At a glance, the takeaway from Richard Pryor’s school record is that he didn’t do so well in school.<\/p>\n
If we look longer, the record suggests the trying circumstances of his childhood: seven different residences in as many grades, seven different schools, divorced parents, and a stint in Springfield, Illinois, where his mother Gertrude moved after separating from his father Buck. A label of “apparently unstable emotionally” was placed on him as early as first grade, the year after his parents’ divorce.<\/p>\n
The string of C’s, D’s, and F’s ends abruptly: no spring semester for ninth grade. Richard was kicked out of Central High School for punching his teacher Walter Fink<\/a>. “S[tudent] can’t return,” noted the administrator on his report card. A large majority of black teens dropped out, or were expelled, from Peoria schools in the 1950s and 1960s (the figure was 77% in 1964<\/a>), and Richard was no exception to the trend.<\/p>\n Perhaps the deepest lesson of Pryor’s school record is how little conventional schooling, in the 1950s, could recognize unconventional talent. On his first round of standardized testing, Pryor scored a 100 \u2014 perfectly average.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" At a glance, the takeaway from Richard Pryor’s school record is that he didn’t do so well in school. If we look longer, the record suggests the trying circumstances of his childhood: seven […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[369,232,378,13,119,412,21,46,54,26],"tags":[211,240,237,241,55,425,238,56,239],"class_list":["post-520","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-of-richard-pryor","category-the-pryors-and-peoria-between-two-worlds","category-3-young-richard","category-1946-52","category-1953-1962","category-2-floating-from-school-to-school","category-family-affairs","category-featured-document","category-richard-pryor","category-schooled","tag-blaine-sumner-school","tag-central-high-school","tag-irving-school","tag-lincoln-school","tag-records","tag-richard-pryor","tag-roosevelt-school","tag-school","tag-trewyn-school"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=520"}],"version-history":[{"count":29,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6873,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/520\/revisions\/6873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.becomingrichardpryor.com\/pryors-peoria\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}