Not all abuse is physical. Some is the result of psychological warfare. For 42 years, I seemed to be receiving coded messages that something was wrong. They came from seemingly likable billboard ads, pop songs and TV comedy skits. The queasiness, t...
With my mother having died about 25 years before 2010, and the school's principal having passed on a few years prior to that year, the question of exactly why Miss Briggs abused me was unanswerable, save ever getting the truth from the offender herself. (More shortly on my efforts to locate her.)
With no way to find a motive for the abuse and me questioning how precise my memories really were, I was about to place the mystery of Miss Briggs in the unsolved file.
Then, one night in early 2012, as I was finishing a move to a new apartment, the case was re-opened.
Tired out from the day's hauling, I looked over the array of my smaller belongings arranged on my new living room floor and decided to chill out by again examining the big pouch with all the family documents.
Oh, that's right – it has my elementary school report cards! This time, I looked over the whole set – well, not quite. The 4th grade card was missing from this neatly organized sequential collection, and was nowhere else in the pouch or any other file I had.
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Oaky, this was not necessarily significant; the report cards were packed away in Mom's closet for decades, then moved to new homes a couple of times. Still, every other year's cards are there, and in perfect order and condition.
No grades and no final comments by Miss Briggs – what on Earth could she have written? Bigger hints of something odd were forthcoming, as I noticed that my grades were superb in all subjects from the 1st through the 3rd grade – and terrible in the 5th and 6th.
Well what do you know, I had not always been the underachieving student I had figured I had my entire youth. And there was a point where it all changed, or at least a nine-month-long period which by happenstance is concealed from view. And look who was the teacher as the academic collapse began.
What would my 4th grade report card show? Steadily declining grades? A collapse right away? Had the teacher's comments addressed the drop?
Why is that year's card alone missing? Did Mom perhaps offer the card to a school official as evidence in some evaluation or hearing that resulted in Miss Briggs immediately leaving the school?
Could Mom have shown the report card to the pediatrician I saw soon after I started the 5th grade? He interviewed me about my feelings overall, but he recommended that I be transferred midway in the 5th grade school year to an advanced class my sister had been in and which I seemed destined for until the academic collapse in the 4th grade. This would indicate my grades in the 4th grade were the issue that sent me to the pediatrician, and they evidently were stunningly bad. Yep, using study time to sneak up on a child repeatedly to humiliate him in front of the whole class will impede his concentration.
Well, as if the first evening in my new home hadn't been sufficiently eye-opening, I then found a form attached to the 3rd grade report card which contained year-end comments too long to write in the provided space.
My 3rd grade teacher, a woman I recall as pleasant and efficient, had seen fit to type a note, dated June 1967, which said:
"Scott is so quiet that he does not speak out when he does not understand. He works slowly, but is usually right when he finishes. I often wished that I knew what he was thinking or would have liked to add to a topic."
Suddenly, a night I planned to devote to mundane unpacking and storing, was abuzz. This mystery had new life.
