How I Ruined My Life at Age Six

One fateful day in the first grade, we were all working together in our math workbooks. Having, I suppose, achieved her lesson objective, the teacher gave each of us a choice as to how to spend the last twenty minutes of class time: We could continue working in our math books, or we could go to the book corner and read. I chose the latter option; very few others did, and I was discomfited to observe that they were mostly the class dullards. I read happily enough in my favorite old magazine about the space program, yet I felt at the same time a little guilty, for the teacher had called what we were doing “pleasure reading,” and I also had a nagging sense of having chosen the wrong fork in the road and watching everyone else curve away from me forever.

For the rest of the year, the students who had elected to keep working in their math books that day remained a good ten or twelve pages ahead of me, and I could never catch up. Periodically, I would steal glances at their desks and see the dazzling graphics of the lessons they were working on (including a big purple ruler, still embedded in my memory). They filled in the answers with a palpable triumph and pride, and indeed, those of the advanced echelon who had been my chums now found our friendship difficult to justify.

The teacher soon began sending the accelerated students to the second grade math class. Ultimately, a few of them were actually promoted into the second grade, leaving the rest of us behind. Years later, I saw one of them in an international newspaper, after he designed a computer program that beat a renowned chess champion at his own game.

And to think it could have been me.

Author: Harry Miller

I have traveled and lived in Taiwan, China, and Japan and am now a professor of Asian history and author of Southern Rain, a novel of seventeenth-century China. View all posts by Harry Miller