My education was proceeding nicely. I was learning the way children should learn: at their own pace, taking in information in whatever order I needed it to explain the world around me. I occasionally picked up useless bits of information that I didn't need immediately, and I stored them away, figuring they might come in handy later in life, once I got to go past the main gate without that damn dog dragging my butt back to the house.
Every few months, all of us kids would get scrubbed clean, loaded on the bus, and hauled to Chattanooga to take achievement tests required to show that we were learning up to the same level as public school kids. What a joke. The overall level of education would have been greatly improved if the State had required all the public school kids to come out to our farm and let us teach them how to run through a cow pasture without stepping in a fresh cow patty. The ability to shag fly balls in cow pasture softball and not have your Nikes become bovine scat collectors requires a level of hand-eye-foot coordination that you just can't learn anywhere else. That sub-conscious attention to the environment gives country kids a cognitive advantage in life. We make note of, and learn from, things that children educated in a sterile playground never even notice.
I had taken and passed the 7th grade standardized test for home schooled students and was well into the High School Curriculum when, just before my tenth birthday, a traumatic event occurred and changed my life forever. Puberty. I was not prepared for this. I had read about it. Puberty was something that happened to old people: you know – teenagers. I wasn't even ten yet and here this debilitating, age related affliction was attacking my lovely prepubescent body. I was devastated. I was growing boobs. I mean, I had plans for that year: trees to climb, brothers to harass, frogs to gig, snakes to catch. And every morning when I'd get up, my center of gravity would have left a forwarding address. In six months I grew three inches vertically. My body had apparently forgotten how to walk. Then my scrawny little golf club shaft of a body began to fill out. And out. And out. By my twelfth birthday I had reached my final adult size. 4'10-3/4” tall. 32C-20-32. With muscles.
During this two year period I was way too clumsy and uncoordinated to do much roaming around by myself. I still spent four or five hours a day outdoors doing chores and taking care of the kennel which had somehow become my domain. The rest of my time was spent indoors reading and studying. I actually had textbooks and everything! By my tenth birthday (03 July 1986) personal computers were fairly common even if they weren't very powerful. I was enrolled in an accredited correspondence based High School so that I could get a diploma without having to wait until I was 18 to take the GED. Being that we were in the age of HighTech®, all of the correspondence was done via an online BBS hosted on CompuServe. Access was via a 300 baud dial-up modem (later 1200 then 2400). They could actually overnight a disk with assignments faster than we could download them.
I finished all the required course work in September 1988 with a GPA of 3.9 out of 4. The one flaw in my perfect academic record was a biology course in genetics in which I received a D. The text used in the class was outdated and wrong. I submitted breed records from our farm to prove my point and current research from the University of Tennessee that agreed with my data. I was told that the text in use was the best available and was the standard in the field. Ergo, I was wrong. Bad call on their part. The Scientific Method says theory has to account for observed results or you have to adjust your theory.
The school wouldn't issue my degree until I turned 13 in July of 1989 which gave me nine months with nothing to do but try to correct this imbalance in the intellectual equilibrium of the universe. So I wrote to the publisher of the text book and pointed out the error of their ways. And they agreed. They already had a second edition in the works but it wouldn't be available for another year at the earliest. Meanwhile, they issued an addendum to the existing text that corrected the chapter on genetics and agreed that my answers had, in fact, been correct.
I finally graduated on July 5, 1989 with 24 credits and a 4.0 GPA. Whee!!!!1111!! I'd been a teenager for two whole days, I can't drive, I can't legally consent to have sex, I can't legally work more than 10 hours a week (somebody tell my parents that—please), but I have a high school diploma. I'm set for life. All I have to do now is hang out till I'm 18.
