No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers' dirty looks.

Now to write something that will totally get me in trouble with several people in my life. I'm going to write about how I feel in regards to the education system. Of course I don't think I'll get in all that much trouble. I'll probably get yelled at by my wife or get the silent treatment from some of my teacher friends, but I don't think any of them have what it takes to try and run me over in the parking lot some dark and stormy night. Oh, don't get me wrong, I'm not against education in and of itself. It's the education system that I absolutely loathe.

It has become quite clear to me over the course of my quest for enlightenment and wisdom that education is absolutely necessary for a person to reach their full potential as an individual. But, it has also become quite clear to me that it is not in the best interest of most government and societies to have a large population of free willed educated individuals. It's the old what's good for the goose is not good for the gander cliche. For those of you unfamiliare with that particular cliche it means what is good for the individual is not necessarily good for the whole community to which they belong.

Let's start with my personal story regarding the education system. I taught myself how to read when I was five or six years old. Well, not really, Sesame Street and the Electric Company taught me how to read, but I didn't have a teacher other than the television. That jumpstarted my whole realization that you don't need a formal teacher to learn. I entered school straight into the first grade, skipping the beloved kindergarten most people enjoy.

In the first grade I was diagnosed with a speech problem because I had a Cuban accent. I was being raised 10 hours a day by Cuban babysitters; there were 7 in the apartment and only 1 spoke English. I was well on my way to being bilingual when the Tennessee school system go a hold of me and told me I couldn't speak like a normal white kid and sent me to speech therapy where I learned how to say "bathtub" instead of "bafftub" and how to say "church" instead of "shurch". I was also told that speaking Spanish was bad and to only speak English at all times. Thank you Tennessee, I will always remember you for that gift.

In the 2nd grade I was one of only two or three caucasian children in the Flowers Elementary School in Knoxville, TN. I was left handed, but they made me be right handed because it was easier for them. I guess they couldn't afford left handed scissors or desks. So now I write with my right hand but skateboard goofy footed and box south pawed. Also, I got into fights every single day of my school life but fortunately I never knew we were fighting so it didn't totally screw up my self-esteem. But now, as an adult, I wonder where were the teachers to protect me from having to fight my way out of the school yard and down the street to walk home. Yeah, I walked home through very low income/high crime neighborhoods all by myself without adult supervision or escort. Thanks Mom and Dad.

In the 3rd grade we moved to Texas where the only significant memory I have is flipping some kid off and getting in big trouble and another time of having to wash my mouth out with flourescent pink soap for saying "bad words". I didn't even know what flipping some one off meant and I ended up cussing every five minutes and washing my own mouth out with soap just to show the teacher I was tougher than her and toxic waste hand-soap. A big hurricane came and we moved before it hit us, leaving behind my beloved microscope and b.b. gun.

We moved to Pennsylvania where I attended the 4th grade. I went to a school for which I wasn't zoned because it was closer to my Aunt Barb's house where I stayed after school for several hours. One day the teacher found out I wasn't zoned for that school and I was called to meet the principle, a fat balding man who was sweating and eating a twinkie while he grilled me like a hardened criminal on who I thought I was coming to his school when I was zoned for Cannon McMillan. Yelling at a 10 year old about something he had no control over; thanks principle fatty for the memory.

Also that year I was showing myself to be a gifted and smart kid who excelled at math. So, the teachers took it upon themselves to move me up to a 6th grade class for math without asking me if that was okay. It taught me an important lesson. If people think you are smart they make you do things you don't want to do. I promptly failed 6th grade math and swore off learning any form of math so long as I lived.

We moved from Pennsylvania back to Tennesee, to Alcoa this time. There I met a witch named Mrs. Cochan who believed the best form of disciplining children is to humiliate them, make fun of them, and call them stupid if they didn't do what she wanted them to do. Unfortunately for Mrs. Cochran my father had invested a lot of time in raising me to never trust what an adult says or tells you to do just because they are an adult. During my two years at Eagleton elementary I concentrated all my efforts on torturing the teachers as rigorously as Mrs. Cochran had attempted to torture me. Naturally my school work and studies suffered, but I was on a crusade and couldn't be bothered with learning while I was engaged in open warfare with the authority figures trying to teach me.

My dad had left my mom for a year then came back, and upon returning it seems that he and my mom reconciled their differences and went on to love one another until the day my father died. That's all well and good for them but I wasn't having any of it. There was no way my dad was going to up and abandon me then come on home a year later and tell me what to do or how to live. My father chose my school performance as the battlefield in which we were to engage in our power struggle. The worse my academic performance the more my father punished me, the more he punished me the more determined I became to peform poorly at school.

The funny thing was, I learned plenty at school. I listened in the classes, I learned the material, and even did the homework most of the time. But I threw the home work away rather than turning it in and I failed the tests on purpose. The teachers were all sad faces and tsk tsks about me not living up to the potential they saw in me. I guess that potential wasn't really worth investing their time to reach me, though, since none of them ever really tried to turn me around back onto the straight and narrow path of being the next valedictorian. Thanks again Tennessee school systems. Sure, some of you may click your own tongues and say it was my own fault to which I respond I was a kid, they were the adults. Sure I was difficult but I was a child. The burden of duty for educating children lies with the adults in that child's life, not with the child.

