and probably (surely??) just plunking me directly into the 11th grade would have been hilariously suboptimal. can you imagine? it has been done though, i guess. school was fine as long as i could do whatever i wanted, so long as the work got done. i’d be reading or drawing…
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or talking, quietly, with one of my friends, one of the cleverer or funnier people in class. at one point i was drawing up, kind of, machine geometries for imagined fusion reactors. there was a spelling test and they were like “spelling test” and i said “can’t you see i’m busy”
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they let me get away with it. and the class kept going in jr high, it was not good. the social scene blew up / collapsed as people moved away and new schools merged, and i had a punitive teacher who really hated being corrected or asked questions. she kept giving me detention…
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actually it wasn’t just me. she had tenure, and she was infamous. she would give so much detention that the detention population would exceed her home room population. she would give detention to people in the hallway walking to class.
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anyway, after the nth time this happened, i was like, this is bullshit, i’m locked in here, but i wonder if the doors are actually physically unlocked. so i waited till she was distracted and then slipped out, and checked the doors. they were unlocked! i bolted, hid behind a tree
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and then walked home. my parents, ex world traveling hippies, did not send me back. they decided i didn’t have to, i was ahead a year anyway, and that i was just going to school for recess (for friends, essentially), anyway, a function it no longer provided
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at some point we found out that the tests they had been hiding from a couple weeks before i quit said i was in the 99.97th percentile as scored for uni entrants, or whatever, so we were like, huh, maybe i should just go to university i was too young for the GED, but not the SAT!
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before that, school was books, essays, horseback riding, 3d modeling and programming class at the community college. and lots of videogames; even making some with map editors and engines, little things
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Replying to @DanielleFong
Flexible schools to model = Richmond Community High School, a public charter school decolonializing education & empowering young people to strive across fields & sectors for over 40 years https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/virginia/districts/richmond-city-public-schools/richmond-community-high-school-20598 … Over 80% POC led for over 40 years, 100% graduation rate
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Replying to @amoration @DanielleFong
When I went back to the 40th party for all of the classes of my high school it was astonishing to see how many of our alumni are leading across fields & sectors -- in sciences, media, on Broadway, as authors and fieldmakers in public and private service. So many leaders.
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wow. that's awesome! that reminds me to study another school that was really inspiring. Leta Hollingworth taught at the Speyer School, they were very gifted kids, boys and girl evenly, but basically they organised the curriculum as chapters of an encyclopedia they wrote together
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Replying to @DanielleFong @amoration
it was all part of a curriculum where the main units were all organized as "understanding the world around you". so they would as a class organise to find out about, e.g. aviation, which was even rapidly changing at the time! I think they even visited an aircraft factory
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Replying to @DanielleFong @amoration
apparently the "non-gifted" kids also like this style of class the most, but Hollingworth died before she could really promote it as a learning methodology. the notes and the actual works written by the kids and a manuscript are just now being published again.
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