Callista wrote:
My mom didn't let me attend kindergarten. I attended only half the first grade, and my first real school year was the second grade. After that I was largely home-schooled, though occasional experiments with schooling lasted half a year or a year at the most; the last two years of high school I was in a tiny private school where pretty much everybody had some issue that their parents were in denial about, but that was the first time I was in the same school two years in a row. She's just move me every time she thought it wasn't "right for me". I'm pretty sure that the reason she took me out of the school I was in during the sixth grade was that they wanted to move me to special ed.
I think my mom was trying to keep me out of special ed, because she didn't want to admit that I was autistic. She knew very well that I was, because she worked with autistic kids herself; only she thought I was "too smart"--because obviously autistics can never be smart--and that if I got "labeled", I'd suddenly fulfill all the horrible steroetypes of disabled kids that she had in her head. Ironically, not only am I in college now, but some of my classmates are people she would've written off as not even capable of going to school at all, much less college!
Maybe it wasn't that your mom thought you were too smart to be autistic...maybe she thought you were too smart to be "schooled" rather than educated. Sometimes I feel like I don't necessarily see the reasoning of placing any child in a concrete building, where every child is expected to learn exactly the same way, at the same rate, and not be able to pursue their own interests from the hours of 7:45-2:45 (or whatever it may be). School is kind of an artificial place for kids to get bored, learn to hate learning, and be taught how to be cruel to one another.
Did you hate being homeschooled?