How my high school experience compared to Gatto's claims. (assignment 11/12)

I would have to agree with Gatto on pretty much everything.  Not just my high school, but all of my K-12 schooling.  I was bored in most of my classes to a degree that quite often I did not even bother to show up for them.  There were a few exceptions; computer science, history and a few others where I excelled.  Looking back the reason that I excelled in the classes that I did was because I made them interesting.  In computer science I was able to create my own programs, what ever I wanted to do, it was like being given a lump of clay and being told that I could make what ever I wanted to with the lump.  With the other classes that I enjoyed we were allowed to do projects and present them to the class.  Looking back I wish I had joined the drama club as that would have been fun but I was shy.  I did make some special effects for one of the plays that they did.  The classes that I had that were just go in and absorb information and leave were the ones that I had problems with.  Writing reports on books, memorizing facts, regurgitating the same information as everyone else just had no value in it for me personally.  Every time I have ever excelled in school it was because I was given the opportunity to dance to the beat of my own drum.  Now I have largely put most of the memories of my high school days out of my head as that was a long time ago and my participation was minimal at best.  There are only a few things that I can remember that I think fit here.  First is that because of my poor performance in my classes they decided that I must be dumb so they gave me a series of IQ tests, when the three IQ tests came back averaging about 140 they were perplexed at my bad grades and said they could not help me.  That school system had no AP classes, and in fact said that they did not believe in accelerating students learning.  Even if they did, I would not be a candidate.  Second is that when I moved at the end of 10th grade, I had accrued several hours of detention for skipping classes.  My high school would not transfer my grades to my new school unless I did the detention hours during the summer in which I transferred.

I will relate the following from my kids school as that is fresh in my head.  My wife volunteers in several of the schools in the area, mostly in my kids school though.  One day she was in the teachers lounge and over heard two of the teachers who were known to be questionable talking.  Those teachers were comparing notes on which one of them was being meaner to the students and laughing about it.  In another class my daughter spent a large portion of the year with her head on the desk along with her classmates because when there was one child being loud or bad, the entire class was punished and school work was stopped.  As a result of that she always had a lot of homework and did not know how to do it because she was not being taught.  In another class a teacher said my daughter should be put on medication, not because she was a problem but because she would not pay attention and was doing her own thing.  My daughter was moved into a different school and she excelled, and in fact her teacher at her new school said she was writing poetry at an adult level and we should get her published.

Prior to the prussian influence on our schooling the kids were schooled either at home or in small school houses.  The education bore relevance to the lives that they led.  I once had the opportunity to take a test which was purported to be an 8th grade test from the early 1800's.  The test was on farming, selling crops, and buying supplies.  Everything on the test was interrelated, especially the math questions which were word questions similar to what Mr. Escalante did with the gigolo question except about farming.  Now if we in our current society were to do that sort of schooling in junior or senior high school they would be teaching people how to balance check books, do taxes, understand amortization of mortgages, and credit card interest.  These would be useful skills to learn at a young age if they were not deliberately being set up for failure, or to be slaves to the bankers and corporations.  By the time the kids realize what debt really is it is too late, okay that is an exaggeration or is it.  I think I wandered off topic anyway