School Failure
By Gene Aronowitz
My academic performance in high school and most of college was disastrous. In 1955, I graduated in the lower fifth of my high school class. Despite my poor academic record, I entered college, hoping to become a physician, as did many of my friends. They were all doing well in college, but I was continually grief-stricken, suffering the death of my aspirations because of my abysmal grades.
In the first semester of my junior year in college, I nearly flunked out and decided to temporarily leave school. I joined the Marine Corps Reserves, partly, I rationalized, to get out of my funk and get my collegiate head together. But there was also a military draft in those days. I had a student deferment, and knew flunking out of college would have me in foxholes for at least two years. By joining the reserves, I would be on active duty for only six months. I exercised that option, completed my six months, headed home, and notified the University of Delaware that I was on my way back.
Once back, I continued doing poorly. I was a member of the University of Delaware’s Jewish fraternity, Alpha Epsilon Pi, which consistently ranked highest academically among all fraternities on campus. I felt like an irresponsible member of this group. Academic achievement was paramount in the Jewish Community at that time, and failure would have been a disgrace not only for me but for my parents as well.
I recognized that being a physician was out of the question because I had already flunked organic chemistry lectures and labs and gotten Ds in physics. I knew I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life, wondering first if I could become a low-level scientist, perhaps a lab technician. However, that would have required more science courses, which scared me. My lack of any acceptable plans for my future was a continual source of anxiety and sadness. I considered teaching as an option, not because I wanted to become a teacher, but because I thought education courses would be easy, and I hoped to get decent enough grades to graduate.
Before my senior year, I thought obsessively about possible explanations for my dismal academic performance. I knew I had poor eyesight ever since my childhood, and believed that an inability to read was causing my academic problems. I went to the school’s reading lab for an evaluation. It showed that I read with one eye and then the other, losing my place during the switch. Consequently, I read very slowly, had poor comprehension, and had the reading ability of a tenth-grader at that time. An ophthalmologist indicated that I had a condition called exotropia, a misalignment of the eyes. I was desperate and decided to try the operation he was recommending to strengthen and focus my eyes. I didn’t know if it would solve my academic problems, but I thought it was worth a try.
The results were eye-opening. My double vision disappeared, and people told me I wasn’t squinting anymore. But, suffering from decades of bad reading habits, I still couldn’t read. I went back to the reading lab and signed up for reading lessons and exercises. Changing my major to Secondary Education and reading more effectively resulted in my getting As and Bs the following semester. But I still just barely graduated, 334th out of 404 students in my class. But I did graduate and was then able to earn a master’s degree and a Ph.D.
My intellect was not my problem. My eyesight was, and, regrettably, none of my educators picked that up. Special education services did not exist nationally until 1975. The federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act, enacted that year, was later renamed the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. Special education was not available to me in school during the 1950s. If it had been, they might have figured out what was wrong with me much earlier and addressed it. But it wasn’t, and they didn’t, and I spent much of my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood feeling inadequate.
A version of this memoir is included in the book 23 More Memoirs.