In May of 1960, I was finishing up a successful third grade year, marred only by a few playground fights and talking too much in class, and maybe raising my hand too enthusiastically when the teacher asked a question. A few days before Ketchum Elementary School began summer vacation, I was called to the principal’s office, where the principal and the school district’s psychologist informed me that I was not going to enter the fourth grade the following September. Instead, I was going to be a fifth grader.

The adults in my life had gotten together and changed not just what I was but who I was. My parents were assured by the school psychologist that I would be bored in fourth grade. She had administered IQ tests to selected third graders, and I had done well enough that my fellow students had been seen as a drag on my progress. I was nine years old. I went from being the oldest in my class to the youngest.

Since that time, a great deal of psychological research has indicated that people who are oldest in their cohort tend to thrive in their classes, in athletics, in social situations, and in life. The younger ones have trouble, and as the youngest fifth grader, I was no exception.

One of my new classmates organized after-school fights between a series of fifth-grade boys and me, probably to see where I fit in the pecking order. He was the mayor of Ketchum’s kid and the pecking order was important to him. He would stay at its top until sixth grade, when all the girls suddenly grew ten or twelve inches taller and started beating the crap out of the boys no matter who their parents were.

I did what I could to avoid the fights by going to the Ketchum Community Library after school, and if I couldn’t avoid them I gave up as quickly as I could, thus reserving a place in the pecking order slightly above the school’s polio victims and its developmentally disabled.

I missed my old class. On the happiness scale, it was far above the class I became a part of. Now, after decades of teaching, I know that some classes are fun and some classes aren’t, and if you get stuck teaching one of the non-fun ones, nobody has a good time.

The fifth-grade teacher, Veronica Chamberlain, didn’t approve of skipping grades and made a point of not cutting me any slack. In the school’s grading system, I went from Excellent to Satisfactory and stayed there. I remember Mrs. Chamberlain as a smart, beautiful, angry woman who did her job without warmth, but I soon learned that if I didn’t try to stand out, she would leave me alone.

(After I had skipped a grade, who was smart and who wasn’t became a topic of occasional conversation around our house. My mother said Mrs. Chamberlain was angry because she had married a man who wasn’t as smart as she was. My father said it didn’t matter, he liked her husband better anyway.)

Later on, in high school biology classes, when we learned about protective coloration and protective morphology, I realized I had already mastered the concepts.

 

I am making this sound awful, and it was, but it was also a well-meaning mistake by adults who held life-and-death control over the children in their lives. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was going to school with fifth graders who were putting drunk parents to bed most nights, whose parents had abandoned them to the care of older siblings, and who abused them or let others abuse them. Our school psychologist, for the most part, dealt with damaged souls.

The school psychologist was doing me a favor, she thought, and at the time I thought she was, too. The eight grades of Ketchum Elementary were an ordeal for a nine-year-old, and the thought that I could get through it in seven school years was a relief. I liked the idea of being smart enough to skip a grade, and my parents liked the idea of having a kid smart enough to skip a grade.

That wasn’t true of my teachers. The school psychologist had let slip my scores on the IQ tests she had given me and they were high enough to brand me as a dangerous, unpredictable underachiever no matter what I did.

Over the next three years my grades and my standing in my class improved. My after-school time in the Ketchum Library began to pay off, and I had learned to ski, which meant that I could spend time with my classmates on the weekends.

Still, there isn’t much more you can do to effectively alienate a nine-year-old from his peers in a small town in Idaho than by jumping him up a grade and saying he’s smarter than everybody else.

 

Sixty-two years have brought a few insights to these matters. For one, IQ tests don’t tell how smart you are. For another, if you’re looking for humans who have free will, don’t look at a nine-year-old kid whose parents and teachers are making life-changing decisions for him. Don’t look at those parents and teachers, either, because they are subject to the Law of Unintended Consequences. Yet another: when we interfere in other people’s lives, we’re usually trying to fix damage within ourselves.

