My School Expereince

In Gatto's "Against School," one of the main components he discusses is that of boredom. This is the aspect that I can most easily identify with. I'm one of those kids who genuinely loves to learn, so school should have been a fantastic experience for me. Unfortunately, for the most part, it hasn't been. Like most school students, I became well associated with boredom at a very young age. My biggest struggle was in my English classes. As a kind my parents read me the classics—instead of TV, we’d all gather around and listen to C.S. Lewis. Instead of video games, we’d do book trivia. Sound like a bore? Maybe, but we didn’t know anything else and we loved it. When I got older, I read on my own obsessively, all the time, everyday. I also wrote.  By the time I was in middle school, I was miles ahead of curriculum. English class soon became an intense staring match between me and the closest clock, accompanied by bored compositions of the finger-tapping variety. I knew the material. I could dance around the material. I wrote essays in minutes and tested at a college level all through sixth grade. But the thing I soon realized was there were no options for me—or very few. Attempting to get me in an advanced placement English class was a long, hoop-jumping ordeal for my parents and me. By seventh grade, I ended up in a group of overflow AP kids. The official AP class was full, so our regular English teacher would give our group a random ‘AP’ assignment and send us outside of the class to work on it in the hallway or the library. The only good thing about those assignment was since we were basically ignored, I could make up random stipulations to make it harder and more challenging me. All through high school the boredom persisted. Soon it bled over into my other classes. I wasn’t engaged, I was bored out of my mind, and eventually I had trouble figuring out why in the world I should even bother with any of the schoolwork. My grades started to slip because my boredom grew into apathy, as it is bound to do. The thing I learned from all this? Well, people always talk about ‘No Child Left Behind,’ and assert the importance of not letting any child fall behind in school. But the curriculum that has been created by that movement has created a new negative; I was in the upper percentile of grades, ability and intelligence, yet I was the one slipping though the cracks.