Not surprisingly, he was sent home two or three times before he finished third grade. By then, however, his father had begun to treat him as special, and in his calm but firm manner he made it clear that he expected the school to do the same. "Look, it's not his fault," Paul Jobs told the teachers, his son recalled. "If you can't keep him interested, it’s your fault." His parents never punished him for his transgressions at school. "My father's father was an alcoholic and whipped him with a belt, but I’m not sure if I ever got spanked." Both of his parents, he added, "knew the school was at fault for trying to make me memorize stupid stuff rather than stimulating me." He was already starting to show the admixture of sensitivity and insensitivity, bristliness and detachment, that would mark him for the rest of his life.