Ever have memories that you seriously can NOT shake? You try to put events and stupid stuff behind you, but they just won’t go away.
That’s how I remember my childhood in Saudi Arabia, stumbling miserably through the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School.
It was a K-8 school for Aramco employees of the American variety. After you hit the 9th grade, they sent you back to the US (or to Switzerland), where you finished high school and, if you had something resembling a brain between your ears, either got a job or went on to college.
Growing up in Arabia — in a company town called Ras Tanura — I was the weird little kid.
What made me weird was that I was too damn stupid to understand that — especially as a girl! — I needed to cover up my intellect, pretend I was stupid as a post, and never EVER reveal my passion for science. Especially not for astrophysics.
Those kids in my grade were just so GODDAMN mean, and the teachers weren’t a lot better. In particular, the one I encountered when I hit the 5th grade, a Texas broad named Hatley, was just flat-out cruel. If I was sick of b-o-o-r-i-n-g school by the end of the 4th grade, in Miss Hatley’s fifth-grade room I quickly learned to hate school — with a deep and abiding loathing.
Every now and again, I find myself musing over that time in my life. Not on purpose: the memories just bubble up like gas in some swamp.
Search the name and its variants on the Web, and a few candidates come up. She definitely existed. She definitely came from Texas. She definitely taught at the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School. But that’s about as much as you learn about her,
Probably just as well: some things, you don’t wanna know too much about!
She was a mean one, I’ll tellya…at least from my point of view. Seriously: she would actually encourage the horrid little brats in her classroom to torment me. I was the class pariah. And whenever an opportunity arose, I was reminded of that, teased about it and tortured over it.
What kind of “teacher” not only tolerates such behavior, but actually eggs it on?
Really, there was no excuse for it. I’d done pretty well in school until I reached her fifth-grade classroom. There was no reason for me to hate going to school. To hate my classmates. And especially to hate my teacher.
But hate is the word for it. I entered her class as a fairly normal kid, if one who wasn’t smart enough to keep her yap shut about what a wannabe brainiac she was. By the middle of that year, I hated school.
* Hated school.
* Hated the idiot teacher.
* Hated the mean little brats in my class.
* Hated the dim-witted, brain-numbing content that passed for subject matter.
Hated everything about it.
And then one day hated the horror of learning that the bitch who had tormented me all the way through the fifth grade was “graduating” with us to become our sixth-grade teacher.
Apparently, my mother figured out, sometime during that hideous fifth-grade year, WHY I had come to hate going to school…why I dreamed up every ailment I could possibly fake to get out of going…why I was so miserable I was passing beyond neurotic to damn near psychotic.
At the end of that school year, she announced that we were going back to the States. My father did NOT want to come: he was working toward Aramco’s highly paid seniority, and leaving then put the eefus on that goal.
She must have told him that she and I were leaving, whether he came with her or not. He stayed behind for about six months, and then quit his job and joined us in San Francisco. My guess is, he must have reached some kind of lower-level seniority goal at that point, which made him feel he could leave without losing too very much.
It was pretty much in the nick of time, for me. I was so roundly hated by the little darlings at the school that I had no hope of ever making friends out there. And by then I had turned inward and become an odd — even weird — little hermit whose only serious interest in life was astrophysics.
Yeah. I wanted to become an astrophysicist. 😀 You see why the little darlings just loved me no end?
***
Back in San Francisco (at last! ), none of the kids at the school knew I was a weirdo. And apparently, an interest in science was not considered weird there, even for a girl. Well…and by then, I’d learned to keep my mouth shut; that no doubt helped.
