Cannonpointer » 21 May 2022, 11:41 am » wrote: ↑ I was that student.
I was bored, and I was being step-beaten at home, and I saw no reason to learn Grammar. I learned that if I showed a willingness to disrupt, and was fearless, I could reach a deal: Don't **** with me and I won't disrupt your class. I was socially passed because they never wanted to deal with me again.
They had already taught me to read, write, and manage basic multiplication and division before I resigned from playing their game. I turned in no home work, took home no books, did no class work, aced all tests and passed with d's. I dropped out in ninth grade. I did a semester of my junior year in Spain at a baby-sitting oil field school - for social reasons. Made straight A's there - mostly for social reasons. It was all young teachers. Who the **** were they gonna party with - our redneck parents?
But I always worked for teachers I respected - both in Spain and in the states. I would usually have one A with all my D's. In seventh Grade, it was a literature teacher. The work lit me up and the teacher, though a total bitch, merited respect. I did all of my class work and homework for her. In 8th, it was a math teacher AND a science teacher. The math teacher gave me my own curriculum. He understood that learning at the rate of the slowest *** in class was nothing I was interested in, and he wanted to contribute. The science teacher got my respect because she was sneaky. She would draw me in by under-explaining interesting stuff, causing me to put my finger on the page of my library book and ask for more details - which would always excite the interest of the other students, who expected a show whenever I interacted with a teacher. She was clever like that - I did the work for her. She was pretty and young, on top of being cever and teaching an interesting topic. That semester I had 2 A's, one "I" for incomplete, and the rest D's. If that's not a portrait of a bored kid in a ****-show of a system...
It was all good until 4th grade, when integration came in and the learning went to the level of remedial ***. I LOVED school. Then the learning stopped, and my library books and sport fighting became my self-expression, I was a disciline problem and my parents weren't PTA members. We muddled through, I suppose. Later, I had a foundation. I will always be grateful for that. Learned to understand and appreciate Shakespeare in the context of the times - William Kidd, Ben Johnson, Baldesar Castiglioni, Niccolo Machiavelli. Learned how the field of statistics works, learned how to do post graduate level work in the field of literary criticism. Became an excellent orator and a decent marketer. All because of those first three years of school - the pre-negro years. Those were excellent, very profitable years.