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Comment Re:My schooling... through the ages (Score 1) 1114

The end result of your story sounds so familiar. I was a military brat, and thus experienced a lot of different schools. I was always in the 98 percentile and was far ahead of my peers. In 7th grade, we were transferred to Grand Forks, North Dakota. I don't know if the same program is still in effect, but back then they had a special class for all the bright kids. This was a large school, being a feeder school for all the small farming communities in the area (I spent the last few months of 6th grade in a school where 4th, 5th, and 6th grades were taught in the same classroom). Hitting 7th grade was a shock. We were taking high school level courses; English Comp, Biology, Algebra/Trig, etc and were graded on that material; not the normal curricula the rest of the students used. It was extremely challenging and pretty competitive as well. Fast forward to high school..I spent some time in Las Vegas...typical school system, nothing exceptional either way, but when I went to the DoD school system in Okinawa, I had a horrible shock. I was using the same textbooks I used in 7th grade (and on which I had earned straight A's). For the most part the teaching staff seemed to be either young people who took the assignment as a way to travel or teachers who probably couldn't cut it any where else (my Latin teacher was so old she constantly fell asleep in class, my shop teacher liked to smoke hash behind the shop bldg, etc) I got bored and started cutting school; eventually getting expelled. Since I wasn't in school, I hung out with the other people who were cutting class...and eventually came under the view of military and Japanese law enforcement as a suspected drug dealer! I hung out with the dopers, but didn't appear to be one - therefore I must be dealing in drugs. Eventually, the Japanese government began deportation proceedings, but fortunately we were transferred back stateside before that happened. In Lompoc, CA, I went back to my getting A's in my classes (very good school; we actually had a Digital PdP8e to learn Basic on), but found that because of differences in graduation requirements, and my expulsion for the one year, I would graduate in the class of '77 rather than '74. Needless to say, I didn't stay around to graduate, I ended up with a GED and CLEP tests worth 2 years college equivalency. It is hard to say now, whether that one year in North Dakota taught me to apply myself and succeed academically or whether I would have been better off with mediocre schooling all the way through.

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