Every now and then I do have to admit my mother did one good thing in my life. She did not home school me. OK, she really really wanted to with the ACE-curriculum but it cost too much and we had no money to afford it. Thankfully she couldn't get it all second hand from any church buddies so that idea was dropped and off to public school I went.

I hated school for a long time. I'm not sure I ever enjoyed it but I'm forever thankful for some of the teachers I had:

• The one who even though I freaked out every day, still sent me to do reading in the grade above me. Learning the alphabet when I already knew it at 5 wasn't fun, reading cool books was. So thank you.
• The one who taught me when I was 7 and was the sub when I was 17. He expressed his surprise at how well I'd turned out (I was a social oddity when he taught me). The look on his face when I put up my hand to answer a question was really amusing. Yeah, that was something he hadn't seen before.
• The librarian/teacher who let me help out older students who couldn't work a computer in the early 90's. Because somehow I could even though I wasn't allowed to touch the computer at school.
• The three teachers who made it part of their teaching to teach us how to organize and structure our work. The one's who broke it down into little steps, then trusted us enough to be able to, and supported us along the way. Without these teachers I don't think I would ever have managed to graduate from university.
• The teacher who when finding out that most of our class failed all the practice  exams decided instead of reviewing material to teach us how to study. And not just study for her subject, but how to make an effective study schema for all our classes. She really went above and beyond.
• The cool librarian who recognized that I was a rule follower. She utilized that to help me break out of my 'only good christian books allowed' reading. "You have to read xxx" I always took as command. Most books nestled well into my Bible so it looked like I was reading that, instead of those Tamora Pierce books.
• The teacher who pushed for me to skip a grade, which ultimately didn't happen (apparently I wasn't socially ready. Amusingly all my friends for the next two years came from the grade higher). That same teacher insisted that if I couldn't skip a grade I should be allowed to skip a grade in some classes, and get extra work to keep me interested.
• The teacher who spent half a year teaching me to look people in the eye. I was 11
• The teacher who taught me that violence is never OK.
• The teacher who put me in charge of the orchestra (even if she gave someone else all the credit).
• The teachers who challenged me, but never forced me to look at things outside the very small worldview I had acquired from home.
• The teachers who knew I was forging my parents signature but never did anything about it because they (and me) believed that it was healthier for my development to be allowed to do certain things
• The teachers who apparently enjoyed teaching me with all my quirks. They were the teachers who encouraged me to utilize my quirkiness and that it didn't have to be a hassle.
• The teacher who let me teach myself, who guided me instead of nagging, and then sent struggling students to get tutored by me because I was going through my work too fast. I learnt a lot more by tutoring people than I did doing all that other work.
• All the teachers who encouraged me, believed in me and let me know I could do stuff. And that I could achieve more than I had dreamed up until then. It was hard to believe in myself when all I ever heard at home was that I was a failure and never good enough and couldn't be trusted. Not even 100% could get me a pass on being good enough :/

Of course not all teachers were cool, or should have been in that profession:

• The sports teacher who got up into my face (and thus also personal space) to tell me that if I could score in the top % of my country in science I should be able to apply the physics knowledge to doing gymnastics. And spent the next 20 minutes berating me because I couldn't.
• The same sports teacher who when I got concussion doing gymnastics yelled at me because I got hurt, then yelled at me because I wasn't back attempting the same dangerous ass thing that got me hurt in the first place and then yelled at me because I was hurt worse than he realized (even though I had tried to explain that)
• The teacher who, when someone strangled me to the point my vision faded away, blamed me and told me I should just keep away from said perpetrator, and if I hadn't have been near her in the first place it wouldn't have happened.
• The teacher who yelled at me in front of the whole class for getting 19/20 for an assignment. The class average was 8/20. Sure it was a careless mistake (I wrote something like 198 instead of 189), but I had actually tripled checked everything. Sometimes that shit just slips through.
• The teacher who tried to fail me for a maths test one time because I used shorter 'working' than he taught.
• The same maths teacher who wanted me to 1) buy a new maths book and 2)send me to detention because I had finished my homework book in a week. It was meant to last all year. It was maths I had done 3 years earlier - even though some parts weren't meant to be taught that year. I won that one too
• The school counselor who, when I entered his office for the first time, instead of asking me why I was there said I should keep an eye out for student X because she was struggling and he knew I had a good home life and was happy. There was no way I could then explain that the reason I turned up is because I was because I wanted help for suicidal behaviors.
• The teacher who told me I was going to fail because I couldn't write essays her way. When I asked for extra help/guidance on what she meant, she told me I should have been taught it previously and she wasn't going to help me
• The teacher who went nuts when I helped fellow students. Apparently it was better that people didn't understand, than that students helped each other understand hard concepts.
• The teacher who accused me of lying a whole year long because he didn't believe any student could read more than 20 novels in a year. I was reading that much a month.

Even though school was crappy at times I'm so glad and thankful that I got to go. I had outside influences, secular education (it really isn't that evil), and people who encouraged me to be more than a wife with a million kids. There I was told I could aim higher, I had the ability to achieve great things, and that life was more than the world that my parents tried to paint for me.  I'm glad I had that experience when I decided to leave home to get a degree in an area my parents didn't agree with. I really hate to image what I would have turned out like if I had been home schooled. I'm pretty sure I dodged a fatal bullet with that one.

Once upon a time there was a class of students. All the students were taught to exceed all expectations that people had of them. They dreamed big, they focused their energy into improving the world. The teachers loved their jobs with a passion and everyone had a jolly time at school and all lived happily ever after. The END