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I've been homeschooling/unschooling
for not even an year now, and I can't stand the thought of going
back to the world of harassment, boredom, and textbooks. I love
teachers, I always have, but I requested to me taken out of school
because I wasn't learning. Sure the crowded classrooms were bad,
some of the preppy kids so to speak harassing me day in out was
intolerable, and my friends not really my friends because I didn't
have time to build deeper relationships with them. But that wasn't
the problem. The problem was somewhere along the line I realized,
the reason I suddenly went from being an underachiever in all of elementary
school (climbing trees, playing, and doing chemistry
experiments interested me more than homework), to being a straight
A student in all of the 3 years of Middle school, wasn't because
the school changed, or Middle School was more
"comprehensive". It was because of me. I who developed
goals in the summer and finished the coming years textbooks, me
who read all the great science works, and then swiftly aced the
tests. That was fine, you see. I gained the knowledge, sat through
class, and got my A's, parent's no longer thinking I'm stupid. But
there is a problem with all this. And it was that I was bored. The
meaningless projects that were given with good intention, taught
me nothing. All that busywork which was essentially just 'busy' work,
was just sort of wasting my time. And I was loosing my brain
knowledge, and gaining more 112 percents. Sometimes in math
classes I would want them to slow down. And then in other
classes, I had to sit and sit and sit waiting for others to
finish, or more often, wait for the teacher to shut up, I get it!
I know he doesn't get it, but I get it, and I would like to start
on my homework now. Subjects that were fascinating written by
Asimov, Darwin, or Shakespeare, became chores in textbooks that
talked, how should I phrase it...baby-talk. But of course A's and
praise give you sort of a glow of pride, that you shouldn't have
because of a letter, that doesn't mean much when it comes to
knowledge. But 8th grade was the last straw, A's were becoming
normal and the minimum now, and I knew I wasn't learning as much
as I could if I could spend my homework time reading, Mind's I.
Most of all, my teacher's unlike before, weren't my friends, for
some reason as I got in higher grades, there seemed to be more
people, and my teacher's didn't seem to care for me like they use
to. And classes reached a limit on wasting time (in lectures
mostly because the boys in the back, and now next to me in the 2nd
row as a punishment, were clowning around again <who can blame
them?>), and projects that we've been doing every year since I
don't remember when, homework that we learned nothing from, stress
on the project about who invented the telephone, (didn't I do that
in 3rd grade). American History was fascinating when I read that
book in the summer, but boy was I wrong and so on. So I quit. Yup
I quit. And now I've finished almost 3 years ahead of all the
other students my age. No, not because of some miracle curriculum,
turns out I knew quite a bit about science, so I could move on,
and study more deeply. Since I've mastered the basics, my parent's
let me coordinate my schedule and studies and stimulating projects
(well to me!) on something I'm curious about.
School would be great, just keep everything, but requirements,
more various textbooks, and no grade levels, perhaps more like
brain levels. In my belief, when schools or learning in our
society becomes a better place in accordance to human psychology
and how we learn, like Grace Llewellyn says, "There would be
a lot more library and a lot less school". Hey, nature made
us to thus so far to design robots, and build bridges, naturally,
every infant knows how to learn. While the rest of us may be full
of facts, but learn slower because we've forgotten HOW to learn.
In support of Teacher's everywhere, and especially learning,
-Rain
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