**I will preface this post by saying that it’s long and mundane and pointless and you don’t even want to *begin *to read it.
It’s way too long, and it’s not worth your time.
I think I wrote this post just for my own personal catharsis. It’s not for anyone else but me, I suppose.
**
**[COLOR=Green]**Don’t let the door hit you on the ass on the way out.
**Leaving? Bye! 
**[/COLOR]
So let’s talk about what I learned in public school.
I started when I was just barely legally old enough, since I’m born in late August. I was always smaller than the other kids regardless of my age and my parents moved a lot when I was younger, so before first grade I hadn’t even had an actual friend yet.
My friends were the sets of encyclopediae which I would snag from the basement and read by myself in my room. I learned about world history, famous presidents and less famous ones (the odd presidents that no one remembers were my favorites) famous artists, musicians, philosophers, military leaders, inventors, animals, dinosaurs… for someone who couldn’t get enough to read, countless thousands of pages with worlds and worlds of information in it were so precious. I learned a lot about things that began with X because that was the thinnest volume, so I polished that one off cover to cover.
When one is used to reading college level reference books and thinks those are exciting, spelling and handwriting tests in the first grade are beyond boring. I would sit under my desk and sing to myself and recite Calvin and Hobbes comics from memory, draw accurate maps of the united states state-by-state, placing the capital marked as a star and naming each state and capital, and on the next page I would draw the solar system, to size-scale, with the sun taking up the whole left side of the page and the rocky inner planets being barely visible, labeling the asteroid belt, drawing the known moons, naming the larger asteroids.
Of course I aced all the tests, they were absurd in their simplicity. Yes, I can draw the word cat and also spell it.
But since I couldn’t engage in class or with my classmates, the powers that be thought I might have been retarded. So they tested my intelligence, and then discussed skipping me ahead to fourth grade, realized how poorly I was doing with just one years’ disadvantage in age, thought how bad even more years disadvantage would be, and decided I’d do better learning to socialize first, and decided I’d do better in kindergarten. I *still *didn’t connect with anyone my own age, and I was *still *bored to tears.
Private schools, public schools, they were *all *horrendous. Expecting me to fit in in any group of people my age was absurd. Expecting me to fit in with older kids was equally absurd. It only got worse as kids got older and more capable or more imaginative forms of cruelty.
Teachers would lecture, read aloud from textbooks, stop mid-page, wait for questions, start again, stop again, assign pages of busy work, send you home with more chapters to read and hours more tedious busywork.
I couldn’t handle the tedium. I suffered so much… sitting for hours and hours and hours in uncomfortable desks with harsh unnatural lighting, often at times when the sun had not even risen yet (School in New Hampshire during the deepest part of the winter can get pretty ridiculous) waiting and waiting and waiting for each class period to be over. I learned nothing from my teachers at all, year after year after year after year. There wasn’t anything they had to teach me that I didn’t already know or could learn more easily on my own.
I never did the homework, I never studied for tests, I never participated in class discussions, I never worked in groups except on my own, without interacting with my “group”. I showed up, waited for the tests, and completed the tests with flying colors. My grades were failing or Cs and Ds, because all I would ever do were the tests and the required in-class assignments I could get in severe trouble for refusing to do. But if you just took my test scores, my grades would have been A or A+ depending on the subject matter. Only because I never studied would I ever miss any question.
After moving me from one school to another, I still had no long term friends and still did not know how to form relationships with people. I had no peers, and only the really, really weird kids with vaguely similar interests would be the ones I’d play with, simply because those were the only ones who would accept my weirdness.
I had written most people off as being irredeemably ignorant and cruel, monstrous animal-things, generally incapable of any kind of rational or moral behavior. I saw them as herds of cattle whose primary form of entertainment was locking horns with one another and trampling anyone who didn’t stampede with them. To this day, I still see large groups of people as persons dumbing themselves down to this level in order to conform to the will of the group.
Teachers would teach to the middle, to the bulk, under the philosophy that the smart kids would learn on their own and the kids in the middle needed their help the most, and the ones that never tried would fail regardless. They needed mass produced, cookie-cutter students, and taught from cookie-cutter lesson plans designed to appeal to the average person.
