My eyes were only ever fixated on the clock above the door. Impatiently waiting six o’clock to roll around, my teacher’s words drowned out like hearing someone speak from underwater. I had never felt so lost and disinterested in an academic environment. This surly was not the fun play time I’ve heard the other kids talk about. 6 o’clock would roll around and my dad would appear at the door, rescuing me from this dreadful afterschool program. 

Throughout my childhood, I’ve always heard my cousins boasting about “Hebrew school”. All the time Hebrewthis Hebrew that. Jealousy ran through my veins. I imagined all the fun the other kids were probably having there. I begged and begged my parents to sign me up and finally they said yes. This was great, behind those temple doors waited two hours of kickball and apple juice, pure bliss. Or that’s what I thought of course. Something much different awaited me within the confines of those temple walls. Something much more dull and academic. Reality hit me in the basement floor of Beth Elohim in Park Slope when my teacher struck me with two hours of the Hebrew alphabet and a fat Hebrew vocabulary book. There were no kick balls to be seen, no sliced apples and juice. I had been deceived by those fools. 

I felt stupid. Hebrew School made me feel stupid and incompitant. I could not for the life of me remember those letters, they resembled random squiggly lines to me. I have my earliest memories of giving up here. My perception of school and learning had been completely altered. Like many other days, I sat there on the carpet waiting for 6PM’s arrival.When the time finally came, I hit the cubbies, grabbed my stuff, and would be the first one out of there where my dad greets me. “Learn anything?” He asks

“Lotov” I respond in Hebrew which translates to “No Good”. All the parents around me found this quite humorous. All the hours I spent zoning out, but I made damn sure to learn how to tell my dad how bad Hebrew school was.

This was my first experience ever feeling “dumb” in a classroom environment. In all honesty these are really old memories that I’m digging up so it’s rather fuzzy. But around this time was when my teachers first contacted my parents about my unsatisfactory performance in their classes. I was taken to a number of psychologists, therapists as well as taken out of class to be “tested” by other teachers. Eventually I was diagnosed with ADHD. Looking back as a college student to myself as a kid in elementary school, having had a label that said “learning disability” slapped on my forehead left me feeling shattered and unworthy. Over the years as I got older, school did get more challenging for me. I could not read as “advanced” books as the other kids. 

Did all of the special attention I received in school make me feel worse about myself?  As I got older I just wanted to be treated like every other kid. I became an underachiever and just wanted to fail in peace.