My childhood

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My childhood

My childhood was filled with problems and troubles. I had a long struggle as a child, an unending struggle with a number of personal problems. All the way up through my college years, my life was all struggle, and frustration. I think now, looking back, that I must have been a very, very difficult child to raise. I must have been cause for a lot of concern and frustration for my parents, especially my mother. I was slow in learning to talk. Mother later told me that I started talking when I was around a year and a half, then stopped, and then didn’t start talking again until I was around three. I was inclined toward temper tantrums in my early years (less than three) and she told me I was a very difficult child to deal with. If I didn’t get my way, I had a temper tantrum. She said she didn’t start me in school until I was six because she didn’t think I was ready before that. I didn’t go to kindergarten. She started me in the first grade. When I first started school, we were living in a small village and I had to walk about a mile and a half to the school. On the way I had to cross a bridge over a fair sized river and an older boy, a bully, was terrorizing me by hiding behind one of the bridge’s steel trusses and jumping out and grabbing me when I came by — threatening to throw me over the railing of the bridge. He would do it both in the morning when I was going in to school and then again when I was going home. I didn’t know who he was, had never seen him before, but he had zeroed in on me from my first day of school. I don’t think I ever told my parents about the problem. I felt I was old enough and big enough to be able to take care of my own problems without having to complain to my parents. I wasn’t some sissy who needed help from his parents. That daily torment ended after a couple of months when we moved from the village out to the farm my parents had just bought. Here I attended a small one room country school. It had a couple of outhouses, one for boys and one for girls, and a big coal furnace. In my first couple of years of school I had a terrible time. I just couldn’t seem to learn and was doing terribly. My memories of my parents trying in great frustration to teach me to count and to read are nightmarish. One of my personal problems was that I easily panicked, easily became all confused, couldn’t take pressure. My mind would freeze up from fear of failure or humiliation. From the nightmarish experiences of my mother trying to teach me to count (or to read), and my repeated humiliating failures, I quickly learned a very important lesson: If I was going to learn to do something I had to do it on my own with no help from other people, especially my mother. Of all people, I definitely didn’t want any help from my mother! I needed to do it in my own way with no pressure. I was a first child, and my mother, who had been an excellent student in school, skipping several grades and starting college at the young age of 15 (but who was not good in mathematics, getting D’s in algebra) just didn’t know how to handle me. In my first and second grades there was a succession of several teachers and I was doing terribly, creating a ugly loser/failure complex. Then on my third year we got a new teacher in our school that I liked and respected, and who liked me. Almost immediately I was doing great, my grades jumped up to A’s and B’s and my school problems were over. I quickly learned to read, liked especially geography and history, and started reading a lot. We had a traveling library in the rear of our school and by about 2:00 PM in the afternoon I would have finished working the assigned lessons for the day and would finish the day reading from some book from the library. The teacher must have liked me especially because she bought me the book Bambi as a present (I am sure she didn’t buy any of the other students presents). I really liked Bambi, read it through a couple of times, and then she bought me the book Bambi’s Children, which I read.

My inability to function under any kind of pressure, my tendency to become confused and freeze up under pressure, continued with me through all of my school years, up into adulthood. It was one of my weaknesses. I had a stuttering problem for a couple of years, around the ages of seven or eight. My parents believed it would go away by itself and it did. I was slow. Very slow. It was a personality trait. The teacher that especially liked me, the one who gave me the book Bambi, once told me that I was “as slow as molasses in January”. My natural slowness, my reputation for it, and the tendency of society to equate slowness with “dumbness”, caused a complex for me that continued through my school years up into adulthood.

My childhood included the childhood diseases of measles, mumps, and chicken pox. When I was in the seventh grade, twelve years old, I got a severe case of scarlet fever. I was out of my head and started walking in my sleep when I had that. The sleep walking went on for a little while and then stopped. Then, a while after that, when I was thirteen, while cultivating corn with a John Deere tractor, I rolled the tractor over and nearly died from that. I was far out in a field at the far end of the farm, crawled perhaps a quarter of a mile up to the house, my parents weren’t home but luckily my younger brother was, and he rode his bicycle up to a neighbor’s house who called for an ambulance. I had crushed my chest, broken four ribs and punctured a lung, and was in the hospital for a couple of weeks.

