Self-taught.

This will be a bit of a rant, and I’ll apologize in advance, and I’ll try to keep it at least a little interesting.

I am almost entirely self-taught. In everything. I started out in the American public school system, and pretty quickly started to hate it. Now, when you hate someplace you have to go Monday-Friday from 8-3, your whole life starts to look pretty miserable. Adults have the option of looking for another job if they don’t like the one they have. Kids are sent to public schools by zone, and so have few options for transferring, and having been to a few different schools, I’ll tell you it’s not like transferring makes much difference anyway.

My mother eventually took pity on me and started home schooling me, which suited me perfectly. Since the school system would not cooperate with us, I eventually got my GED, not a real diploma, and while I applied to two colleges, got accepted to both, and tried one for a few weeks, I have maintained my home schooling more than anything.

Teachers often talk about inspiring a love of learning in their students, and having been bullied, frustrated, left behind, forced back, forced forward, etc, etc, but still being possessed of a fanatical love of learning, I will offer this observation: schools’ main goals are to inspire a love of the school system. Love of learning seems to be genetic, as are so many more things than people used to assume. My sister also never finished high school, for similar reasons, and she and I often share the same books, which tend to center around language, human development and evolution, and psychology. We both love trying to understand the human race a little better than we do now. I also love learning more about the cosmos and the history of our planet and universe. My sister dabbles in that area, but isn’t as interested.

Still. Statistics would have that, as “uneducated” children of a single mother, we should be in big trouble as adults, and probably not very bright or very interested in anything around us. Neither of us has a piece of paper that says we are smart, which limits the types of work we can get, and both of us feel frustrated about that, but otherwise we’re pretty regular people. Both married, both working, both own homes and have no children, no drug trouble, no alcohol trouble, no laws broken. But we both still have this thirst for knowledge.

The reason this is a rant is my frustration. I am smart. I love to learn things. I extrapolate what I learn into my own daily life. After reading about the procedure prehistoric people used to make leather slings, I grabbed a pair poorly fitting leather sandles, did exactly what the book described, and now they fit very nicely thank you. I do this kind of thing all the time.

I once spoke to a woman who had graduated with a Women’s Studies degree only weeks before. I asked her what Third Wave Feminism was, because I had never heard the term. She said, “Well, it’s kind of like . . . it’s sort of . . . um . . . here. Read this book. That will explain it.” I took the book from her, thinking, wow, Third Wave Feminism must be a hell of a thing if I have to read a whole book to get the definition. I checked the glossary first, to see if it might be summed up.

It was.

Third Wave Feminism is a generational term. First Wave Feminists were the suffragists, the women who fought for the right to vote. Second Wave Feminists were the bra-burners of the sixties, who wanted equal pay and the right to reproductive choice. Third Wave Feminism is my generation, who see that things have gotten better but also see the devil in the details and want things to get better yet.

A grown woman with a Women’s Study degree couldn’t explain that to me. But you know she has a better paying, less boring job than I do.

So why am I treated like a typical high school drop out? A high school drop out I may be, but typical? I am anything but typical.

I have been told to just jump through the hoops and go to college, but I have two problems with that: One, I am easily bored, and the few weeks of college I tried bored the pants off me. I’m self-educated well past the basics that college promises to lay down for me. I’ve been told to apply to better colleges, but I am a grown woman with a house. I am not pulling up stakes to move to go to a better college. Two, I hated school. Hated it. I still have nightmares that I am still in school sometimes. Nightmares. I don’t care how much “not like high school” college might be. Why would I set foot in a place that bores me to tears and that I have nightmares about? I’ve been told to just suck it up and deal with it, but until you have a full-blown panic attack, don’t tell anyone else to suck something up.

I’ve looked around for some sort of alternative, some sort of testing I can go through that will get me a basic degree, some sort of online thing that won’t make me scream, and I just am not having any luck. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative for people like me. The whole entire education system is set up for people who really aren’t all that smart and don’t really want to learn more than they have to. Witness Einstein (not that I think I’m Einstein, but I feel that pain and frustration, stuck in a boring job because you can’t fit into the standard education procedure, even if you are a generally bright person).

Now I just need to come out with a theory of relativity and blow everyone away.

Literally.

Um.

Anyway, that’s my rant. It’s a long one, I don’t expect people to get it, but hey, it’s where I’m at and what I was thinking about this week when I sat down. If you have experienced anything like what I’m talking about, please, by all means, comment. I’d love to hear from others in my same boat.

Now back to work on the next novel.