Your jr principal sucks. Why does she works on education if she doesn`t believe in her students?.
Some people don`t understand 2 things.
1-How people learns vary from person to person: For example, some people learn better in an academic setting, but others learn better with more dinamic activities, like kinestethic learners. (there are more styles of learning and not everyone fit 100% in one specific learning way)
2-There are many kind of intelligences: Not only logical-mathematical and linguistic, there are others like intrapersonal and interpersonal, musical, espacial, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalist and existencial intelligence.