I WAS NEVER PARTICULARLY FOND OF SCHOOL. In fact, when I was selected as the student speaker for my college graduation, the administration asked me to remove the sentence, “I hate school”, from my speech. I’m not sure whether I agreed or not, but I do know that when I stood in front of 1,000 people to give my speech, I left the line in.

I’ve remained in occasional contact with my first grade teacher from Grand Manan, Mrs. Brown. She tells how nearly every day she would come home with a new Danny story. I was a bit of a troublemaker. In Grade 2, after we’d moved to Dalhousie, I would throw some pretty epic temper tantrums, the worst of which ended in me being carried down to the office by the principal. I told him I wished I’d never moved to there. He said he wished the same thing. We were not friends.

For my third and fourth years of school, my mother homeschooled both me and my sister. I still managed to get in trouble, but I think I did better for those couple of years.

I finished up my elementary school by attending the fifth grade in Centreville, New Brunswick, which was the nearest village to Royalton. I continued to struggle socially, having difficulty making friends in my new surroundings, although I did make a couple of close ones.

The sixth grade meant moving on to middle school and was certainly my rougest year. I would get into arguments with teachers and fights with other students. My temper would flare. Bus rides were the worst. I was the subject of lots of teasing on the bus because the other kids knew that if they pushed my buttons just the right way, I would explode. They knew exactly which buttons to push. And I did explode. Over and over again. Eventually, bus rides became out of the question. My parents had no choice but to drive me the 12 kilometers to and from school every day.

I ran away from school on multiple occasions. Once, I lost my cool during art class. I stormed out of the room, went to my locker, climbed inside and closed the door. My teacher, Mrs. Prosser, assumed I had run away again. When she went to check my locker to see if my coat was gone, she opened the door and her face turned as white as her paint smock when she found me inside staring back at her.

When I would run away, usually I would run toward home. A couple of times teachers hopped in their cars, tracked me down and convinced me to return to the school with them. Once a neighbour picked me up and gave me a ride the rest of the way home. My parents worked long, hard hours on local farms to augment the measly income my dad got from the tiny church where he was the preacher, so even if the school had called to let them know I was on the loose, nobody would have likely been home to answer the phone.

Once I decided to run in the direction away from home. A few days later, a police officer came to the school to talk to me. I’m not sure whether his primary mission was to scare me into not running away again, with the threat of being picked up in a police cruiser, or if it was to find out whether there were troubles at home. He did ask me several times if everything was OK at my home. And it was. My family loved me and did their best to take care of their very distraut Danny.

The school troubles escalated to a point where it became necessary to seek help. We traveled to see a couple of psychologisists or psychiatrists. One counsellor diagnosed me with Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Another prescribed medication to try to mellow me out and calm my temper. It worked. I hated the idea of being on medication that affected my brain, but I did understand that it was just about correcting a chemical imbalance, and it worked.

My mother told me middle school would be hard but high school would be easier. Those weren’t comforting words to a 12 year old boy. Middle school would last three years. That equated to one quarter of my life to-date.

But I survived those three years. A small room once used by the school nurse became my getaway space, where I was allowed to run to and hide when I needed to cool down, even in the middle of a class. By the eighth grade, I think the teachers had learned how to manage Danny to some extent.

One principal in particular recognized that I was different, and he figured out how to relate to me and make me feel like I had an important role in the school. He wasn’t a typical principal. He had worked in the school district office for some time, but I think he was pressured to take a year and work as a principal. During that year, I feel like I became a pet project. Suddenly I was spending hours in the principal’s office not because I was in trouble, but to keep me out of trouble, and I enjoyed it. In the mornings, he would have me sit in his chair, at his desk, punch the secret intercom code into his phone and read the morning announcements. At noon, whenever he was on duty to supervise the cafeteria, I became his personal secretary. Again, I would sit at his desk. I’d answer his phone and I’d page whoever needed to be paged to take a call. He even showed me on his computer how to send e-mail, which was a pretty revolutionary thing back in 1996. 

The teachers also recognized that I had a knack for figuring things out on the computer. In particular, whenever a printer would stop working, I could figure out how to get it going again. So it became acceptable to have me paged from whatever class I was in to go help a teacher with their printer troubles. Another teacher, Mr. Steeves, used to send me at the start of each class to walk to the post office and collect his mail. They all seemed to work together to give me little jobs to do that made me feel like an important part of the school. I don’t know whether this was a concerted effort made in collaboration, of if it’s just how things played out, but either way, it worked. (As for Mr. Steeves, he may have just liked the idea of having me in his classroom for a few fewer minutes every day.)

Looking back now, I think in addition to obvious chemical imbalances in my brain, many of my challenges as a school boy stemmed from unsatisfied curiosity and boredom. It’s not that I’m some sort of genious who understood all the material and couldn’t be bothered with the work. Not at all. I was terrible at math, and I still struggle with complex mathematical problems. I often found science and history boring as well, and my grades reflected it. I didn’t learn well in those classes, because I wasn’t curious about them. There were other things on which I wanted to focus all of my attention—things which I’ll tell you more about in future blog posts on the subject of multipotentiality.

I finished middle school on a high note, acting as Principal George Murray of the Lanigan Technological Institute in the school’s Drama Fest production of a one-of-a-kind play called The Masterminds. I latched onto the role and gave it my all, feeling accomplished and like part of a team. I loved the stage and the spotlight, but I’ve never taken on a formal acting role again. I moved on to other passions.