2023-11-22
I am currently in a Bachelors program in college and I am about 5 months from finishing. I am so ready to be done with college, and have often been quite animated in expressing my disdain for the whole system. I have even gone as far to say that the system is broken, but I have started to wonder if that is false.
I think it is important to start this post by stating that I grew up homeschooled. Real homeschool taught by my parents and their own hand picked curriculum, not like some people who send their kids to private school and call it homeschool. This is an important distinction to make, not because I am better in some way (it was none of my doing), but it is to lay the ground work for the upcoming word soup you are about to read.
For the first few years of being old enough to do school, I did workbooks for english and math, and we did history with a Christian history series that I fail to remember the name of. From my age 9 to age 12, We lived on a small hobby farm where I spent the majority of my time outside and not doing much school. I did keep working on my Life Of Fred math books (which also had other subjects baked in) and I also kept a journal on paper at the time (something I need to return to). Me and my brothers played outside pretty much all day, every day. We built our own bike ramps out of (probably not safe) construction scraps and made our own fun with a combination of animals (chickens, turkeys, rabbits, dogs, horses), made up games, and Legos.
I didn't really start doing much "school" until I turned 13 or 14 and got interested in computers, but my parents mostly supported me in my own endeavors since I was such a motivated kid and worked hard to learn new skills. I attribute my ability to teach myself to them, and I think it was only reenforced by them allowing me to spread my wings and learn online. About that time, my parents also got me started studying for and taking CLEP tests, which gave me some college credits before I really knew what I wanted to go for, in fact, I said I didn't want to even go to college (and that part of me still lives on, but for different reasons).
At about 15 (ish) my mom signed me up for an online class; Programming in Python and Java at Arizona State University (ASU). Not only was it my first "real" school class, but it was my first college class. It was honestly a really good class, and it taught me a lot about programming. I didn't really struggle with the exercises and I feel like it was actually one of the best structured learning courses I have ever taken.
Here is the thing about that ASU class (and they still do some like this), it did not have weekly deadlines. There was just one due date at the end of the class, and I could work on it as fast or as slow as I needed to. Now, since I was a kid with nothing better to do and no other classes, I did about 3 weeks worth of work per week and blew through it. Once I finished that class, I could make things in Python and Java, and I knew I needed to buy a computer of my own so I could play with more programming things (I was on a retired Windows 7 workstation that got bogged down compiling "Hello World" in Java). Years later, I was wrapping up my high school education (I was doing online college classes in the place of a high school class to be more efficient) and I finally enrolled in a local school of Information Technology.