Bureaucratic Buffoonery

Stupid Stupid Stupid

From Nate at BloggerBlaster:

I wonder how common it is for advanced kids to be held back by teachers who are too stupid to realize what's going on...

I went to school in Kentucky... at least up until High School when I moved to Nashville. Back then, Kentucky had "achievement tests" that every kid in 1-12 took at the end of every year to determine their progress.

Now in the 6th grade.. you can imagine that I didn't really grasp the whole concept of test taking. I generally felt like the teachers knew me... and knew what I was capable of. And well... This is the story of how Nate found out just how stupid government school teachers are.

First some background. As you can well imagine... I wasn't the slowest kid in the class. In fact, I was insanely bored in school, most of my in class time was spent reading fiction, non-fiction, or drawing... On the occasion that I had a teacher that would object to these things, I would make it evident that I knew as much or more about the appointed subject as he/she/it did. I would point out blatant mistakes in text books, I would refuse to regurgitate verbatim dictionary definitions on vocabulary tests.. and on occasion I would throw words at the teacher and explain that they needed to study up some as well.

Most teachers quickly learned that I was better off left to read on my own.

I never studied... and I rarely did homework. My reasoning for this was simple. I knew the material. Therefore I didn't need the practice. My time was better spent elsewhere.

I was in the highest level classes for my age group... and I was bored out of my mind.

Go read the rest...

This sounds like something that would have happened to me in school, even though I went to a private, Christian school. It's more than just public schools that are screwed up. I think the whole procedure used to "educate" is faulty.

Teachers can only teach as fast as the slowest kids can learn, so the smarter kids are bored and restless. To complicate matters, the "slower" kids aren't necessarily slower; some kids don't learn well from the standard processes. What a waste...