I also dropped out after 3 years of school…not because I couldn’t do the work, I just wasn’t motivated to do the work…also because I got a job offer that paid what I was paying in tuition LOL. It does nag me at times that I don’t have my degree. But then again, I don’t NEED my degree because my skills speak for themselves.

Eventually my mom left Montessori. She got bored with the routine of it. While she was deciding what to do next she enrolled me in what were called at the time “free schools”. They were private schools, but ones in which the students’ interests were paramount. I remember kind of liking them. There was guidance from the teachers, trying to coax us into different subjects, involving us in creative projects. We went on field trips to see different kinds of stuff. One science project I remember is we tried to hatch chicken eggs. We took some fertilized eggs, put them into an aquarium-sized glass box, with a regular light bulb turned on inside to provide heat. It ultimately didn’t work out. The chicks died in their shells. We had done something wrong, though we never found out what.

I tried my hand at traditional math, but struggled with it.

My mom tried enrolling me in some affordable private schools that were more structured. I went to one school where my memory is they emphasized reading and writing, and math using wooden rods, plates (divided up into etched squares), and cubes. I remember liking this. Occasionally we’d do some creative projects. The wooden math aids really stuck out to me, because we learned the idea of squaring a number (take a rod and match it to a plate by its length). Each plate was Y x Y in length and width, so for example a plate of 25 squares shaped as a 5 x 5 square. I could see that “5 squared” was 25. We also had cubes, which were plates in the configuration of a cube. These were harder to figure out, because I was used to counting all the squares on the plates. I doubt I understood them, but they were meant to illustrate “5 cubed”. What was cool is we could take pieces off the cubes (like the top) and fill them with material, like sand, and kind of get an idea about volume (cubic units).

It was at this time I was introduced to music. My mom encouraged me to learn to play the violin. She enrolled me in the Suzuki method. Playing an instrument was kind of interesting. I think I liked performing, and my efforts being recognized, but I didn’t have much motivation to stick with it. Looking back on it I wonder if it was just that the violin is a difficult instrument to play. In the same building where I’d have violin class there was a black bassist teaching students how to play drums. He’d groove with his electric bass guitar while his students riffed on the drums. Looking back on it it sounded like jazz. It sounded pretty cool, and I thought maybe I’d enjoy that more, but I didn’t pursue it.

Eventually though I was placed in public schools. What my mom kept seeing was that I would neglect certain subjects because they felt hard to me.

Reading silently was hard for me. I could read out loud and that seemed to help my comprehension. I liked writing though, and I still do.

I immediately felt a little out of place in public school. I was tested and was behind in math. So when we were scheduled for it I’d be assigned to a lower grade math classroom, just for that subject.

The students were different. I can’t put my finger on it exactly. They were very attuned to routine, and interested in superficial things like what other students were wearing. All of this, I wasn’t. Their social interaction was different from mine. While some students welcomed and engaged me, others just didn’t get me. They chalked me up as “weird”, not because I’d make faces or talk to myself in class or anything (which I didn’t). I was just used to having more freedom. The teachers also expected me to strictly follow routine, and I tended to rebel. Obviously they didn’t approve. I felt kind of isolated.

My mom tried a couple more times to enroll me in alternative schools, ones with some structure, but also some freedom. Ultimately she put me back in public schools because I was still getting behind in some subjects. In hindsight I’d say that she thought structure was the solution, not that I learned differently.

She put me in a school I hated, at first. It was superficiality and strict routine times 10. Not only did most of the students think I was weird, most of them picked on me/bullied me, too. I was so isolated I had only 3 friends in the whole place. We were the “losers” as far as everyone else was concerned. She quickly took me out of there and finally found a public school with a classroom that fit my flair for creativity. I loved it! It had structure, but we learned interesting things. For example we were taught Greek and Latin roots (parts of words). There was a little electronic device available at the time, which my teacher allowed me to have while I was doing math. I haven’t seen anything like it since. It was like a calculator, but didn’t tell me the answer. It just told me whether I was right or not. I would punch in “3 x 5 = 15″, for example, and it’d give me the “green light” for “correct”, or “red light” if I was wrong.

