On Kickball, Group 4, and Growing Up

Posted by Andrew Leibs Aug 25, 2009

I was 10 that spring when candy bars jumped from a dime to a taxable 15 cents, but somehow, was never broke. My world was foundations and mountains of excavated dirt, the rattle of plastic machine guns, and wooded paths down to the village where I’d buy patches to be sewn onto my jacket and borrow records from the library.

In school, after a fall of futility, we finally began beating Mr. Butler’s class in kickball. I wasn’t a good player. I was legally blind (a fact I’d learn five years later), and excluded from all but calisthenics in gym. But that spring, I improved: I was fast; could now kick out of the infield, and made the occasional putout, once catching an outfield fly tipped into my arms by a backpedaling classmate. Leading off first, Mr. Butler motioned to a defender to keep an eye on me. The direction drew a squint and scowl but that acknowledgement thrilled me.

Feelings made forms in my consciousness: the sound of the words the teacher pointed to at the end of stories that unlocked their meaning…or anticipating and feeling the rightness of a song’s refrain.

At the end of that year we took a field trip to Americana Village. After lunch, as half the grade ran screaming among teachers playing keep-away with a Frisbee, I wandered up a little ridge to another corner of the field. A red ball rolled toward me. I picked it up. It had a thick, shiny skin—an older, heavier model that looked like a cartoon bomb. I held it in both hands. It was dry, yet slippery. When I tossed it back to the boy retrieving it, how slowly it slid from my hands, frictionless, as if on the moon. I stared off in that moment of surprise, entranced, fatigued with joy, and with an odd separation, felt not just happy, but aware that I was happy.

I’m sensitive to these memories of high childhood, that feeling of limitlessness when one’s heart opens to the world, because I know the exact moment when it ended—on the first day of sixth grade.

The school had a Huxleyan system of sorting students into four groups based on perceived ability. My visual impairment alone landed me in Group 4, the lowest one. The syllables, “Andrew, 4” stunned me. Every good feeling was gone as this first placement borne of my disability quelled me into self-questioning silence.

I ached to prove myself and was helped by a prescient, unexpected gift from my homeroom (and Social Studies) teacher Mrs. Kendall, who’d spent a summer recording the thousand-page Western Civilization textbook onto reel-to-reel tapes as a reading aid. Reading along as I listened made the text come alive, augmented my ability to answer each chapter’s questions quickly, and enabled me to get far ahead in assignments.

Within a month, I was raised to Group 3 for Reading and Social Studies—the only convenient promotion as Groups 1 and 2 had Math and Science during this time. I was encouraged, however, and pressed on, ignoring all pleas to slow down, and finished the book three months early. I then tackled independent study projects until Mrs. Kendall, bemused and mildly bothered by my doggedness, struggled to fill my freed-up time.

During those final weeks, I sensed she saw me as more of an anomaly than a top student and that she marked my reading accomplishments with a kind of asterisk—as if reliance on tapes justified the Group 4 placement or validated her teaching tool more than my eagerness and ability to learn.

I was vindicated, however, on the June day, when, returning from recess, she announced that my mark of 97.5 on the final exam was the highest in the grade.

Compounding my joy was news we’d have a kickball game on the outdoor basketball court, which I saw as a chance to punctuate my performance and end the year on a shining note of normalcy.

Late in the game, I singled with a hard kick kept in the infield when it hit the double pole holding up the hoop at the end of the court, which also served as second base. A teammate then blasted a ball far onto the grass.

I knew I could score from first. I ran as fast as I could, shot deftly between the poles at second, grabbing one with my left hand to fling myself towards third. Racing home far ahead of the throw, I slipped cleanly between the other set of poles, feeling kinetic and capable before slowing into nonchalance in expectation of acknowledgment. But when I came near Mrs. Kendall, she was shaking with laughter. She looked at me, wagging her head, cheeks puffing, glasses bobbing on their chain, words tumbling into laughter. I gathered from her depictions, made not to me but to another teacher, that she assumed I saw nothing not inches from my face; that my baserunning was to her an unfolding comic catastrophe sure to end with me clanging off one of the poles.

It’s still difficult to quantify and frame for the fully sighted what I can and cannot see. But I was crushed that my accomplishments did nothing to expand her sense of who or what I was. Since I was coded for disability, she saw me as one ever in need of help, if not protection.

Despite her dismissal, I had learned not to dismiss myself, and my introduction to auditory learning through her tapes pointed the way to a world of reading.

After the game, she signed notes on our report card envelopes. I waited for her to sign mine, but she never reached for it till the end, when, looking up at the clock and with the bus pulling into the circle, she said, “Well, it’s late, I’ll have to just sign my name,” scrawling “Mrs. Kendall” as sufficient token.