@luckystardate and another anon also asked this SO here’s the why and how I came to write like four harry potter fanfictions on a TI-82
I don’t know if y’all remember, but TI-82 calculators were a Big Deal. They were required and cost like 80 dollars at Staples (keep in mind that I came from a family with five kids all the same age so that’s a lot of money). We had to buy them to learn to graph even though I definitely still did most of that by hand because I never read the instruction manual or let anyone teach me what buttons to push.
We bought them for Algebra and in 8th grade that class was taught by Mrs. R. She was so awful to students that the school actually banned anyone else from transferring out of her class within like two weeks of the first semester. I think she was fired like a year later for verbally abusing students.
Now, I was pretty “gifted” back then. That meant that I was used to doing whatever I wanted when I finished my work because teachers generally didn’t have a backup plan for me and the three other kids who finished that early.
Not Mrs. R though. Never Mrs. R.
By the end of the year, it was kind of a joke how many things she confiscated from me. I think my count was, like, 6 notebooks, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Askaban, Maximum Ride, Gulliver’s Travels, and a stack of notebook paper that I made to look like math homework but actually had a bunch of pretty lemony fictions written in code on the back.
And that’s just the stuff I let her keep. The first few notebooks, I followed her instructions and showed up after school where she yelled at me for about fifteen minutes before giving it back. After those though, I felt like it was worth it to just…leave my things with her than ever be in a room alone with her again.
I stopped doing homework. I didn’t pay attention in class. My grade dropped from an A to a B to a D. Did I change my ways? Pay attention? Maybe do a single equation assigned to me?
No. I did not. That might have been smart but it wasn’t justice.
My every waking moment in that class became consumed by the burning need to do the exact opposite of what Mrs. R wanted. When she wrote on the projector, I’d close my eyes. I’d draw tally marks of how many minutes there were left in the period. I’d use my Super Secret Code to write sentence fragments in the corners of tests.
(Soon she just started writing SEE ME!! on every piece of work I handed in. I literally don’t know how my parents didn’t see what was happening until I basically failed 8th grade math.)
I just wanted to write. I wanted to write so bad. Soon I couldn’t even have a notebook on my desk without her being suspicious. All I could have was the homework/test, a pencil, and a calculator. She would call me out if I had anything more and make me put it away.
Which is when I found the Notes feature on the TI-82. And it was glorious.
I could write whole fics on that thing because its storage capacity was stupid large (or so it seemed). I never figured out how to save so, if she ever came over, I ran the risk of having to delete it all if I couldn’t get it in its case fast enough. If I managed to keep the fic I wrote, I typed it all on the family computer at home and cleared the calculator so it was ready for the next day.
The funniest thing to me, besides how stubborn I was, was that no one asked me about my F. Literally no one. They promoted me to Geometry in high school and then AP Calculus the year after that.
The requirements for those classes was a B or higher in Algebra which I didn’t get!!! I didn’t pass it!!! I didn’t even try!!!!
So, anyway, school systems are fallible and it’s very important to understand kids are less likely to respond to a bully than a coherent conversation about Why We Have Designated Periods to Learn.
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