The episode in which Joachim is sent home after four months in first grade marks the collision between his intensely personal way of understanding letters and the expectations of the classroom. His anger, which seemed to others to come without warning, was not separate from how he perceived the world: even a simple writing exercise could become a crisis when the teacher’s sentence and the character of its letters did not agree in his mind.

The World Behind the Letters

The hospital buildings around Joachim’s home were arranged in two rings and identified by letters. Each had three floors, named for their position as lower, middle, and upper; the placement of patients also reflected the severity of their conditions, with lighter cases below and the most severe above. Because his father often spoke about the wards, this system was part of Joachim’s everyday understanding of letters, not an abstract classification he encountered only at school.

When he began learning to write, he therefore wondered which height a letter should have in a word. The question was not merely about handwriting. He associated the letters with the floors and the patients who lived there, and he could give a word special force by raising its initial letter. A word beginning with a letter placed on the upper, closed ward could acquire a dangerous, unruly character; a lower placement could make an illness seem mild, while a middle placement could make a cat seem capable of scratching. In Joachim’s perception, letters had an identity and a nature of their own.

The Classroom Collision

The conflict became visible during ordinary lessons. Asked to write that a cat was hungry, Joachim produced a cat that was not hungry instead: his attention had gone to what the letter’s assigned height made the word mean, rather than to capitalization, grammar, or the teacher’s intended sentence. The teacher shook her head, but those conventional distinctions seemed less immediate to him than the character of the letters themselves. What looked like a failure to follow a basic instruction arose from a different, internally consistent system of meaning.

The frustration extended beyond writing. Joachim was increasingly beside himself with anger, and even what he experienced as the smallest injustice could drive him to despair. The account describes these first-grade outbursts as the beginning of episodes of rage that would follow him through his life. After only four months, and to his complete surprise, he was sent home.

The Rest of the School Year at Home

His parents decided not to send him back to kindergarten, hoping to spare him from having the painful experience become traumatic. He spent the rest of the school year at home. On mornings when his mother worked as a traveling physiotherapist, he accompanied her around the countryside. While she taught skeptical farmers with slipped discs how to lift and carry heavy loads, including sacks of fertilizer, Joachim wandered nearby or played with the toys belonging to children who were away at school.

Once a week, his mother gave riding therapy and taught him a few tricks on horseback during the breaks. His father sometimes took him along to swimming therapy for people with severe disabilities, where Joachim was lowered into the water by crane. These activities made the year at home more than a simple interval without lessons: he moved through the working routines of his parents, though he remained outside the ordinary school life being lived by other children.

Separation and Lasting Consequences

The interruption also changed Joachim’s place among his peers. His former friends regarded him with suspicion as a failed first-grader, and he felt that they now belonged to a different world. He wanted no further contact with the children he knew from kindergarten. The family’s choice to keep him at home spared him a return to that setting, but it did not restore his earlier friendships or sense of belonging.

The episode thus links an intimate difference in perception to a concrete break in schooling and social life. The classroom judged the written result against its rules; Joachim experienced the letters as beings with height, character, and force. His removal from school followed not a single miswritten sentence but the mounting strain between those two ways of making sense of what was on the page.