Gifts and Anger

I learned to read before I started school. Really read, with comprehension, not just sounding out words. I'm not telling you that to impress you. I want you to have a picture of how much I had already taught myself, learning my own way, before I ever walked into a kindergarten.

Being a couple of years ahead got the school to move me up a grade. The self-teaching was working. Then things changed. I was now taught entirely in someone else's method, and as the years went on and the material got harder, that method never changed. I struggled more and more.

I bought into the idea that I was the problem. Why wouldn't I, with so many educators telling me it was so? I kept at it. I never gave up, though I will admit there were times I wanted to. Somewhere underneath, I knew my brain was not the problem. I just had not yet figured out that the method was the thing holding me back.

Here is the part that should have given the whole game away. The entire time school was teaching me that I could not learn, I was still learning, every single day, outside of school, in my own way, through my love of reading. My effort only ever rose and fell with one thing, and it was not how hard I was willing to work. It was whether the way something was taught fit the way my brain actually ran. Where the work was hands-on, or interesting, or built out of words, I was strong. Where it was dull and rote, I drifted, because there was nothing to hold onto. In one place in particular, though, the mismatch went past boredom into something I can only describe as pain.

The Speed of Smell

Every class worked the same way. One teacher, talking to thirty kids at once, using one method, moving at one pace. The pace was set by whoever was struggling most in the room. I want to be careful here, because I don't blame those kids for a second. The same broken setup was failing them too, just from the other direction. One method aimed at the middle cannot fit thirty different minds, so it bores the kids who are ahead and loses the kids who need it slower or taught another way, all at the same time.

What that felt like, from my seat, day after day, was a classroom moving at what I came to call the speed of smell. I had usually understood the point ten minutes before we got to it, and then we would sit in it. For a long time.

A fast mind does a strange thing with time. When it is caught up in something, it forgets time exists at all. When it is made to idle, it feels every minute twice. A quick brain runs ahead of the room, so a forty-five-minute class does not pass in forty-five minutes. It passes in what feels like ninety, every one of them spent waiting for everyone else to arrive where you already were.

Math and Headaches

Here is something it took me years to understand: math is a language. It has its own symbols, its own grammar, its own rules for what is allowed to sit next to what. The catch is that it is a foreign language to most people, and it was most foreign of all to a kid whose native tongue was words.

My mind had been steeped in language since before I can remember, and language was home. When arithmetic arrived, it did not arrive as a language anyone offered to translate. It came as bare symbols on a page, no story attached to any of it, and my brain had nowhere to put it. It did not simply fail to interest me. It hurt. I mean that almost literally, a real ache from being dropped into a foreign country with no dictionary and then graded on how fluently I spoke.

Nobody thought to translate it. No one taught it to me in words, or in things I could hold, or as a puzzle to crack, any one of which would have carried the meaning across into a language I already spoke. It came untranslated, in a tongue that was never mine.

Not Trying Hard Enough

So I did what a trying kid does when the method does not fit. I fell behind in the places it didn't fit, and the adults reached for the oldest explanation there is: he's bright, so if he isn't performing, he must not be trying hard enough.

The fix that followed was always the same. More practice. More homework. More of the exact method that was already failing me, as if the problem were the dosage and not the medicine. There is a line, the one everyone hands to Einstein, that insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. Said by him or not, it describes my schooling exactly: the same method returned to me year after year, a little louder each time, everyone faintly surprised it kept not working. It did not help, of course. More of what does not work is not a remedy. It is just more.

This happened at school, and it happened at home, and I want to be fair about home. The adults there believed the school, and why wouldn't they? When every report card and every conference says the same thing, doubting it would be the strange choice. They were handed a story about their kid, and they believed it, which is exactly the trap. It is the reason I am gentle about it now, even though it cost me a great deal then.

There was one teacher who saw it. She understood it was a mismatch and not a character flaw, and the hard part is that back then she had no tools to do much about it. What she could do, she did. She worked to make it more bearable, and I have never forgotten her, because being seen, even by someone without a solution, is not nothing.

Here is the part that still amazes me. Through all of it, I could usually still beat the class average on a multiple-choice test. Not because I knew the material. Because I had figured out the test. Process of elimination, the way wrong answers are built, the rhythm of how questions get written, I worked the format. The score looked like proof I was fine. It was proof of nothing, except that the one thing the system bothered to measure could be gamed by a kid who still had not actually been taught.

A Whole Year

If you want to see the whole problem in a single picture, here it is, and I suspect some of you have watched it happen to your own child.

A kid fails a subject for an entire school year. Not for lack of trying, but because of a mismatch no one ever named. Then summer comes, and that same kid sits in a summer-school room, or at the kitchen table with a tutor, and hears the same material taught a different way, and they get it. Sometimes in a single afternoon.

Sit with that, because it is damning. The child did not change over the summer. Their brain did not suddenly repair itself. The only thing that changed was how it was taught, which means the material was learnable the whole time. The year of failure, and everything it did to that child's sense of who they are, was never about their ability. It was about the fit, and the fit could have been changed back in September.

The Tax I Still Pay

What I eventually learned, and what I still do to this day, is that I would have to teach myself. Nearly everything, for the rest of my life. When I do it my own way, it sticks, and my retention is high, because the material finally matches the mind taking it in.

I have also taught myself to work in other styles when I have to. I can do it. I want to be honest about what it costs, though, because this is the part that rarely gets said out loud. Learning in a style that is not your own is exhausting, in a way I am not sure people who were taught their way their whole lives can fully picture. It is a tax. I have been paying it my entire life, on a bill that was never mine to begin with.

Why I'm Still Angry

I am angry about all of it. I have made a kind of peace with the part that happened to me, because it is long over, and it led, in a roundabout way, to here. The part I cannot make peace with is that it is still happening. A child is sitting in that seat right now, trying as hard as I did, hearing the same thing I was told, failing a year they could have passed. Very little has changed.

What has changed, finally, is that the tools exist now. The thing that one good teacher wanted for me and did not have, we have. It is possible now to find out how a specific child actually learns, and to take the very lesson that is failing them and teach it again in a way that fits, patiently, as many times as it takes. That is the entire reason this place exists. It is why we built a free activity called Professor Fin to help you discover how your child learns, and why everything we make starts from the same stubborn belief.

No child should have to become their own teacher at seven just to survive a system that could not be bothered to teach them their way. I had to. I am still a little angry that I had to. I would rather spend that anger making sure the next kid doesn't have to.

— James