At my forty-fifth high-school reunion, I had a conversation with one of my classmates who had just gotten her bachelor’s degree after years of correspondence courses and summer classes. She was proud of her degree, all the more because the same psychologist who had engineered my jump from third grade to fifth had also given her an IQ test. She had done poorly on it, and the psychologist had told her that going to college would be a waste of money and that she should get married and have kids.

She did get married and have kids, a bunch of them, and the kids had gotten married and had kids themselves, and she had thirty or so grandchildren at the time I was talking to her, a fact that made her college degree even more of an accomplishment. She was still angry about being told she wasn’t smart enough for college. She was sorry that our school psychologist had died fifteen years before. She had wanted to tell her to take her IQ test and stick it up her ass.

I told my classmate that the psychologist habitually told the school districts’ young women to get married and have children. “Do it before it’s too late,” I had heard her tell another of my classmates, a brilliant student, who did get married and who did drop out of college when she got pregnant and who never, as far as I know, got a bachelor’s degree.

Our psychologist had remained single and childless, and now and then told students that her education couldn’t make up for not having a husband and family. She was lonely. She had returned home from college to take care of invalid parents and she did that all the time I was going to school.

 

I’m far enough from any kind of school these days to start thinking about what will go on my tombstone. I’m trying to avoid the kind of irony that will make my name the answer to trivia questions. That’s what happened to the much-anthologized poet John Keats, who specified his tombstone read Here Lies One Whose Name Was Writ in Water.

He Tried Not to Attract the Attention of Beautiful, Angry Women is one line I’ve been trying out. A Happy Guy Once He Met Julie is another. (I should note that while Julie is beautiful, she’s not often angry, and when she is she’s not angry for long, which is why yet another of my possible epitaphs is Usually Forgivable.)

Also, Meant Well would work but would apply to too many people. The same for Just Another Ball in the Pinball Machine of Life.

Given my academic career, Not Too Bright for Such a Smart Guy fits, as does His Only Aptitude Was Aptitude Tests.

That last is not entirely true because, over seventy-one years, I have gotten good at things beside multiple-choice tests. I’ve become a good skier, a hard worker, and I can ride a mountain bike through tough terrain without killing myself (i.e., He Thought He Was A Better Mountain Biker Than He Was). I taught writing long enough to get good at teaching people how to put their thoughts on paper. I’ve written some books that I’m proud of.

But I’m best at taking tests. It’s a good news/bad news joke. A test score can save you from actually having to know anything. My scores got me into Harvard and grad school, and my purported IQ once got me an awkward date with a woman with whom I would have gone blissfully through high school if I hadn’t skipped a grade. (I was a school record, the school psychologist had once told her in a high school psychology class, but she stopped being high-IQ-curious once she had gone out with me). I graduated college with a solid B average. I never wrote a best-seller.

How’s this for an epitaph: If He Ever Made Major Life Decisions for Anyone Else, Even By Accident, He’s Sorry.

 

Of course I made major life decisions for other people. I taught for thirty years. I gave people grades. I made them take tests. They came out of my classes with skills and confidence that let them tackle bigger challenges, or senses of failure that seeped into their other classes, their relationships, and their plans for their futures. I tried to do more good than harm, but when you teach, it’s hard to tell which is which for decades, and then only if you keep track of people.

The universe is a giant Rube Goldberg machine, where one thing causes another, but there are so many causes and so many effects and they’re so mixed up together that it’s beyond any human ability to keep track of them. All you can say, at the end of a long life, is that with power comes responsibility, and if you had known you had the slightest bit of power, you might have acted more responsibly.

 

In the spring of 1964, I was in eighth grade, a solid B+ student. That winter the National Junior Safety Patrol had contacted our school and offered to fund badges and Sam Browne belts for a student paramilitary organization whose purpose was to keep students from getting run over by cars and buses during recess or lunch hour.

A teachers’ committee was formed to administer the students, and I like to think that it was because of my IQ that they designated me Captain of the Safety Patrol. Under my immediate supervision were three seventh-grade Safety Patrol Lieutenants, and under the Lieutenants were five sixth-grade Safety Patrolmen.

