Professor Jacobson blogged yesterday about the media’s continued attacks on President Donald Trump’s advisor Stephen Miller. This time, Miller’s third grade teacher Nikki Fiske spoke to The Hollywood Reporter and described Miller as a loner who ate glue.
Her school district has now suspended her.
From The Los Angeles Times:
The Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District has placed veteran teacher Nikki Fiske on “home assignment” while it decides what to do, if anything, about disclosures she made about a young Stephen Miller.—The school district’s concern is “about her release of student information, including allegations that the release may not have complied with applicable laws and district policies,” said district spokeswoman Gail Pinsker.“This has been picked up by other digital publications and blogs, and some issues have been raised,” Pinsker said.
Fiske told The Hollywood Reporter:
I can still picture him sitting in my classroom.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. I wish I could remember what I wrote, but this was 25 years ago. I’ve taught a lot of third-graders since then. Of course, Stephen wasn’t political then — it wasn’t until later that he started to make waves.
This isn’t the first time Miller’s third grade has come to the light. Politico allowed a classmate of Miller’s at that time to pen an op-ed for the publication:
Because of our last names, Stephen and I shared a desk. We were not friends, though we weren’t exactly enemies, either. Our teacher, Mrs. Fiske, had the class write stories each week with vocabulary words, and sometimes she let us read them aloud. I wrote a series of stories about a “mixed-up chicken” named Jeremy. I felt proudest, that year, when I got to read my stories in class and they made the other kids laugh.It was difficult to make Stephen laugh. I found him difficult to reach at all, and so, it seemed, did most everyone else. He was frequently distracted, vacillating between total disinterest in everything around him—my stories, of course, included—and complete obsession with highly specific tasks that could only be performed alone.He especially was obsessed with tape and glue. Along the midpoint of our desk, Stephen laid down a piece of white masking tape, explaining that it marked the boundary of our sides and that I was not to cross it. The formality of this struck me as odd. I was a fairly neat kid, at least at school, and I had never spread my things to his side of the desk. Stephen, meanwhile, could not have been much messier: His side of the desk was sticky and peeling, littered with scraps of paper, misshapen erasers and pencil nubs.
Who didn’t have awkward times while growing up? I believed in Santa until 4th grade. When you can’t get enough of demonizing a person, why not go to his childhood? I wonder what kind of dirt we would dig up on these people who go after Miller and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh?
But we won’t because we’re decent human beings.
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