Quote: I'm a very self-directed learner and don't feel that I have lost something if I pull the information from an author via his/her words in books as opposed to a teacher doing it for me.
If you know to look for it. That's my point. If you don't have the background how do you know to look for the connections.
And yes, clearly my school experience is probably not available today except in a few unusual places. The biggest school I ever attended had a max of 500 kids. My h.s. graduating class was 63. My COLLEGE only had 2,500 students at the time. Now most high schools are way bigger than that.
For another thing, there was no ritalin back then. There was no junk food in school AT ALL (unless your mom packed a candy bar in your lunch)-- so kids were not hopped up on sugar. We had several recesses during the day and went outside and ran around. In 5-7 grade at a school on base, we had a math teacher, a social studies teacher, and an English teacher, and they rotated, teaching each of us their specialties.
About four years ago, I searched the internet for my 7th grade English teacher who still lives in New England where I attended that school. I sent him a letter telling him how much being in his class had meant to me. I learned some things about writing that I still use. One day the phone rang, and it was him! He not only remembered me, he had actually framed my letter! He said that he remembered that I was a good writer. This meant the world to me, considering I had this man in class for one year over 45 years ago. He sent me a fruitcake for Christmas, bless his heart.
I'm also still very close to one of my high school English teachers. I wrote a paper once on C.S Lewis (who is all the rage now), and she used to ask me from time to time if she could borrow it, just so she could reread it (no xerox machines).
Thank God for the teachers I had... given my home life, if it hadn't been for school, I'd be posting to this board from prison. Actually, I'd very likely be deceased... by my own hand.
