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I'm so glad my parents decided to send me to school (a lackluster public high school in the rural midwest with asbestos and underqualified teachers that hated t
by Hydraulix989 10y ago
I'm so glad my parents decided to send me to school (a lackluster public high school in the rural midwest with asbestos and underqualified teachers that hated their jobs) a year later, I _hated_ school, and enjoying one more year of a normal childhood was all the more valuable.
When I finally got to school, I was bored out of my mind though. I taught myself how to read, and my classmates were still sounding out words at a painfully slow pace. I could solve addition problems mentally, and my classmates were counting with their fingers. I finished the worksheets right away (within 30 seconds), and my classmates couldn't tell basic shapes apart in the fifteen minutes of time they had to do the worksheet.
My IQ was tested at above the 0.1% percentile, and the school refused to identify me as academically gifted so that they wouldn't have to spend the money (as obligated by the state for "gifted students") on enriching me, so the administration "trained" the teachers to say that I was bright but not gifted. It eventually came down to my parents having to threaten them with a (no contest) lawsuit because there was such a disparity in the results of the IQ test that my school gave me and the IQ test that a local, nationally renowned psychologist gave me.
Of course, I had to sit around and wait for my classmates to "catch up," and the teachers wouldn't even let me read other books or get ahead. Some of the stories we read had Spanish translations, so I learned the Spanish. I'd literally just tap my foot and watch the clock go from 8 AM to 3 PM every day. Terrible. They wouldn't even give me more books to read (how hard is it to just toss six year-old me a book and let me go "off task"?).
- jacquesm 10y agoWhat a sad story. Schools excel at pulling the highs down to average and fail at pulling the lows up to average. I've seen so many examples of this by now I'm happily surprised every time there is a contrary one.
- kbenson 10y agoWhat sticks out to me from all these stories, and ones I've heard before, is that maybe 20-35 kids to a class and annual changes to curriculum aren't necessarily the optimal learning environment. There's nothing special about a year for human development, it's just a common long-term time measurement. If instead of measuring academic achievement by years we measured it in 90 day periods (quarters), would that not possibly solve a lot of the problems presented here? You wouldn't have to worry about getting your child into school early or waiting for the next year, and possibly paying thousands of more dollars for daycare or preschool where it's not subsidized (and that does factor into a great many people's decision making process), and if your child got held back, they wouldn't be a full year behind everyone else. It seems odd that we still let nature dictate the schedule to this degree, and that so little thought seems to go into why.
- jacquesm 10y agoThis is something I wonder about in a much more general way. So many things we take for granted are dependent on planetary orbits and lunar cycles that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Our whole sense of time is so steeped in accident and tradition that hardly anybody ever stops to ask questions such as 'why is it that we get paid per week or per month' and 'why is it that the earth revolving around the sun once' makes X, Y or Z happen which is not related at all? The degree to which accidental items shape our economies and perceptions is odd, to say the least.
- aianus 10y agoJust FYI, percentile is the percentage of people lower than you not higher. So someone really smart would be in the 99th percentile of IQ and someone really stupid would be in the 1st percentile.
- Hydraulix989 10y agoI hope this minor error doesn't invalidate my whole story then! :D
- nether 10y agoHere we go again...
- Hydraulix989 10y agoI hope everyone can look past the "someone on HN said they were smart" part of the story so that we don't miss the actual point.
- nsxwolf 10y agoCan you admit these people really lay it on thick though?
- Hydraulix989 10y agoDefinitely.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- marze 10y agoYour comment is nothing if not an argument for home schooling.