Yeah, I have no memory of what sort learning levels I was expected of meeting/met at kindergarten level (partially due my memories never having reference to time unless such a thing plays a big role them, but also because I never found such information important enough to record in my organic databank), but Frumple's post reminded me that I've always had an adverse reaction to institutionalized learning. I liked learning on my own, and spent a lot of time basically wiki walking through our family's encyclopedia set, and later on in high school (and little before that in middle-school equivalent age when I would go there after school since my mom worked at the high school) I would spend several hours in the school library reading non-fiction books and periodicals instead of doing my homework.
I don't know if it was the school's fault or just my own faulty brain workings, but I've always seemed to have a pathological hatred for homework (I'm sure it couldn't have helped that I was often sent to the principal's office and yelled at or kept in isolation for hours in grade school because I didn't do my assignments sometimes. I'd say my biggest problem as far as academics is concerned probably had to do with my not doing homework, as even when I went to college, several professors remarked how I was clearly quite intellectually capable, doing well in quizzes and contributing in discussions, but there was almost no way they could pass me since I wasn't getting the homework done. But the problem at that point was I was officially tired at that point of people telling me what sort of things I needed to be doing with my free time, but I couldn't just drop out at the time because my parents wouldn't let me, so I had to spend three years travelling 45 minutes each way community college and then a tech school to attend classes which I was pretty much doomed to fail because I had no desire to apply myself, but didn't yet have the stones to confront my parents with the fact that no matter how smart and capable I am, there's no way I could make any of this work when I had absolutely no inner motivation to do so.
And that's probably enough ranting about my school history for now.
EDIT: Okay, one more thing and then I'll shut up. When I said homework was probably my biggest problem in school, that's because it's at least a toss-up between that and writing. I was always a very capable writer for my age (at this point, I think I could stand to brush up on my grammar and structuring), but I had/have a problem with perfectionist tendencies. I would often/will often write and rewrite sentences several times, sometimes spending several hours on a single paragraph. I think I'm getting better, but what I wrote above must have taken at least an hour. And I often agonize over the wording of one thing so much that I eventually forget the things I intended to write about later on. For many school assignments, my mother would have to take dictation for me just so that I would have something written down.
In short, writing has always been painful for me. But I found that, while most normal writing just paralyzed me with dread, I had a much easier time with creative writing. Most other writing felt crass to me since for the most part I was expected to just regurgitate facts in different wording, whereas with creative writing I was making wholly new things on the paper or the screen. Probably another factor is the fact that I've always found it easier to make things up than to remember facts exactly, and I've always had a strange compulsion to present facts as accurately as possible when writing anything non-fictitious, one which mostly goes away when I write fiction (I still feel compelled to make sure things I didn't make up are accurate or a good facsimile of accuracy).
I bring this up because, as much as I hate writing, I try to do it anyway here on Bay 12, and force myself to post stuff even if know it's not my strongest writing, because the important things isn't getting it perfect the first time around, or even correcting it to be perfect in the editing phase. The most important part of writing is willing yourself put words on the page, and that's something they could never teach me in school, no matter how hard they tried. It's something I had to learn for myself in my own time.
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Topic: Things that made you RRRRRRAAAAGGGGEEEE today: Trust-o-nomics Edition (Read 3766343 times)