In the 8th grade I loved where I went to school at Bearden, loved all the friends I had made in the two years we lived in Knoxville, TN, and was actually starting to settle down to doing better in school. Then we moved again, to Chattanooga, TN. That was the straw that broke the camel's back, my friends. In spite of every fit and act of open rebellion I threw to attempt to derail our move to Chattanooga, we still moved and I had to follow. I started my new school year at Hixson Jr. High School, which by the way was an appropriate hell in which to be sentenced for all my sins.

I decided to fail the 9th grade, escalating my war with my father over my school performance to Global Thermonuclear War. I succeeded in my goal to fail every class and to fail the 9th grade in spite of the herculean efforts my parents went to in an attempt to force me to get good grades. Upon failing my parents threw in the towel and gave up on trying to make me do anything ever. My father said, "Sean, it's yoru life. If you want to screw it up then go ahead, I can't stop you."

Once I established my intellectual and spiritual autonomy I proceeded to make straight A's the next year of 9th grade, not scoring below a 96 in any class except Geometry which I failed since math was still the devil to me at that time. During my Hixson Jr. High experience I was student to several teachers who were far dumber and more socially awkward than me, the only one of which I will name was Ms. Duggan. She used to go into fits of rage, storm out of class, burst into tears, and was generally insane in every facet of her teaching life. I took her class twice for entertainment purposes since it was great fun to watch her melt down. The whole experience of being 14 and having to sit in a class in front of adults who were by all appearances dumber and bigger failures than I ever was or could be caused me to lose all respect for the education system.

Oh, and I forgot to mention when I lost faith in science. It really was a process that culminated in the 10th grade. For all my childhood every science class told me they knew the nature of reality. What screwed me up was the model of the atom. First I was shown Dalton's model of the atom and told this is what an atom looks like. I was like, awesome, that's cool. Then I was shown Bohr's model of the atom a few years later and I was like, what the hell? That's not what you said two years ago. Then in the 10th grade I was shown the modern model of the atom with electron clouds and I just threw up my hands and told them they were all lying bastards and they could go straight to hell.

Also, in the 10th grade I raised my hand in a Chemistry class during a lecture about radiation and when I was called upon I stated with a straight face in a serious tone, "Ms. Macafee, I heard that when you are exposed to Gammar radiation that later when you become angry you turn green and develop super-human strength.", to which she looked thoughtful and replied, "You know, I haven't read that. I'm going to have to look into that and get back with you." And she was serious!!!

In health class and gym the teacher was legally blind, had an uncontrollable tremor and stuttered. In home economics the teacher tried to convince us that condiments were one of the four food groups and she almost had a heart attack when Andy Gray hid in the broom closet, plus she never noticed when some bored kids lit hairspray on fire on top of their desks. One science teacher tried to kill her whole class by attempting to demonstrate Newton's laws of motion by having everyone stand in the middle of the room and jump up and down at the same time. They stopped when the second story floor started buckling severely beneath them. I had a different chemistry teacher throw chalk at me when I dozed off in his class.

I did have a few teachers that I enjoyed. Mr. Denton, the art teacher was awesome as was Mr. Fulgham the latin teacher. My english teacher was very nice so I behaved well for her at all times. The geography teacher had a huge beer belly and coke bottle glasses, his tests consisted of maps and blank lines, but all in all he was cool enough. During the later years of my high school education my grades were more of a direct reflection of how I felt about the teacher than any reflection of my real knowledge on the subject.

During my Senior year the school tried an experiment in the attendance policy which only lasted that one year. The policy was as follows: There were no number of maximum allowable absences, you could miss as many as you wanted. And, all failing grades regardless of actual numeric value were calculated as 59's in the computer. I strained my brain to do the math, using a calculator, on what grades I needed at the beginning of the year to be averaged in with 59's to pass my senior year. I got those grades during the first half of the year then had 75 or more absences the rest of the year. Sometimes I came to school for lunch and to see my friends, and when I decided to do that I slept all morning in my car at the tennis courts parking lot. If you are a girl who went to Hixson High school in '93 and you surrounded a Dodge Omni to wake some kid up in the back seat by pointing and laughing, that was me. You guys scared the crap out of me.

After all was said and done I graduated high-school with a 2.65 GPA and scored a 29 on my ACT, applied to the University of Chattanooga at Tennessee and was accepted for the fall semester of '93. That is how I wasted my mornings and afternoons from age six to age eighteen. Thank you all, U.S. federal, state, and local governments and education systems.

I'll wrap this entry up here and go on to talk about my higher education experience at the Univeristy level and then clarify my position on the state of the education system in the U.S. I look forward to continuing with you guys in the future!