Your desk dumping experience sounds exactly like my desk dumping experience (Hammond Middle School, Columbia, MD). For a shy kid like me it was mortifying.
I think one thing my public school education taught me was how to coast, and this coming from someone who was in a good school system. I'm smart and lazy, and I learned early on I could do well on my natural abilities. I rarely felt challenged, partially I think because I didn't have anyone who noticed what I was doing and took the time to push me. I know that's been a detriment to me as an adult because I am only now (in my mid thirties) learning how to push myself. It makes me sad to think of what I might have been capable of when I was younger but I never knew what it was like to really work for something. Like you, I find home/un schooling fascinating in how kids can explore a subject until they are satisfied, how they can mesh it with the other things they are learning, how there is no limit on what they can do. It's funny, people have told me I should be a teacher except the only kids I'd want to teach? Home schoolers. Ah, well.
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Date: 2009-03-31 03:34 am (UTC)I think one thing my public school education taught me was how to coast, and this coming from someone who was in a good school system. I'm smart and lazy, and I learned early on I could do well on my natural abilities. I rarely felt challenged, partially I think because I didn't have anyone who noticed what I was doing and took the time to push me. I know that's been a detriment to me as an adult because I am only now (in my mid thirties) learning how to push myself. It makes me sad to think of what I might have been capable of when I was younger but I never knew what it was like to really work for something.
Like you, I find home/un schooling fascinating in how kids can explore a subject until they are satisfied, how they can mesh it with the other things they are learning, how there is no limit on what they can do. It's funny, people have told me I should be a teacher except the only kids I'd want to teach? Home schoolers. Ah, well.