In more urban circumstances, the National Junior Safety Patrol escorted schoolchildren across crosswalks, but at that time Ketchum didn’t have crosswalks. Most of its streets had yet to be paved.

The twelve members of the Safety Patrol assembled in the sixth-grade classroom of Mr. Paul Pender, who was also the PE teacher. He told us that he had plenty to do without running our organization. He was another of our teachers who was smart and angry, probably because he got stuck with duties no one else wanted.

We were on our own, he said. Then he told us that Ketchum Elementary was instituting a closed campus policy. Up to that time it had been possible, once the noon bell rang, to leave the school and walk two blocks across Sun Valley Road to Ketchum Drug and spend your lunch money on penny candy. As a rule, it was better tasting and probably better for you than what the Ketchum Hot Lunch cooks were serving. Students were voting with their feet.

The Safety Patrol was going to fix that, Mr. Pender said. Any student who crossed Sun Valley Road would be fined a quarter—the price of lunch. We were responsible for levying and collecting the fines.

He told the patrolmen and lieutenants to give the money to me for safekeeping, and gave us a fire-and-brimstone lecture about police corruption, telling us that if any fine money was spent on penny candy at Ketchum Drug, he would personally make us do push-ups all day long for the rest of our lives. He had credibility, because at that time another Paul Pender was the middleweight champion of the world, and Mr. Pender said he was related.

The first day of Safety Patrol was a chicken-shoot. Safety Patrolmen fanned out in all directions from Ketchum Elementary, swooping on unsuspecting candy-seekers, confiscating lunch money.

I collected five-and-a-half dollars in quarters that day. It was a fortune. I put them in my desk, in a lockable tacklebox I had brought from home.

Within a week, all the sixth graders had quit. Word had gotten around that you could refuse to pay a fine to them, and if they got nasty about it, all you had to do was push them into a mud puddle and they’d let you go on your way. My lieutenants lasted longer, but by May, with the end of school in sight, they were gone, too.

Being a cop was a ticket to unpopularity. Besides the contempt and violence of the scofflaws, you had to put up with kids who would toss you a quarter and proceed to Ketchum Drug anyway.

I became the face—and the body—of the Ketchum Elementary Safety Patrol. Fines had dropped off as students found alternative routes to Ketchum Drug. Parents had brought up the issue in PTA meetings, standing up and accusing the school of stealing their kids’ lunch money. At the start of every lunch hour, I gamely put on my Sam Browne belt and badge, and headed out on patrol. Classmates I had thought were friends laughed at me.

A week before school was out, Mr. Pender told me to stop. Ketchum Hot Lunch was still throwing away a couple of garbage cans of uneaten food every day, including, most days, the cold lunch they saved for me after my shift. Students were still running across Sun Valley Road in front of trucks and buses. Fifth graders had resisted all Safety Patrol attempts at recruitment.

I asked Mr. Pender what I should do with the fines we had collected. He asked me what they amounted to. I said about thirty dollars.

“Keep it,” he said. “You deserve it for what we put you through.”

 

I haven’t trusted cops since. I haven’t trusted tests since. I’m suspicious of favors. I have trusted Lord Acton, the British nobleman who said, “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” I’ve trusted Paul Pender, although I never saw him again because he quit teaching that year and joined the Peace Corps. He had an idealistic streak that wasn’t serving him well at Ketchum Elementary.

I’ve trusted my own perceptions, at least to the extent they can be fact-checked.

I don’t trust the idea that we can make our own choices in life. It doesn’t fit with my experience. Thinking that life is simply a matter of making the correct choice on a multiple-choice test is ignoring the fact that you didn’t have a choice not to take the test. Also, there are undoubtedly more choices than the ones you’ve been presented with.

That sounds bleak, but it’s not. If your life is absolutely determined, you won’t know it until it’s about over, when you can look back and see that the answers you gave life’s questions were the only ones you could have given, and it was interesting, even joyous, to again and again give the only possible answer to a hard question and turn, with hope and confidence, to the next.