My interest and passion for learning and development (and opportunity gaps) is due to my own complex educational background. My kids often tell me that my childhood stories sound made up and I’m sure there is truth there. I fully acknowledge that many of my memories are at best incomplete, but as I’ve said before, this is my story, definitionally flawed and yet still worth telling. More importantly this complexity informs my deep belief that we need to ask ourselves different questions when it comes to the future of education (not just K-12 or Higher education but the entire concept of upskilling and lifelong learning).

I spent most of a Saturday attempting to deconstruct my K-12 educational experiences and I have to agree with my kids. Not only does it sound fake, one can’t help but postulate that the educational decisions were made by people who were very high. In my parents defense, their actions were more about a different set of life challenges and values than [just] recreational drug use.

1. My parents went to one of the best public high schools in the US, they were extremely young working class parents who hadn’t found any great personal benefit from education. While they did raise me to expect to go to college, they didn’t think that was anything that required preparation.
2. They had a strong belief that as smart kids, my sister and I would do “fine” wherever we went, and generally were more concerned with things like peer influence than academic rigour.
3. My mom and older sister are extreme extroverts, the idea of getting a fresh start at a new school held a fair bit of romance for them that did NOT translate to my socially awkward self.

I would like to remind everyone that things worked out fine for me in the end and that this story is a comedy NOT a tragedy, I will also invoke my religion disclaimer here.

My birthday is in July (feel free to block off the month for my annual celebration) so I was one of the youngest in my class. My sister and I moved in with my mom and step-dad to start school. After a couple months they purchased a house across town, so I switched first to morning and about a month later afternoon kindergarten. So 2 schools and 3 classes in the first year of school, gives a good sense of how things started. First grade I was able to stay at the same school and settled into full day schedule where I finally learned to read.

Second grade was another epic move-o-ramma – this one partly on me (or as much as anything can be on a seven year old). I decided I wanted to live with my dad again and thus began second grade at the local elementary by his house. What I hadn’t factored in, was the unique kind of boredom that comes from being an only child. I moved back to my moms after Thanksgiving and a few months later we moved again. What I didn’t fully appreciate at the time was that this move was economically motivated. The new school required learning some personal safety skills in addition to new social norms.

I didn’t think much of that at the time, but it makes more remarkable the reality that I had my absolute best teacher in that 2nd half of 2nd grade. Of course, I don’t remember her name, but I remember everything she did for me. The year before this teacher had been teaching 4th grade and clearly loved math. She quickly split the math learning by groups, putting me in a group that was essentially self-study.

The powerful experience for me was that there was no artificial barrier to learning, nothing to hold me back waiting for the full class to progress, just jump in and learn and come ask for help when you get stuck. I was transformed (I still remember how proud she was of me when I came to her stuck on the concept of borrowing and how excited I was to learn how it worked). I completed two solid years of math curriculum in those few months and at the end of the year she had negotiated for me to join the fourth grade during math lesson (an opportunity that terrified me at first – I just couldn’t imagine that I was able to keep up with kids so much bigger than me – later to realize it was really NBD).

I had my second IQ test thanks to this teacher (the first was part of the divorce when I was a year old, family lore has it that I threw the blocks a the proctor and was summarized as being smart but in need of better discipline). What I remember most about this IQ test was that I could feel my visual spatial learning disability – while I killed it on all the memory tasks, I couldn’t figure out the number of squares that would exist if you folded a piece of paper multiple times. I think they assumed I wasn’t comfortable with exponents (which wasn’t true) but what I couldn’t do was visualize to recognize the pattern. It was a huge letdown then, that my 3rd grade experience (in the same school – yay!) was a total dud. We spent the ENTIRE year learning cursive and writing endless themes.

My parents began talking about skipping me a grade.

Instead we moved house and switched schools. This school shift was mostly about my older sister being in middle school and our new neighborhood school having a rough reputation. At this point, most of the life decisions were made based on religion, saving our soul from sin was the primary goal – learning a distant second. Since cost was a HUGE factor, it was decided to join a newly formed religious school best described as a group home school. Academic work was all “self paced” learning – picture the SRA reading academy but for all subjects, now layer on that all these materials were crafted with a religious-first corpus ( I did a spit take reading this in the above link – “Words like ‘brainwashing’, ‘fundamentalists’, and ‘low academic standard’ jump out at you” – I couldn’t have said it better myself!).  I generally think of these years as the lost academic years and yet while academics were lacking, there was still learning of a sort.  A one unique thing in this program, any time you completed a unit you could earn “extra” recess.  I earned so much available recess that I began just reading about ½ day, every day.  Later, I began putting my time to helping my step-sister get through stuff so I’d have someone to play with in my extra recess. 

