I am an advocate for education for reasons that may not be all that common. I suppose what I should say up front is that I didn’t get a college education. My path has been a circuitous one to say the least. What I did get was a rock solid basic elementary education. My high school experience was different in that I had to change schools after my sophomore year and it was pretty much downhill from there.
I wasn’t one of those self-propelled whiz kids that would do well no matter what, but I was smart. I did fairly well, though from my perspective now, I certainly could have done better had I exerted a bit more effort. Neither of my parents went to college, though my mother did later on when I was in high school. But, that was back in the day, back when the world was a far easier place to negotiate, back when you could support your family with a fairly run of the mill job, back when the world could be navigated with a high school diploma.
My first two years of high school were hard. It was a Catholic, all-girls high school and I was their token poor person. Scholastically I did well enough, but socially it was pretty tough. My parents moved me to the local public high school for my junior year. My experience with public high school was almost harder than the Catholic school had been. I wasn’t the token poor person, now I was just one of the many that didn’t fit in. My problem now was that I wasn’t being challenged at all. My interest waned until I really didn’t understand why I was there at all.
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