Teachers insisted that I prove that I had been keeping up with the official curriculum.
Obviously, I hadn’t. But I was willing to step up to the blackboard and give it a shot.
Trying to reverse engineer math formulas on the fly with everyone watching me was unnerving. And the teachers weren’t exactly supportive.
So I’d invariably be sent to the Principal’s office. I guess the big lesson I learned was that grade school is not a place where they encourage you to figure things out on your own.
When I got to college I majored in Philosophy. This puzzled my friends who deemed this choice to be highly impractical.
To me, it was incredibly practical, but (apparently) not in a way that most people could understand.