Narrative Sample One

As a child, I was different from most children. I was a shy, quiet, good kid who pretty much kept to herself. I had only a few friends at school; therefore, I spent most of my time playing by myself. I would find ways to entertain myself such as investigating nature, taking things apart, riding my bike, and playing in the ditch. I had always been more of a “tom boy” than a “princess”. When I was eight years old, I was diagnosed with dyslexia. As most people know dyslexia is a type of learning disability.
A few schools have programs that teach those with dyslexia certain techniques and strategies that help students to learn. Furthermore, in these programs, teachers instruct in a manner that is more conducive to a dyslexics learning capabilities than that of a typical instructional environment. At the time, there was only one public school, in the Baton Rouge area, that had such a program designed for dyslexics. Therefore, my grandmother thought it would be beneficial for me to transfer to that particular school. Attending this school ended up being extremely traumatizing for me.
From day one, that school was horrible. My first memory of ever being bullied was at that school. On my first day there, we had a substitute teacher and it seemed like the students used that as an excuse to be unruly and on their worst behavior. While I was sitting at my desk, wondering what in the world was going on, one boy crawled under my desk in order to look up my dress. When I asked him to stop, he hit me. I was in shock. For one thing, I had never seen students be so bad in a classroom. They were using desks as platforms to stand and sit on. They were tearing things off the walls, yelling and screaming, and not paying any mind to the teacher who was trying to get them to sit in their chairs.
The above is one of two incidences of abuse from that school that I can recall from my memory. I believe that I may have subconsciously blocked out the other events that I went through while attending that school. The reason I can inform you of these other occurrences is due to my grandmother documenting them each day I came home from school.
Prior to my grandmother noting the incident mentioned above, she wrote in her log, “Boys grabbed Ashley and were kissing her.” It was recorded that two weeks later, “Dustin”, not the boy who was trying to look up my dress, kicked me in my “private parts” and spit out of the bus window onto my clothes. Those events occurred on Friday, September 22nd. That next Tuesday, the 26th, Dustin elbowed me in the ribs.
On October 22, three boys dragged me through some oil at the school bus transfer point. Also, according to my grandmother’s report, Dustin jumped onto my back. The following day, Dustin hit me in the back of the head with a branch from a pine tree when we were at school. Dustin hitting me with the branch was the second and only other incident that I can recall from my memory.
Continuing from my grandmother’s record, on October 4th, I fought Dustin back. The documentation states, “Ashley came home with a reddish bruise under her right eye. She said Dustin hit her and she hit him back and he socked her very close to the eye.” Then on the next day after that, I came home with some brush burns on my right arm because Dustin had tripped me.
Out of the ten days that event were recorded, it is listed six times that I asked or said that I did not want to return to that school. The documentation stated that one night I cried myself to sleep because I did not want to go to school the next day. My grandmother tried to get me removed from the program but they did not want to release me. I was a minority there; one of maybe 3 or 4 white children. The school received more grant money from the state with because I was going there. It wasn’t until my Social Worker got involved that they let me transfer back to my previous school.
Why they bullied and caused me so much grief, I don’t know. There are numerous possibilities that it could have been. I was different from them in the way of me being quiet, shy, and well behaved. ‘I didn’t talk right,’ i.e. my grammar was awful. Also, something I didn’t know then, but I know now, is I that have somewhat an accent that is all my own. I was born and raised here in Baton Rouge but people from here ask me where I’m from. However, the main reason I think they tortured me was because I was a cute, blonde-haired girl in a school full of people that were nothing like me and I was ‘a good girl’ so they saw me as an easy target that wouldn’t fight back.