"
The belief in individual freedom over arbitrary
authority extended to school as well. Two years ahead
of his classmates by age 11, Stallman endured all the
usual frustrations of a gifted public-school student.
It wasn't long after the puzzle incident that his
mother attended the first in what would become a long
string of parent-teacher conferences.
"He absolutely refused to write papers," says Lippman,
recalling an early controversy. "I think the last paper
he wrote before his senior year in high school was an
essay on the history of the number system in the west
for a fourth-grade teacher."
Gifted in anything that required analytical thinking,
Stallman gravitated toward math and science at the
expense of his other studies. What some teachers saw as
single-mindedness, however, Lippman saw as impatience.
Math and science offered simply too much opportunity to
learn, especially in comparison to subjects and
pursuits for which her son seemed less naturally
inclined. Around age 10 or 11, when the boys in
Stallman's class began playing a regular game of touch
football, she remembers her son coming home in a rage.
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