But I couldn’t deal with the slowness. We’d cover things in class almost every day that we covered the previous day. We’d read aloud, and I’d have to listen to kids who could barely pronounce the words attempt to struggle their way through sentence after sentence. We’d stop, and discuss, and ask questions, and then continue ahead swift as a glacier. Then we’d do worksheets, and more worksheets, and pop quizzes, and class assignments, and a test at the end of the unit, and a test at the end of the chapter, and homework assignments.
Teaching via repetition to those who need it. Teaching via discussion and interaction for those who needed that. Teaching by doing, for those who need that. Teaching by reading aloud, teaching by reading quietly. Every known form of teaching tried all at once, and just to be sure the slower kids can keep up, at the pace that would make a snail weep in frustration.
And then between the hours of not-learning and preventing me from just reading the material at my own pace and passing the exams, I would be treated to periods of absolute torture, where absent an authority figure, I would attempt to make my way to the next holding pen without being singled out, stolen from, tripped, pushed, or otherwise targeted. Then for good measure, I’d sit at the table nobody else sat at during lunch period, to emphasize that I did not belong. Because any seat elsewhere in the cafeteria was “taken” by someone’s book bag.
Clearly the public school system wasn’t designed for someone like me. Obviously, it wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever if it was. It was designed for the middle 80 percent. The top 9 percent would do fine anyway, and the bottom 10 would struggle regardless. People like me happened once in a school year, or not at all, and so therefore, there was no need to cater to my special needs.
What did I need?
I needed a textbook and a quiet place to read it.
Send me to the library, where I would read the material, and when I was ready, go back to the “teacher”, hand him my textbook, and ask for the exam. Which I would then take, in full view of the teacher.
Then, I needed my textbook back, so I could move on to the next chapter.
I estimate with my reading and comprehension speed, I could have moved through a chapter in a textbook every 4 or 5 school days, probably finishing each course of instruction within 3 months, moving on to the next “grade”.
I also could have, in most cases, simply skipped ahead several grades and continued on from there. Stuff which required actual memorization of content would have moved at a decent pace with little skipping. Stuff like reading, spelling, vocabulary, grammar, math, and so forth, I could have been given a more advanced starting point.
I think that I could have moved ahead to high school courses by the age of 12, and completed high school by the age of 14 or 15, and begun college work, which would have been much more suited to my needs. Assigned course work which was reading, and exams.
However, this did not happen, because through much insistence on the part of people who knew what was best for me, I was required to move at a slow pace through grades I already knew backwards and forwards, with the same group of overgrown horses asses I knew from all the years prior, who were getting even more physically capable of harassment, and had graduated to moving in groups of six or seven to ensure that it was a team sport, and taking weapons to school to ensure that hey, there wasn’t any chance of a fair fight ever happening. We wouldn’t want to actually man up and bully the smaller kid one on one without a weapon. That would take actual balls. But what can you expect from a herd of dumb cowardly animals except herd mentality and cowardice.
The purpose of stunting my educational development was for the sole purpose of developing me socially. I needed to learn to interact with these other people, whose only interactions with me were none at all, or extremely negative.
Needless to say, I didn’t become a people person.
Still do not know how to make friends in real life, don’t know how to maintain the friendships of those brave and warm souls who have tried.
And of course, it **is **all my fault. I could have reached out to my tormentors and offered them my friendship. Hey, would you guys like to read encyclopedias with me and draw maps from memory? No? What do you guys do for fun? I see. That sounds remarkably like the kinds of things my dog does for fun. Playing fetch the ball, running around with a stick. Somehow I just don’t think we have much in common. I read and play all the single player computer strategy games. Where I sit for hours and days and weeks and months using my mind to defeat superior foes. What do you do? Ah, button-mashing fighter games, where you beat one another literally to death and insult each other while you’re doing it. The objective being hit the buttons faster and more randomly than your opponent. You’ll notice a common gaming motif of rock paper scissors providing balance to these sorts of games. If you mash the buttons faster, you may not win. Someone might have guessed a different button, and that button beats this button. A beats B beats C beats A. Very stimulating game. Let’s do it so fast we’re not even thinking about it, just mash buttons.
