4 ms·

Can confirm: My parents made me go through the grades one at a time, despite the principal's recommendation that I start in 1st grade, move to 2nd mid-semester,

by smeej 2y ago

Can confirm: My parents made me go through the grades one at a time, despite the principal's recommendation that I start in 1st grade, move to 2nd mid-semester, do 3rd grade in the spring, and do two a year after that. It was intensely boring. I can see why they thought a bunch of teens and young adults wouldn't want to be friends with a much younger child, but I've always wondered if they would have been more willing to overlook the age difference than the other young children were willing to overlook the fact that the only thing we had in common was our age. Ironically, I found it decent preparation for life, though, which seems to be occasional bursts of furious activity punctuated by long stretches of repetition, which could easily become boring. I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting.

bradrn 2y ago
> I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting. Oh yes… I also spent considerable time teaching myself interesting topics. It’s a good skill to have. But I was still bored a lot of the time, and being able to do the interesting stuff in school too was a much better experience for me.
- smeej 2y ago
  Ultimately I've had to get to a point where I realize I'm grateful for the life I live now, and accelerating through school would have changed a lot of it, such that I probably wouldn't have met some of the people most important to me, so I'm grateful for it in the long run. But I don't know that I'll ever stop wondering, and it's not a comparative gratitude, because I'm sure my life could have become beautiful like this in other ways. It's more a practice of radical acceptance with gratitude. I will say one of the things that always made me laugh was that at each milestone, like finishing elementary school and starting middle school, my parents would try to tell me now it would be different, because I was at a higher level. I remember pointing out to them all the same doofuses from the previous years were moving up right along with me, and it wasn't just that I was ahead of them, but that I was faster, so this didn't seem to help. I never did understand why they thought that would work!

by smeej 2y ago

bradrn 2y ago

> I ended up becoming very good at taking responsibility for making my own life interesting. Oh yes… I also spent considerable time teaching myself interesting topics. It’s a good skill to have. But I was still bored a lot of the time, and being able to do the interesting stuff in school too was a much better experience for me.

smeej 2y ago
Ultimately I've had to get to a point where I realize I'm grateful for the life I live now, and accelerating through school would have changed a lot of it, such that I probably wouldn't have met some of the people most important to me, so I'm grateful for it in the long run. But I don't know that I'll ever stop wondering, and it's not a comparative gratitude, because I'm sure my life could have become beautiful like this in other ways. It's more a practice of radical acceptance with gratitude. I will say one of the things that always made me laugh was that at each milestone, like finishing elementary school and starting middle school, my parents would try to tell me now it would be different, because I was at a higher level. I remember pointing out to them all the same doofuses from the previous years were moving up right along with me, and it wasn't just that I was ahead of them, but that I was faster, so this didn't seem to help. I never did understand why they thought that would work!