Addicted to YA discussion

School SUCKS! That’s the opinion I had at eight years old, and it didn’t change for twenty-five years.

It started in kindergarten where each day before naptime we were forced to listen to bible stories. Not being a believer, even in those early days of my life, and being what I consider to this day to be an intelligent child, I was quick to point out the illogical conclusions these stories suggested.
I am more than willing to admit that I hadn’t learned the social graces to correct someone gracefully. That took many more years to learn, and if you talk to the people that know me well, they will affirm that I have never truly taken those lessons to heart. I spent a lot of time standing in the time-out corner.

I was raised in a household that was centered around science like some are centered around religion. I played math games with my father on a daily basis and loved it. We did experiments and studied various things of interest, ranging from zoology to space.
So, it was no surprise to me that in second grade the teacher told us to complete two pages in our math workbook, and in the time given, I completed the entire book. What surprised me was the teacher's reaction. She was totally surprised by this, and it irritated her. It irritated her more when she could discover no error in my work.

In those days the school system was totally unprepared to understand or to help gifted kids as they are now referred to. This isn’t me bragging, I don’t consider myself gifted. Science has always been easy for me, English and history not so much.

In seventh grade biology my teacher informed the class that animals have no capacity for language. Three days later I showed up with three books about the language of dolphins, and this time presented my evidence in a private meeting. Instead of engaging in a scientific debate over my evidence per the scientific method, I got a long-winded lecture to never ever point out his mistakes again. What a wonderful way to demonstrate what science was all about.

I only had one good teacher in middle school, Mr. Mueluer, is the only name I can remember. It was eighth grade history. He didn’t give a damn about dates. He taught cause and effect and awakened an interest in history that lasts till this day. It was the only A grade I had ever gotten.

The teacher that made the biggest impact on my life was a teacher in that middle school. She was not a great teacher. She droned on the repetitive English lessons we got each year. One day she told us to go to the library, check out a book and write a report. It was the first time I got to pick the book rather than have it assigned.

I wandered around that library despondently. I didn’t like to read at that time, and I didn’t read well. I finally picked out a book and left. Waiting until the last possible minute, I picked up that cursed book and forced myself to start reading. My mother almost had a heart attack when she walked into my room at 3:00am because my light was on, and she found me with my nose buried in a book. Red Planet by Robert Heinlein and it changed my life forever.

My father always told me “You can learn anything there is to know from books.” I didn’t believe him until that day. Since that day I have never been more than an arm's length from a book.

School still sucked, but I could learn anything I wanted without their help. In High school I just stopped going. I missed twenty weeks of a twenty-two-week semester. I only got caught because the librarian in our local library started to question why I was coming in so often during the day when I should have been at school. That’s when I added spy novels to my reading list.

By the time I hit college I was reading a minimum of two books a week, plus the required course textbooks. Other than programming and computer courses, college still sucked. Not being required to attend class I didn’t. I just turned in the required work and took the tests. In fact, I was much better at learning on my own. I had the discipline at this point in my life to buckle down and get the work done. In the final trimester of my wife's pregnancy, I turned in all my homework for the semester during the first week.

That’s the time in my life where I really learned how to learn. It’s a shame schools don’t teach students how to research much earlier than they do. In my day they didn’t teach it at all.

I entered the workforce professionally in 1978 as a computer programmer.

In two years, I was managing a group of ten programmers for General Electric. Over the course of the next ten years the computer industry exploded. Technology was changing faster than you could keep up with it. It was a constant scramble to learn what you needed to know. The is when I learned an important lesson that serves me well to this day. The more you know, the more you realize how little you really know.

I was in and out of classrooms for the next 30 years, both as student and teacher. This is where I learned what a good teacher was, and I had some great ones.

Great teachers care about learning outcomes more than grades. They want to develop you as a person, more than meeting test scores. They encourage, guide, coach and mentor their students. If you disappoint them, they will not criticize, they will help if you let them, but you might just get that look you got from your mom that made you feel two inches tall.

To be a lifelong learner is invigorating. It keeps me young. They say eighty percent of men that retire early die young, mostly from boredom. Not me, there is still so much left to learn, and that volume grows hourly.