As a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on.

There was nothing I wouldn’t read. Truly. I’d read medical diagnostics manuals. Airline flight manuals. Lists of obscure facts. Dictionaries. You name it, I’d read it. I once read an entire book that pharmacists use to determine drug interactions.

So one day my teacher was discussing crack cocaine and how we shouldn’t do it. She mentioned something about how  — repeating the urban myth – that crack was more dangerous due to how it was made.

She asked rhetorically (it turns out) if anyone knew how crack was made.

I didn’t take it as a rhetorical question. I answered it accurately because I’d read it in some magazine in the library a few weeks before.

I was nine years old.

Parents were called, parent-teacher conferences were set up and all sorts of other rigmarole. Eventually it was acceded to that I was not manufacturing crack cocaine behind the school in my spare time.

This sort of thing was not an abnormal occurrence. I was constantly in trouble for “having knowledge that I shouldn’t have.”

I got in more trouble more often for this sort of thing than for fighting – and I got in fights nearly every day.

It didn’t make me want to stop learning, but it did make me completely ignore anything that was happening in school.

In a way it was a gift, though a gift with consequences. It means I don’t get as much credit for the knowledge I do possess because I don’t have the right set of papers (aka credentials) to go with the erudition.

But such is life.