By 6th grade we moved to a school at our church – an evangelical megachurch that had the distinction of including SEC investment fraud, money mismanagement and ultimately bankruptcy – but god forgives and your children are in need of salvation so off we went.  This was a much bigger school with a more traditional academic approach. My parents looked to skip me a grade, but were told that I clearly hadn’t been in a school up to their academic standards, so I should just stay in the level I was and start 6th grade as planned.  This was probably the right call, given how much ground I had lost academically (to say I have a few learning gaps would be an understatement) , but it also put me in a class with a teacher who was clearly annoyed with my family (and probably me) and decided to *not* allow me to join the academic enrichment programs for the smart kids due to my poor handwriting (!). This exclusion annoyed the shit out of me, so I called in my dad to come to my defense where he deftly forced the teacher to concretely define the bar for acceptable handwriting. This proved a learning on how to [rationally] negotiate with someone who dislikes you, and how to not take shit from power when you have the moral high ground.

Of course 7th grade required a new school thanks to the bankruptcy. Here I had a head fake, believing I was going to one school and in the 11th hour switching to a different one. A huge disappointment, but I took it in stride deciding joining drill team would be the highlight (I really wanted cheer but lack of two required skills – cartwheel and the splits – made me well aware I was not going to make that). The drill team was winning awards at parades and my sister was already on the team.  Uniforms, french braids and even music, I was excited.  I ended 7th grade primed to be JV captain and I was excited for a 2nd year at this school, when I found out that instead we were moving to Arizona.  

OF COURSE we were.

Again, this was financially motivated as my step-dad had inherited “property” [chain link fence enclosed dirt lot with a single wide trailer] where we could live for free. The free rent was important, as the business was struggling such that we were several years behind on taxes – they needed a path out of that spiral and the inheritance was that financial fresh start they were [again] looking for, hallelujah. The family packed up a U-Haul and we drive to Arizona in August (!!! – IYKYK).

I attended Junior High in this [very – I mean extremely] small town for 3 days and was [wisely] moved up to the high school where I had a better (but not great) hope of actually learning something. I thus began high school at 13. In my freshman year I tied a junior for first place at the school for math achievement – reminder, my math education was really from a strong year of 2nd grade and marginal education in 6th and 7th grade) – I am not being falsely modest when I say this said more about the class makeup than my own abilities, and I was self aware enough to know it.

I chart a few important learnings at this school – first context matters. Gladwell talks about being a big fish in a small pond, I think that experience is even more eye opening when you have a reasonable sense of your own abilities. To become overnight a math-champion AND extremely attractive, while a nice affirmation at a formative age, also called into sharp relief the understanding that status is a completely made up social construct.

The second big learning was about myself and how far I could go doing things I was bad at with grit, determination and a growth mindset. It was during this time that I re-directed my force of will on athletics and while I can honestly say I was never very good, I played volleyball at the state championship in my junior year and continued with the sport at a bigger school my senior year (I gave up tennis and basketball in my sophomore year and softball after changing schools).

Which leads me to my final K-12 school experience. In my senior year we moved again (or at least my mom, sister and I did) and I went to yet another school for my last year. While I was pissed to lose my valedictorian spot, I think the middle stop at a larger high school re-calibrating and learning a few study skills before college was a net positive. Also, the last stop was an Army town, so there were several army brats that made being new less socially difficult.

Ironically as I reflect on these experiences at 10 different schools, while not anything I’d recommend, against the objective of learning to think, they did manage to get the job done. I exited K-12 education [at age 16], having developed both character skills and readiness for college. I was over indexed on survival and life skills and under indexed on study and traditional academic skills, but in the end that was probably a fair trade. I had a solid foundation to close the gaps and most importantly a scholarship and a pell grant to help keep my student loans manageable.

An interesting byproduct of this chaos-based academic approach, is that I had a good understanding of what learning environments worked best for me and a strong belief that I could enter almost any situation ill-prepared and ill-informed and sort out how to succeed, and that (as they say) has made all the difference.