The Volokh Conspiracy
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Trump Adviser's 3rd-Grade Teacher Dishes: Look How Weird He Was at Age 8
Oddly enough, not in The Onion!
Rather, it's in The Hollywood Reporter, a serious entertainment industry publication (to be sure, in a very left-leaning industry). Here's the key passage:
Do you remember that character in Peanuts, the one called Pig Pen, with the dust cloud and crumbs flying all around him? That was Stephen Miller at 8. I was always trying to get him to clean up his desk — he always had stuff mashed up in there. He was a strange dude. I remember he would take a bottle of glue — we didn't have glue sticks in those days — and he would pour the glue on his arm, let it dry, peel it off and then eat it.
I remember being concerned about him — not academically. He was OK with that, though I could never read his handwriting. But he had such strange personal habits. He was a loner and isolated and off by himself all the time.
At the end of the year, I wrote all my concerns — and I had a lot of them — in his school record. When the school principal had a conference with Stephen's parents, the parents were horrified. So the principal took some white-out and blanked out all my comments….
Is it just me, or is that a rather unprofessional way for a teacher to talk about one of her then very young students? (I set aside occasional reminiscences that are clearly meant fondly, either of the "how cute he was in his oddness" or "look how far he's come" variety.) If my boys some day make it big, should I expect their teachers to write up stories about how supposedly weird and awful they were when they were, literally, eight years old?
Thanks to InstaPundit for the pointer.