Not much common ground here.
You know, I graduated from high school and moved on with my life and still never got the hang of interacting with people my own age.
So, I spent 12 years failing that class over and over and over. I failed socializing 101.
Somehow, still got an education. It was just several years too many for my taste, and involved a whole lot of other unnecessary people.
At no point were my “teachers” anything more than a hindrance to my education. They were the assigners of busywork, the delayers of knowledge, the graders of homework, who valued participation and repetition more than actually knowing the material.
Knowing the material should be 100 percent of my grade. After all, I am there to do what?
Learn the material. If I already know the material, can you not just test me on that to prove it? Must I prove it to you day, after day, after day, after torturous day, be quizzed and challenged on it for months at a time, until we finally get to a chapter test and MOVE ON?
At no point were my “classmates” anything but a distraction and a nuisance.
My education could have happened in a few years, sitting in a library, reading the material and then being tested on it. Kind of like how certain college courses work. My goodness how much you can learn when you don’t have a teacher or classmates.
So I get it. The verdict on me is that I am an aberration, I am a weirdo, I am an antisocial loner, I deserve all the torment I ever got, I look down my nose at the average person (primarily because all they ever did was look down at me) and think of them as inferior, nasty beings that I don’t ever, ever want to have the misfortune of knowing personally. I don’t want to touch them or look at them or have them involved in my life in any way.
What’s funny is that this has spread to the women I date, who have been without much exception, brilliant professionals, usually in the medical field, who are usually quite well off financially, often women who graduated high school several years before I did. These would be the women I probably would have graduated with, if I hadn’t been forced to spend my time with the class of 2001.
Of course, I wouldn’t have dated them at the time. That would have been very illegal. 
But I do wonder how different my life would be right now if fate had not decided that I was to associate with people I would never understand, and would never understand me back.
If I had been skipped ahead to fourth grade at the age of 6, wouldn’t it have been dramatically uncool for people to beat me up? There’s no honor in kicking the ass of the kid that’s 4 years younger than you. Not that there was much honor in the torment I did receive. Even cruel dumb kids have their limits.
I wouldn’t have been EXPECTED to keep up on the sports teams. I might have been actually challenged by my school work. I might have maintained a desire to grow and learn.
Wouldn’t I have gotten a few people to reach out to me as hey, this kid’s a brainiac, maybe he can help me with my homework. Maybe I’d have had something to talk about. Maybe I would have had actual peers. Maybe everyone I met wouldn’t have been a total douchenozzle, and possibly as a result of that, I’d be a lot more sociable myself, and less of an antisocial asshole that I am today.
I can tell you this much about being tested in first grade as being someone with “astounding potential”: That *potential *is a horrifying curse, a dreaded cloud of darkness, that follows me everywhere I go. It is a gigantic sign on my forehead which reads “DIFFERENT”.
It is an excuse for people to expect me to be different. It is a societal demand that I be utterly phenomenal. And when I am phenomenal, I am a threatening egghead jerk who is full of himself and makes everyone else feel bad about themselves. And when I’m not phenomenal, I’m not living up to my potential, or look, the kid who can do no wrong on graded exams can’t catch a football, let’s make fun, since now we’re in the position of being better at something. Let’s make him feel horrible because he’s not great at absolutely everything, that will show him, the little shit.
Here, let’s throw him in with younger kids, then older kids. Let’s pull him out of public school for several years, and then throw him back in. Maybe he’ll get really *great *at making friends this way.
I can tell you of all the glorious things I was able to achieve with my enormous potential.
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I was a virgin until high school was quite over. I had probably one friend at any given time throughout my years of schooling, if that.
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I built the strongest straw skyscraper in science class, that held the most weight, and also survived the longest in the earthquake simulator, and I managed to do it without any tape or glue- it was held together by friction alone. My teacher was baffled by how it worked and how it was stronger than the heavier, glued together designs.