When I graduated from the eight grade in the small country school I discovered that I had a decision to make. I had to decide whether to take algebra when I went to the large 1000 student high school the next year. I had been told that it was a very difficult subject. However, someone (I don’t remember now who) recommended that I take it. I am thankful to them for that advice, since I did decide to take it, and it was a decision that set the course of my life. I liked algebra, did very well in it, ended up taking all of the mathematics and science courses that were offered, and went on to college to get a degree in mathematics. Had I decided to take the easy route, not take algebra, take an easy curriculum, who knows what I would be doing now. In my first year of high school I also took shop and agriculture courses. When I started high school I thought I might become a farmer.

I was a top student in high school, took all of the hardest courses, had my mind set on going to college and getting a degree in mathematics, physics, or some similar subject. Yet high school was a very stressful experience for me. I didn’t like the system at all. I detested it. In this new system, I spent the entire day in either classes or study halls. I am a person who learns by reading. Mostly, I hardly need a teacher. I prefer to learn by reading — especially on difficult technical subjects. (I like to have a little time to reflect over each assertion made.) I felt that the classes and study halls of high school were a waste of my time. I felt I mostly wasn’t learning in the classes. And, in addition, I was never able to accomplish anything in the study halls. (I couldn’t concentrate there because of all the distractions i.e. pretty girls, people talking, etc). I much preferred the system of the country school that I had attended where I could essentially spend the entire day studying. When in high school, I did all my studying at home, late at night, after watching some favorite TV programs (a terrible habit, a big mistake). I developed sleep problems. My mind would be at its best late at night, could concentrate best then, I couldn’t get to sleep until the wee hours of the morning, and then was sleepy and groggy during the daytime. High school put me under a heavy mental strain, heavy stress. I remember that when I was in high school I was feeling depressed almost all the time. I started keeping a record of the days when I was depressed. The record showed me depressed almost every day.

College represented the most stressful days of my life, the ugliest period of my life. Those years of my life were a nightmare, a very ugly, traumatic experience. The problem had to do with my natural slowness. I felt overwhelmed by the amount of work assigned and became very badly demoralized. Luckily, mathematics and physics were somewhat easy for me. The biggest problem was all the time and work required by some of the non-mathematical courses like German and economics. In addition, I developed a very bad opinion of the college. The teachers were poor, the textbooks were atrocious, and your entire grade was based on two tests — the midterm and final tests. And the college was a hard-nosed one. It flunked out around a third of my freshman class in the first term. Because of my slowness, I had a hard time completing the tests within the time limits. And there were often only 15 or 16 problems on a test and getting just several answers wrong could mean flunking the test. And flunking a test could mean flunking the subject. One of these tests exerts tremendous pressure on you. I usually came out much better than I feared on the tests. I feel that God was really with me in college. Things there could have gone so much differently. I had no faith at all in the fairness of the system. And I was just a number. My attitude became so bad, my morale so low, that I had a very difficult time with concentration. I just couldn’t study. I couldn’t concentrate. I was too disturbed. My attitude became so bad that I would just watch TV instead of studying. I really seriously lost perspective. It is scary now when I think about it. It was a long, long four year nightmare. It took great tenacity to hold on. College really put me through a wringer. I was not the only one in the college with a bad attitude. Others that I knew would go out and get drunk. I didn’t drink. A few months after I graduated a lady who owned a guest house and rented rooms asked me how old I was. I told her, “Twenty two.” She looked at me in shock and amazement. She told me that I looked at least thirty two. If I look at a picture of me taken at that time, I have to agree with her. I did look at least thirty two.

For more information, see:

About myself

Strongly pronounced personality traits of mine

Why did so many kids pick on me back in my school days?

My stubbornness as a child

A traumatic experience in my sophomore year in high school

Basic Principles of Teaching

God’s hand in my life

A momentous occurrence in my life

One of my pronounced personality traits

May 2018