I go down to the basement, still filled with the loathing & resentment of being made to do this stupid crap, grab my hat & coat, & go home (everyone walked to school in those days).
I walk into the house, "Hi Ma"!
"J! What are YOU doing here, you’re supposed to be in school!"
"It was boring".
"I’m calling you father".
Uh-oh.
Go read the whole thing. I started to comment on this post and it quickly became apparent that I had more to say than would politely fit in another blog's comments... So, true to form, I copied & pasted here:
I'm sure this will come as a surprise to you, but my experience was similar to yours. Basically, what I would do would be to grab the teacher's lesson plan first chance I got Monday morning, then spend all day Monday and maybe early Tuesday morning doing all my work for the week.
Which, naturally, meant that I had Tuesday afternoon through Friday to goof off. I'd get sent off to the library sometime after lunch on Tuesday, spend all day Wednesday and Thursday reading to my heart's content, then Friday back to the class for end-of-week frivolity.
This worked out fine until I had read every book in the school library. As a first grader. Before Christmas break.
The school's response? They had me skip second grade. Well, not completely skip. One day, around late March/early April, the principal came to our classroom. They called me out of class (I was used to the principal calling me out of class by this point) and told me that I was going to a new class. In one day, I went from being a first-grader to being a second grader.
Now, you want to completely and totally fuck with a 6 year old's head? Not only was I in a completely new class, so I was "the new kid", but I was also "the smart kid" - everyone knew that I had been moved up.
Yeah, being the smart new kid really helps with the social adjusting. Especially when you're the smallest boy in the class. Basically it meant I took a beating on a daily basis.
The folks out there who pooh-pooh homeschooling because it doesn't provide the "social interaction" of public school can kiss my hairy ass...
(On a side note, my mother takes great delight in pointing out that my son is very nearly an identical copy of me at that same age...)
That is all.
3 comments:
Heh.
Birds of a feather, I'd say.
LMAO at your comment @ Breda's place- (teflon foot for Obama)- a coffee spewer, fer sure.
BTW, tnx for the link- Maroonalanche!
My mother tells a story from back in those terribly judgmental days when youths were put into different classes based on aptitude and adults were rewarded for merit.
Long story short the elementary school teacher tells my mother that "the world needs ditch diggers too." But my grandmother told the same story about my father and said it happened to her father as well. So I have to think it is apocryphal.
What I can say for certain is that I paid zero penalty for skipping any honors or AP courses in high school. The teachers just assumed you had a valid excuse in the form of student government, charitable activities, etc. I abused this to no end.
"Yeah, being the smart new kid really helps with the social adjusting."
I know the feeling; I got moved from the fourth to the fifth grade after the first couple of months. Luckily I was as big as the other kids.
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