We did creative art and writing projects. Some of the teachers were still sticklers for routine. Ironically my music teacher was this way. How were we supposed to be creative with this atmosphere??

The one anomaly in the school was the 6th grade teacher. He was a stickler for routine, and roundly hated by the students. I got bored in his class. I frequently spaced out, and he’d embarass me by calling on me to give an answer to a question he’d just asked. I had no idea. The other kids laughed.

We had pencil holders on our desks that were stuck there with some putty. One day I just zoned out. I visualized the solar system, and started taking bits of the putty, rolling it in my hands and making little balls of different sizes. I set them up as planets “orbiting” my pencil holder on the corner of my desk. I got all of them set up, out to Pluto (though not to scale of course). I put “rings” around the ringed planets, and I even sprinkled in bits of putty for the Asteroid Belt. By the end of class I was almost done. The rest of the students had left, and I was still working on it. My teacher walked up to my desk and was a bit stunned, and also insulted. He realized I hadn’t paid attention to a word he said that day. He pegged me as lazy. He had an “honor roll” list on the classroom door. A couple times during the year he announced to the class, “There is someone in here who should be on this list, but is not because he isn’t applying himself.” I didn’t realize until years later when my mom told me about this, that he was talking about me. I guess he knew I was smart, I just didn’t care for his class. Really what it was is I didn’t care for his teaching style.

Something happened to me, because by the time I got to jr. high it seems like I had adjusted more to the public school routine. My mom tried to get me in schools with intelligent/creative teachers, and I think she succeeded at it, as much as there was “choice” available. The only reason I say this is I have fond memories of them.

The main challenges I had were taking notes during class, and doing reading assignments. If I wasn’t interested in a subject, I just couldn’t focus on it for any length of time. I would read words on the page, and they’d just pass straight through my brain, no retention. Some teachers had this teaching style where they’d just lecture during class and hardly write anything on the board. It was a real challenge for me, because I used them writing notes on the board as clues to what was important to take down. I almost flunked a couple classes because of this.

I went on to college, and ran into similar issues there. I pursued a CS degree, and tended to do well in the classes that emphasized hands-on work. I found I really had an interest and a flair for classes that discussed ideas, rather than having us take stuff in by rote. I got so frustrated with my college math classes, because they didn’t teach things so I’d understand them. They just expected me to memorize most of the time. Most of my science classes were the same way, though I thoroughly enjoyed and did well in the lab sections, because it was all hands-on work.

When I got out in the work world I could work on assigned projects fine, but I really enjoyed the ones where I had creative freedom within those projects, like rather than having to follow a spec. I was just given, “Make a program that does X”, where I could implement it any way I wanted. I found I could get bored though. If I end up doing just getting pigeon holded, and doing the same ‘ole, same ‘ole, yeah, I want to get out of there.

In the end, I didn’t have a problem with structure, but what I really didn’t like was being treated like a robot, or a blank slate that had to be impressed upon.

The conclusion I came to though, was, if one wants to be a musician today, one shouldn’t waste one’s time getting a degree in it, but should nonetheless learn some theory. Apart from that though, what music that people care about today is coming from the academic world? I dropped out and wandered through a bunch of weird rock bands while delivering pizza for a living before I found my way back into programming, a childhood interest that I gave up in the 90s when much of the skills I had acquired by that point became very suddenly obsolete and my family couldn’t afford to keep up on buying the new, current computers as fast as they were coming out.

I know that in reality, no-one likes to think of themselves as gifted, it engenders some horrific thoughts about extreme arrogance, but it doesn’t mean it’s not true. I thought I would throw some links out to you that you may like to take a look at.

http://www.hoagiesgifted.org/underachievement.htm

Even though most are aimed at current students, perhaps you recognize some facets of yourself in the articles. Or maybe I am wrong, but I wanted to share what my immediate response was, and to wish you the best.

Also, I know you say that you thought “he’d grown up and moved on… but he’s still here”, he never really left, did he, and in all honesty, he shouldn’t have to.

Right, end of philosophical light cheeseiness, I wish you the best of yourself with everything.