[pakled_engineer]

In first grade was given a bunch of tests and determined I had a "grade 12 reading level" whatever that means. I was sent to one of those so-called child prodigy schools but had no interest in anything they were teaching me. Instead I would disassemble every electronic box in the school and hack around with it. They kicked me out of that school for doing nothing the entire time except taking apart electronics and returned me to the public system. First day, when we received our texts for the year I'd read through the entire text on the weekend and do all the exercises. Then I'd just slack off all year, usually only showing up to do the tests and weekly quizzes while spending the rest of my time hanging out with the other delinquents in my school who never went to class. This worked fine until about Grade 10, when I decided to not even bother reading the textbooks on the first weekend of school anymore and just didn't show up or do any work at all. I was solely interested in hanging out with the crazy STS chatboard goths and IRC hackers I befriended who all partied at this guy's warehouse downtown everyday, which I got away with for about 8 months until one day I forgot to intercept the mail and phone calls from my school and my parents discovered I wasn't even going anymore.

My routine was to get up and walk to school, attend homeroom to show I was actually there then just take off to go downtown to said hacker/drug dealer's warehouse. There was always a ton of people there it was a defacto hackspace and party house. I learned more hanging around those people for a few months than I did all of high school. When my parents gave me an ultimatum I decided to go squat with a bunch of street punks and just hang around the hackerspace all day.

I probably would've been satisfied going to some kind of engineering or compsci program after school if it had existed at the time. I liked hanging out with my friends in high school and was glad I still went to be social but it would've been great if school was only a few hours, and the rest of the day I could have pursued my interests in electrical engineering at a non institutionalized type environment. Hanging with my friends was fun in school between and after classes but everything else about it felt like prison. Somebody you don't elect hands you arbitrary rules to follow and you just end up feeling trapped. I'm sure plenty of other kids don't mind high school for a few hours a day but would much rather spend the bulk of their time learning something else they're actually interested in. I have no idea how this can be accomplished but a full day slogging through half a chapter in a textbook on a subject you have zero passion about isn't it.