They said it was advanced!

I've come to a realization in my adult life, and I think I'll have to do something about it. If I don't I'll be completely useless when helping my children with homework, let alone if I decide to homeschool. I never learned the real "basics" of English, the stuff you need to know to write a sentence. Honestly, I shouldn't be allowed to have a blog, but dammit, this is America, and free blogging is an American right! Or not, whatever. Oh, yeah... my point. In 5th grade I was put in a creative writing class instead of English class with my peers. It was an "advanced class" by invitation only, and I was so proud to be in it. We wrote poetry, short stories, and other "creative" projects, while our classmates learned to do frivilous things like use punctuation! Bah! Who needs to know how to conjugate a verb, or the what a participle is. (Is that even right or am I making stuff up? See? I seriously lack in this department!) Though I've known for a while that I really have no clue what I'm doing in this department, the recent chatter about the self-esteem article brought this to the surface. I didn't really belong in the creative class, I'm smart but not altogether creative. They put me there because I got high scores on standardized tests. Granted I have always been ahead of my peers on the learning curve, but did that mean the school decided they didn't need to teach me certain things? In 8th grade our district decided it was a good idea to mix the advanced English/reading classes with the remidial. It was bad for the remedial kids' self-esteem to be in a separate class. I spent that year HATING a couple of kids who could barely read, while they stuttered through simple paragraphs. THAT'S bad for self-esteem, those poor kids were made fun of relentlessly, because that's how 8th graders work. It was also horrible for the rest of us because we were bored, and unchallenged. Let's talk about high school. I doubled up math classes Freshman year so I wouldn't have to take one Senior year. This meant that Junior year I had the option of Calculus or AP Statistics. I still have my AP statistics workbook as a reminder, I damn near failed that class. That was a rough year for me, and I was WAY out of my league in AP Stat. Even Freshman year Geometry, I just do not get geometry. I had the same teacher for Alg and Geometry that year, and he knew I was just barely gonna make it through the Geo 1 class, no matter how well I understood algebra. Why am I rambling on about high school? Oh, I remember. (see what I mean about the attention span?) The end result of my schooling is I can write a haiku and solve X, but somewhere along the line I managed to skate through never knowing how to properly use my native tongue. The saddest part is I'm better off than some.