My Education

Depending on what age you look at, I was either an arsine braggart, had very enlightened teachers, or was just lucky to be surfing the right educational theory that happened to be in vogue at the time.

I didn't enter kindergarten until I was six years old. I went to a private Catholic school, and while I remember very little about it now, looking at the progress reports my Mother kept, I pretty much already knew what kindergartners are supposed to know well before the year I spent there was up. I was however, one of those kids who got the "runs with scissors" NI (needs improvement). This demerit would be brought up by my parents for the remainder of my educational career. If something was wrong concerning my education, my parents would always point to this demerit as the early harbinger of my academic problems.

I pretty much breezed through my first year of grade school. By second grade however, I was placed in the "slow" class. The teacher was observant enough to pick up on the fact I wasn't "slow" but instead simply bored. I spent about a month in the slow class, before the principal decided to move me to the "normal" class. In a very short amount of time, I managed to wrack up an impressive month's worth of incomplete homework papers. My teacher decided something had to be done about it, and decided to bundle all of them up, with a note to my mother, explaining that I was going to be held behind if I didn't do my homework. I got in trouble when I pointed out to the teacher that I shouldn't have to do the homework because I already knew how to do all the problems on it. The teacher said homework was the most important part of school, and that I couldn't do well on tests if I didn't do my homework. I pointed out I always got "A" marks on my tests so what she was saying was incorrect.

Long story short, I ditched the homework in a drainage ditch, got in massive trouble, and couldn't sit for weeks. But at the end of the year, at the grade promotion conference, it was generally agreed that I was not a candidate for third grade. By some fluke of luck, my first grade teacher happened to get to put in some words in my favor, and I wound up being promoted over my second grade teacher's objections. 

Third grade started, and I was still doing the whole bit with homework never being done. Lucky for me I had a teacher who had just started her career, and had bought into the idea that homework and test scores should not be the only indicator of ability or mastery. She began taking me up on my challenge that I could do any problem or demonstrate mastery of a concept contained in my homework. And to her surprise she realized I really did know all the answers. I guess I impressed her enough so that she sent home some paperwork for my parents to read over. A short time after that I found out that she had advised my parents that instead of being slow, I was probably gifted and was just bored with the pace of a normal class.

My mother however, said it wasn't very likely that I was smart. She declined doing any testing, and pretty much told my teacher to mind her own business. My mother then tried to get my grandparents to send me to military school because she felt that since I was so slow and lazy, only a military school could offer me any chance of success. Thankfully, my grandparents never coughed up the money.

Anyway, I started fourth grade with a teacher who thought homework was everything, and simply assigned draconian amounts by anyone's standards. And as you can guess I was miserable. While I got A's on my tests, I got F's on my homework. Then a couple of lucky things happened. The first was we took a couple of nationally standardized tests. And in my grade, at my school, I achieved 99th percentile on the national scale, and was first in class on the local scale. Obviously something didn't jell with what I seemed to be able to do on tests, vs my middle of the road class rank at the time. My mother used the tests as an excuse to punish me for being lazy and lucky, telling me lazy people drive trucks and collect garbage when they grow up. My teacher supported my mother's observations, adding in that unless I could follow rules as a child, I would be unable to function as an adult.

Fate intervened, and my teacher suddenly caught cancer and left before Christmas.  I think she later died, but she was replaced by another teacher who was just starting her career. She decided to be my champion, I guess, and sent me to the school psychologist to see if there was a learning disability. As a result of the tests, the psychologist suspected that my family life was having a negative influence on my ability to perform, and suggested an IQ test to determine just how much I was capable of. There were a series of parent teacher conferences, where for some reason, my mother finally relented to me being tested.

I was eventually tested just before the school year ended and was found to be off the charts. Unfortunately for me, we moved to a new county, and a really crappy school system at the start of my fifth grade. My new teacher was in the ebb of her career and thought homework and Bible verse based lessons were the way to go. Fortunately for me, my records had been flagged by my fourth grade teacher and the new school system got around to sending out their psychologist to test gifted students. I missed one question, the definition of the word "espionage", and I only missed that one because I didn't understand how the question was phrased. Having tested off the charts, I pretty much found myself from that point on always being able to skip normal classwork/homework. 

By the end of fifth grade, I was performing at a college level or higher in everything but advanced math. Probably because I simply didn't like math. But pretty much from that time on I didn't do normal school work. I coasted through middle and high school. Once teachers realized I wasn't going to do homework, but would devourer massive projects, they pretty much gave up on giving me homework. The other thing which probably forced them to give up was that I could usually demonstrate more information and knowledge than they had on almost any subject. Basically, I spent the  next seven years doing whatever I wanted to academically, winning battles of will with stubborn teachers who thought that they would be the ones to finally force me to do homework, and doing my best to blend in with normal kids.

By the time I got to college, where no one cares if you do homework but grade you on tests, projects, and term papers, I was already far ahead of everyone else because that was all I had been doing for years.

What did teachers think about me? Most of them I have no clue. I suspect a fair number hated my guts. But there were more than a few who I made a pretty solid impression on, to the point that as my brothers later followed me in school they would find that my former teachers would contrast them with me. They never found them to have met my achievements and apparently had a bunch of stories to tell about me. I think a few were actually proud of me, my youngest brother, 17 years younger, told me that more than a few of his high school teachers had asked me if he was my brother and when he said "yes" was then told he had a pretty high standard to meet. 

But basically I spent the first four years of my academic career in the slow classes, mostly because of my refusal to do homework. I got really lucky with a couple of brand new teachers. Without them having come along when they did, I would have probably spent my entire academic career in the slow class being miserable. That's the ultra short version.