THE famous little yellow bus stopped at the bottom of my driveway at 8:30 a.m. on the first day of fourth grade. I was the only passenger at first, but we zigzagged here and there, picking up children I had never seen before. We finally stopped at an office building, in a city eight miles from our rural upstate New York town, where a room had been rented for the class. We were “special ed.”

From September to the following June, seven boys and two girls ran around this room in circles, dropped objects from windows, peed in closets, threw a football at the back of a visitor’s head, tossed slices of bologna onto the ceiling, pushed and punched and yelled at one another and did occasional schoolwork. On my second day, a big kid named Darryl split my lip with his fist after a brief dispute. During the fourth week, a teenager lurking in the bathroom down the hall cornered me and ordered me to strip. I hit him in the belly with my head, dashed around him and ran all the way back to the classroom, where a quartet of boys, including Darryl, was quickly assembled. Together we returned to the bathroom, grabbed the kid’s arms and legs, carried him down the hall and threw him out the second-floor window onto the grass. We never saw him again.

I had been placed in special ed for “hyperactivity” — brawling with other boys, throwing and breaking furniture when I was overly angry or frustrated, and not being able to sit still. In the second grade, after one disturbance too many, I was driven to a hospital to have my “brain waves tested,” as my mother put it (this was the 1970s), and was sent to a local psychiatrist who kept repeating, “Tell me the story of your life.” Being 7, I didn’t know what he meant by that, so I clammed up and we spent 55 minutes staring at each other.

In special ed, I immediately toned down my outbursts, for purely practical reasons. The kids fought like grown-ups. If you hit someone in the arm, he might hit you back in the face or the genitals. On this level, special ed worked — I was scared straight, but it also felt like jail, and to get out meant being on my best behavior. So no more jumping on anybody and no more damaging property. But also little schoolwork, no tests, no grades, no homework and nobody asking “What’s going on at home?”