My terror of Mrs. Russell was solely responsible for my "breaking
myself," in the summer before the third grade, of the compulsive
habit of sucking my thumb. For most of my second- grade experience,
older students entertained themselves by telling me all the terrible
things she would do to me because of my babyish habit. (I still
remember the comfort and pleasure of thumb-sucking, though the
proportions of mouth and teeth-to-thumb are now so out of whack
that an attempt to physically recpature the feeling is useless.)
When I returned to school to start the third-grade, I was
shocked to find that Mrs. Russell had been replaced by her
sister, Mrs. Krogen. (Mrs. Russell, we were told, was
having a baby: a shocking idea, given her reputation for
cruelty.) However, Mrs. Russell left our class the legacy
of three students she held back. One of them drew wonderful
pictures all the time instead of paying attention, but the
other two were "slow," one of them the brother of the boy
the teachers let us know had the highest IQ in our class
(which was granted a significance I could never understand,
since he was, to my mind, unimaginative, a halting reader,
an indifferent speller, and a brown-nose. Thus my first
acquaintance with the idea of IQ scores not only cast severe
doubt on the validity of their saying anything meaningful,
but showed me how easily people in authority can be misled
by numbers).
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