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I managed a C or D average during grade school, and a nearly flawless GPA in college. Thus demonstrating I should have been in a college environment the whole time. I also dropped out of college because scholarships do not pay for rent or food, and having enormous potential doesn’t get you a job at Burger King when there are 50 other applicants and the economy has collapsed.
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I got promoted at my job pretty quickly when I did get one. shrug
I’m 30 and I have a job that pays barely above the bare minimum this country allows, no college degree, and I’ve got the same social skills I had in the third or fourth grade.
I’m also now a bitter loner, not just a loner.
I wish I could go back to when I was five years old, hit myself in the head with a brick, just hard enough to make sure I never had any unusual amounts of potential.
I also wish I could throw that brick at every teacher or guidance counselor who insisted on keeping me with classmates my own age, because having* enormous potential* means stifling it by making me learn at the same pace as everyone else.
It is taking a Porsche supercar, naming it “Potential” and putting it directly in the middle of stop and go rush hour traffic in a gridlocked inner city.
That’s what you do with your potential. You park it behind a Ford van, with a couple of Hondas on either side, and demand that my gas pedal never, EVER touches the floor. You also have a bunch of kids throwing rocks at it, to scratch up the paint job, and making the owner of the Porsche wonder why he ever wasted money trying to make that car look beautiful.
So after 12 years of stop and go traffic behind that Ford van, with your paint job utterly ruined, you don’t even want to finally peel off toward the highway and push it to the limits. You just don’t care anymore about your enormous potential. You just want to park it in the garage where no one will ever see it again, and drive a beat up honda around town delivering pizzas.
Everyone hates the guy in the Porsche, and wants horrible things to happen to his car. They dream of him getting into an accident with a cement truck, just to show him for having the gall to not drive the same car as everyone else. Let’s back into his bumper and not leave a note. Isn’t that hilarious?
I don’t care about my potential anymore. It is under a tarp, hidden from view. I’ll never drive it again. I won’t even bother fixing the dents or the bumper. If I could sell it for half a million dollars, I would. If I could sell it for ten grand, I would.
I don’t want it.
If you ever dreamed of what it would be like to be really smart, I’d give it to you for free. You can have it.
I’ll have what everyone else is having. A normal life where I can relate to everyone around me and they could relate to me.
I wish I wasn’t just a bitter, antisocial person.
I see you guys going all dressed to the nines to dance clubs, where you get uninhibited. You actually have no fear about showing off your bodies and being judged by the people around you. You can stand in the middle of a crowd of people and feel comfortable. You can talk to strangers and it feels *good *to you.
You don’t hate yourselves the way I hate myself.
You see, I can’t even blame the world for my ills. It’s my fault. If I wasn’t different, no one would have treated me differently. I’d be just the same as you.
I didn’t choose to be different. I didn’t want this.
I also don’t really care about whether you think I’m a jerk who deserves to be miserable, or if you think things should have turned out better for me. What’s done is done. Wishes don’t mean a thing.
You read all the way this far, all I really ask of you is to do me one favor.
If you have a kid, and his first grade IQ test comes back 153, you understand that your child will probably have a miserable life if you do not recognize that the public school system isn’t built to help him in any way, shape, or form.
You put him or her through that, and it will make your child regret every day of their lives.
Talk to your school about building a special curriculum just for this child. Where they can learn at their own pace. Consider skipping the child ahead, even if you’re worried about “fitting in”. Fitting in won’t happen anyway. Unless they’re model-gorgeous and athletic as all hell, popular and strong enough to be an obvious leader that everyone wants to congregate around, they will have a horrendous time being boxed inside the cookiecutter system built for the middle 80 percent.
Get them involved early in Mensa and advanced learning. You have to challenge them, but not push them. Make early achievements possible, but not expected or required.
Do not worry about their making friends or fitting in. Surround them with similar people and it will happen on its own. Or simply remove them from the damaging environment which is being the one among many, that sticks out like a sore thumb.
Do this, and you’ll get fewer cynical depressed self-hating society-hating assholes like me. And your child will thank you for it.
