a learning experience. In addition to the requisite subjects I enrolled in such un-Jewish courses as woodworking, film appreciation and -- so help me, this is true -- Death 101.
    And Introduction to Journalism. That's where I met both my calling and my first Arab. His name was Laiq Hanafi, he was Egyptian, and he was my journalism teacher. Not one month after the class started, his country and mine were at war, but he became my favorite teacher, and I, his favorite pupil. Go figure.
    I graduated high school with flying colors, and went on to college. I'm afraid I regressed a bit, taking as my role model Bluto in the movie ג€œAnimal Houseג€. I never missed a beer bash until the day I finally quit school for good.
    Since then, I have not been inside a school.
    Well, not until a couple of years ago.
    My kinderlach were in kindergarten, and one day I went to ... a parent-teacher meeting.
    I was sure Mr. Nahumi had got word to Miss Leah.
    "Alright, which one of you is Orbaum?"
    "You? Out!"
    But I was a parent now, of three exemplary little students, and to quote Van Gogh, I was able to "revenge myself upon society for my earlier humiliations."
    When I got home, I made a phone call.
    "Hello, Mom? You'll never guess where I've just been..."
    Me, a parent at a parent-teacher meeting. She howled with laughter.
        But I think she was actually quite proud: at how that boy of her's had turned out, and what fine children I had turned out. We agreed, though, that the best we could hope for was that my children had inherited their smarts from my wife.