It is with a shit eating grin in my face that I present you with one of the most entertaining blogs you will ever read on Benkoo.com. Tonight at dinner with my family (last time I will see my sister and Dad in 2008), they let me know while cleaning out the garage they found a long “psychoeducational testing evaluation” done of me when I was about 6 years old.

The context was that I was a little runt and they wanted to see what the professionals thought. Below are their findings and my reactions to them.

Reaction: Tasks requiring eye hand coordination are still difficult and result in poor anger control. My pencil grip is still akward. The rumor is that I threw some blocks when this lady wouldn’t’ let me finish building. Rome wasn’t built in a week. Lay off me, woman!

Reaction: This one kind of hurt. I mean I am pretty much labeled an underachiever before First grade. That’s pretty hard to do. My only defense is that I was only allowed to watch 1 cartoon a day and that was either Transformers or GI Joes. In addition the no fun gestapo that are my parents didn’t allow sugar cereals (what the hell, was this a Dateline NBC topic in the seventies). You would be pretty angry too if you had to eat Rice Crispies 5 days a week and miss out on GI Joes.

Reaction: I love the quote “gets wild at times and lashes out at others, more often verbally than physically”. Even as a kid I was a gangster putting it down on those who didn’t show respect. Its a big shocker that only a year later I was not allowed to play at lunch after tying Andrew Montarubio sp? to the tether ball poll with a jump rope. What a snitch.

Reaction: Dude special ed? Just because I was a bad ass with poor motor skills? This was the most disheartening. That someone paid a lot of money by my folks wanted to throw in a bucket with Corky from life goes on. In all honesty I would have loved to see this applied to young Ben Koo. He would have thrown blocks all over the place.

In retrospect: I was a little shit and its good to be reminded of it. I probably still have a good deal of this baggage, but hey I got into a good school, have a great job, speak at the business school, write for an ESPN affiliate, and finally mastered how to use legos. Regardless that I hold a pencil like a special ed kid and still find myself easily annoyed with ignorance, incompetence, ridiculousness, etc, I consider myself far removed from the retarded problem child I was painted back in these days.