Maybe You Should Apply To This School

Growing up I fell into a trap that many kids do. I was an only child with parents that, when I was young, hoped that I could make a life better than they had. Now, they were not great parents. In fact, looking back, they were terrible. However, I was a curious type of child, always asking questions and eager to learn things. My mother, to occupy my time and to keep me from annoying them, would give me puzzles and sheets of math to do. And being bored and enjoying completing tasks, did them. I also went to day care from age two where they did teach us things. I went to kindergarten there as well. By the time that I entered public school in the first grade my learning was above the level that they were learning in probably every subject. However, this was a far suburban school in the 80's. There was nothing in place to help children learn at the level they were at. You just worked on everything with the kids your age. The standard, lowest common denominator type of teaching that still plagues a lot of teaching.

I was bored a lot. I would finish the assignments in minutes and have several times that amount of time to be bored. The teachers were not prepared nor equipped to help me learn further. I was told to just sit there and wait for the other students to finish the lesson. I grew up poor. I didn't go to doctors. That was probably just as much as being poor as it was my families grew up not trusting smart people. This would come back to haunt me as I aged and began learning more and more. Today I like to say that we were too poor to afford rich kid diseases like ADHD. I have developed coping skills over my life, but I was likely a kid that today would have been diagnosed as having ADHD and been placed somewhere on the spectrum. Sitting still and being quiet for 15 minutes every half an hour was a lot. I talked and disrupted the others near me a lot when I was done with the work.

I didn't learn how to learn like other kids do. I either already knew what we were working on or could understand it very quickly. After that I would be bored. My disruptions ended up with me in the back of the room with the other disruptive kids which consisted of others like me that easily understood the work or the ADHD kids that did not understand the work and were not taught how to figure it out. Over the years those of us in the back of that understood the work, generally did well in school, while those that were in the back that did not understand the work got worse and worse. My school did have a "gifted education" program for a few years. They would take those of us that tested at the highest levels of the standardized tests and they would pull us from class one day a week for a little while to push our brains. Looking back, I would not be surprised if it was some sort of study. They gave us logic puzzles to do and would ask us logical questions. I really liked that a lot. The logic puzzles were challenging. We also collaborated. This I feel did give me some of the skills that I use today when it comes to problem solving and working with teams on projects. Too bad it was for 60 minutes once a week for only two years of my early schooling.

I did get my attention better under control as I aged. It cost me legible handwriting and contributed to my distrust of people in authority. In second and third grade the teachers were meaner old ladies that believed that torturing children was an acceptable thing. I would have to write hundreds of lines of "I will not disrupt class" and things like that. I got really fast at writing. Really fast. But my legibility suffered greatly as those speed lines probably became 90% of the things that I wrote down on paper for a couple of years. Also, I hated those teachers for forcing me to do that. In fourth grade my teacher redirected me to doodle, journal, read something else, or would even give me other advanced things to learn when I had finished before others. Some of this continued in middle school. I learned to write when I was done. I wish I had those notes, poems, and stories from those years, but they were stolen when I was in eighth grade. My senior year in high school someone else stole the previous four years of writing. That was both the last time that I kept my writings all together and it also gave me enough sadness that I diminished my writing throughout most of the remainder of my life.

I excelled through junior high. Classroom and standardized test scores were still at the highest levels and my grades were great. This lead me to get into all the advanced classes in high school. However, I was still poor and looked it and I had developed a decent mistrust of people in authority. Not a great combination for starting high school. I had teachers that just upon looking at me the first day of class, insulted me and tried to kick me out of class before me opening my mouth or turning in any assignments. Not a great start. Plus, not learning how to learn like other kids did, as I entered these harder classes, I was not prepared for things that I did not already understand nor were things that were easily figured out. I did not know how to ask for help. I did not know to practice things that I did not understand in order to better develop those skills. I began to suffer in some classes and I realized that I was having issues but I had no one to help me.

At the beginning in my sophomore year, my counselor advised me to apply to a private school in the area that specialized in math and science, things that I still was excelling at. It was a school that students could live at. The school boasted an experience for students like me that had learned fast when they were young and that had minds that clicked with math and science. This made me so excited! I lived in a not so stable household that did not appreciate my level of knowledge. My parents stopped encouraging my learning while I was still in grade school. I was poor, but the school's paperwork said that students that qualified could get assistance up to full tuition. So, I filled out the paperwork and gathered my standardized test score copies and gave them to my counselor to take care of. I was hopeful. Something that I do not think I felt often at that age.

The next week my counselor called for me to their office. I was anxious. I was going to find out if I had been accepted to this school that felt like a dream come true. I was already worried about the cost and if I would qualify for free tuition. When I got to their office I could already tell there was bad news. They said that students needed to apply their freshman year for this school and I was too late to apply. This being a school that I knew nothing about before they had brought it up the week before. My hopes were dashed. It furthered my distrust for those in authority. But, it did give me a lesson; that people can be incompetent in their jobs and no one even cares.