I’m 29 now, but I was a lot like you at age 10. I think you’ll like it here—you might find some material too advanced, but then I still do sometimes, so don’t be too worried. You’ll pick it up as you go along.
I can tell you stories of what I was doing at your age, but frankly I don’t think it’d help much(since I did a lot of things wrong myself). The one piece of advice I’ll give you that I think might actually help is this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html—more than anything else, it’s what I wish I’d been able to read when I was your age. It does get better, and more quickly than you might expect.
Also, to a lesser extent, the ever-interesting Yvain posted this bit on his blog, which might help explain why what teachers do bugs you so much:
When I was a student, I hated all my teachers and thought that if they just ditched the constant repetition, the cutesy but vapid games, the police state attitude, then everyone would learn a lot more and school would finally live up to its potential as “not totally incompatible with learning, sometimes”.
And then I started teaching English, tried presenting the actually interesting things about the English language at a reasonable pace as if I were talking to real human beings. And it was a disaster. I would give this really brilliant and lucid presentation of a fascinating concept, and then ask a basic question about it, and even though I had just explained it, no one in the class would even have been listening to it. They’d be too busy chattering to one another in the corner. So finally out of desperation I was like “Who wants to do some kind of idiotic activity in which we all pick English words and color them in and then do a stupid dance about them??!” (I may not have used those exact words) and sure enough everyone wanted to and at the end some of them sort of vaguely remembered the vocabulary.
By the end of the school year I had realized that nothing was getting learned without threatening a test on it later, nothing was getting learned regardless unless it was rote memorization of a few especially boring points, and that I could usually force students to sit still long enough to learn it if and only if I bribed them with vapid games at regular intervals.
Yet pretty much every day I see people saying “Schools are evil fascist institutions that deliberately avoid teaching students for sinister reasons. If you just inspire a love of learning in them, they’ll be thrilled to finally have new vistas to explore and they’ll go above and beyond what you possibly expected.”
To which the only answer is no they frickin’ won’t. Yes, there will be two or three who do. Probably you were one of them, or your kid is one of them, and you think everything should be centered around those people. Fine. That’s what home schooling is for. But there will also be oh so many who ask “Will the grandeur and beauty of the fathomless universe be on the test?”. And when you say that the true test is whether they feel connected to the tradition of inquiry into the mysteries of Nature, they’ll roll their eyes and secretly play Pokemon on their Nintendo DS thinking you can’t see it if it’s held kind of under their desk.
My elementary school (I’m 28 by they way, so this is some two decades ago) actually had a program for students like that; one day a week , you would be pulled out of normal class for an alternative class where the material was taught through projects and discussions, logic was explicitly both encouraged in thinking and taught as a skill, and there was basically no rote memorization. We learned games like chess and Magic: the Gathering (I had no idea how huge that game would go on to become; I wonder if the teacher still has those first-edition decks?) during our breaks from “actual” instruction, and there were basically no tests.
It was a ton of fun, but I only stayed in it for one year; the other four days a week were still boring me out of my skull. After the year in that pull-out program, I transferred to another school that had a fully accelerated / “gifted” curriculum. That was less boring—the material and pacing were both better, but I was still the top math student in the class and frequently bored there waiting for others to catch up, for example—but I missed the one-day-a-week program from the old school.
As for what I did during the mind-numbing classes, I read. Fiction mostly, but some non-fiction—I really loved “The Way Things Work” books when I was about Alex’s age—and I usually tried to make it not-entirely-obvious what I was doing. The teachers knew, of course, but as long as I didn’t flaunt what I was doing and kept my scores up, they didn’t generally care. I was bad at the participation / stupid games stuff in those classes, but I learned to read stuff way “above my level” and got way more benefit out of it that I would have from listening to the teacher drone on about how to do long division or whatever.
My school board did similar—I did the full-time gifted class, my brother did the one day a week.
I also got accelerated to a rather extreme degree—I skipped 3 grades, and started highschool at age 10. It was a mixed blessing, frankly—it got me past the “kids are pure evil” years, and turned me from the obnoxiously nerdy kid into a curiousity, which got me picked on a lot less. The material didn’t get much more interesting—once you catch up, it’s being taught at the same pace. And on the downside, it made me a lot more awkward in highschool years than I probably would have been otherwise, because the age gap meant that the usual diversions of dating and drinking didn’t open up for me until years after they had for everyone else(and when everyone else is years more experienced than you, self-consciousness sets in with dating, and slows you down even further—I didn’t even ask a girl out until I was about 18-19).
I’m 29 now, but I was a lot like you at age 10. I think you’ll like it here—you might find some material too advanced, but then I still do sometimes, so don’t be too worried. You’ll pick it up as you go along.
I can tell you stories of what I was doing at your age, but frankly I don’t think it’d help much(since I did a lot of things wrong myself). The one piece of advice I’ll give you that I think might actually help is this essay: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html—more than anything else, it’s what I wish I’d been able to read when I was your age. It does get better, and more quickly than you might expect.
Also, to a lesser extent, the ever-interesting Yvain posted this bit on his blog, which might help explain why what teachers do bugs you so much:
My elementary school (I’m 28 by they way, so this is some two decades ago) actually had a program for students like that; one day a week , you would be pulled out of normal class for an alternative class where the material was taught through projects and discussions, logic was explicitly both encouraged in thinking and taught as a skill, and there was basically no rote memorization. We learned games like chess and Magic: the Gathering (I had no idea how huge that game would go on to become; I wonder if the teacher still has those first-edition decks?) during our breaks from “actual” instruction, and there were basically no tests.
It was a ton of fun, but I only stayed in it for one year; the other four days a week were still boring me out of my skull. After the year in that pull-out program, I transferred to another school that had a fully accelerated / “gifted” curriculum. That was less boring—the material and pacing were both better, but I was still the top math student in the class and frequently bored there waiting for others to catch up, for example—but I missed the one-day-a-week program from the old school.
As for what I did during the mind-numbing classes, I read. Fiction mostly, but some non-fiction—I really loved “The Way Things Work” books when I was about Alex’s age—and I usually tried to make it not-entirely-obvious what I was doing. The teachers knew, of course, but as long as I didn’t flaunt what I was doing and kept my scores up, they didn’t generally care. I was bad at the participation / stupid games stuff in those classes, but I learned to read stuff way “above my level” and got way more benefit out of it that I would have from listening to the teacher drone on about how to do long division or whatever.
My school board did similar—I did the full-time gifted class, my brother did the one day a week.
I also got accelerated to a rather extreme degree—I skipped 3 grades, and started highschool at age 10. It was a mixed blessing, frankly—it got me past the “kids are pure evil” years, and turned me from the obnoxiously nerdy kid into a curiousity, which got me picked on a lot less. The material didn’t get much more interesting—once you catch up, it’s being taught at the same pace. And on the downside, it made me a lot more awkward in highschool years than I probably would have been otherwise, because the age gap meant that the usual diversions of dating and drinking didn’t open up for me until years after they had for everyone else(and when everyone else is years more experienced than you, self-consciousness sets in with dating, and slows you down even further—I didn’t even ask a girl out until I was about 18-19).