| I homeschooled in 8th grade and I loved it. - No commute to middle school, which returned me an hour of my day right there. - No bullying from the soon-to-be dropouts. - No gross school lunches or having to tote around a smelly lunchbag/box/cooler. - No carrying a pile of books everywhere because the administration banned bookbags (drugs or weapons or something like that...), and no dealing with the worst students who always had their hands free because they didn't care if they had their books. - I went as fast as I wanted through my Algebra textbook (doing up to 8 lessons a day.) - Went to a science class taught every Friday in the next city over with demonstrations of chemistry and physics. - Played my trombone the homeschool band, we performed at Disney World and local recitals too. - Made some friends in the homeschool group. - I disliked the English and History exercises but I did them in weekly batches to get them done. And I read lots of books from the big city's library which was far superior to the school or local city's library that I would have to use later when high school let out. If I had stuck with the homeschooling system I could have finished my BS at the same time I finished high school by taking all my classes at the local university - but I would have probably not double-majored. My experience with home-schooling gave me a big insight to my high school experience. I asked for privileges such as staying in classrooms during lunch or pep-rallies to play chess or read, and I usually got them because I was well-behaved, respectful, and demonstrated I could be trusted. But I also resented the arbitrariness and capriciousness of the public school administration's dictates built around maintaining order due to worst behaving students (for example, I couldn't wear a ball-cap on a bad hair day because the resource officer caught kids hiding drugs in caps - knocking a cap off would start brutal fighting). Compared to that system, homeschooling was a kind of utopia to me. The only downside was not being around the friends that I grew up with. Fewer birthday parties and such. But there was more hanging out with a much smaller set of friends who were all homeschooling, and making new friends in the local homeschool resource group. I went back to high school in 9th grade on the theory that I missed my friends and wanted to be involved in student government and other clubs. But they weren't as friendly as I remembered, and student government and the other clubs did basically nothing. So I spent my 12th grade year at the local university full time, which gave me the freedom I sorely missed from 8th grade. My only regret was not doing it sooner. |
I suspect a high %age of people here on HN could say the same thing.
There's the Big Bang Theory effect, to portray all intellectually gifted people as neurotic social basket cases. I think that's done in many schools as well.