Your teachers not understanding material doesn’t matter if their role is prompting you to ask the right questions and find areas of interest.
I highly recommend that anyone else who feels the same way look into Acton Academy. The model is based on project based work, self guided learning, and Socratic discussions. There are locations all throughout the U.S. My six year old may not recognize all the material for a standardized test, but he’s fascinated by laws of physics, engineering for space, growing plants, and conservation. At home he wanted to start a project on simulating landing a Mars rover with a small programmable robot. He’s playing around with the idea of cushioning the landing versus building a parachute. And all of this is something we can tie back together to make interesting for him — because he has interests! How could we collect a plant seed after landing for example.
His approach to his other interests is similarly curious. He doesn’t want to be told how to fish by an authority, he wants to experiment with different techniques and think about how he can improve iteratively.
We stomp curiosity out of children in public schools. We need to stop.
