For Students, No Success Goes Unpunished
Oscar Wilde
It started from the first time teachers found out I could read above grade level. The kindergarten teacher, Ms. Greene, calls on some of her colleague to watch me read a book, where they marveled that I already knew how to enunciate words a few grades above grade level. My first grade teacher, Mrs. Klein, already heard about the wunderkind going to her class after an accidental switch to a bilingual class. She pulls me and another young girl to the side and said, “Listen, I’d love to put you on a different track than everyone else in this class,” a room full of kids who I assumed had the same intellectual capacity that I had. “All you have to do is a few more pages of this book than everyone else and …”
My mind drifted. I already didn’t want to do it. I completed the first and second nights of the assignment, but soon drifted towards doing exactly as much as everyone else. She was