This is a lot of history I was only peripherally aware of. I was trying to think about what I did over my 6th and 7th grade summers and it was probably lots running around in the woods and playing SEGA genesis. Now I want to know who was on your winning team and what all happened to Mrs. Breckenridge. I had her for pre-Algebra and in hindsight I was really lucky to have her and Mrs. Tipton as math teachers, no one else ever came close (many would actually retard my developments in math).
Mrs. Breck was unhappy in her first marriage. Of course, you know her twin sons who were a bizarre level of trouble. It's hard to think that they were related. She divorced and remarried at some point (named changed to Wright).
The other members of the Alabama were Tim (whom you know), and two kids from Mt. Brook---Mark and Lee-Dicks (the latter of whom is who went to work for Microsoft).
A year earlier, I thought Tim would make the team. When Johnny moved to our school, he worked most consistently, and I thought he would make the team. He outscored Tim 80% of the time in practice. Tim worked hard during the months right up to the State competition. He's whose house I would get in trouble with his mom for biking over to (from where I lived to Dolly Ridge), but we would work problems in his basement, so she mostly ignored it.
In high school, Johnny, Tim, Sushanth, Ty, Sarah, Craig, amd others all worked hard at times, so while Johnny outperformed them a bit, it wasn't clear how good they all were because all of them were good---on the cusp of making the top 150 (US Math Olympiad). I think only Johnny qualified, but everyone else was close.
I wrote most of this a long time ago, and did not share for a lot of reasons. I'm grateful if it is received well. Most of all I want for people to know how much children can learn when freed from the system, not taught to hate the subjects they might find temporary or permanent passions for.
II agree Mathew! I hated math growing up...I hated school...I’m in my late 50’s and I still hate school!😂 So I homeschooled all 4 of our children, and I was determined not to use typical school books (bc I hated them). they learned multiplication at age 5 by singing skip counting songs, which led directly into telling time and counting coins, etc. They learned basic fractions by baking and sewing, and after baking a pan of brownies we did more fractions when we cut it up to eat! They learned to calculate sales tax each week when we went grocery shopping. they were doing algebra and geometry in middle school because it was all just games for them. My husband helped in much of the more advanced math. It was a family effort, and it was fun. Thank you for opening so many doors for the young people in your circle. You were blessed with a gift and you blessed others by sharing it. There is much honor it that.
I was the youngest of four. We would play “school”, and I was the student. My sibs would play teachers and give me the lessons they had at school that day. I knew how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in kindergarten. I could also read and spell hard words. All because it was fun and I was simply playing. The school had me “skip” first grade. Not sure if that is still the practice for “more able learners”, as I was called.
Among other things, you've written a great tribute to Mrs Breckenridge.
I recognise much of the environment that you've described and can substitute other names and so forth, but the piece here resonates strongly with me - albeit at a much lower level of mathematical performance.
Thanks to your prompt, I shall raise a glass this evening to my own saviours such as Mr Radford, Dr. Dempster and also to . . . Mrs Breckenridge. She would have been a time-shifted but kindred spirit.
A great many students appreciated Mrs. Breck (as we called her). She worked hard to create a program for learning math through solving harder problems.
It must have been a joy to have a teacher like her. I, on the other hand, had Sister Rose Alicia, who I am sure is burning in her own special corner of hell. She insulted, shamed, and humiliated her students for stupidity on a regular basis. It's been almost fifty years, and I'm barely over my terror of anything mathematical. When I homeschooled my son, I would sit up nights drawing pictures of fractions to learn the 'why' of multiplying and dividing them. I taught myself so much in the process. I wish I had another lifetime to learn it properly.
so many thoughts about what you have written…most pressing is how you were able to survive and somehow thrive growing up in the family environment you describe…or maybe that is how you were able? i think you wanted to make this about education and realizing /nurturing all the untapped potential among us, but the impact of your experience was, for me, awe at the resiliency of the human spirit. thank you!
Activities can be escapes. Climbing trees, rope climbing in the woods, mapping the neighborhoods on bike, skateboarding, and math team were all escapes. This is part of why a safe neighborhood is important for healthy children. Children can find what is healthy, even when other things are not.
I have no idea how I started following you - obviously it was from an interesting/insightful post but I still could not grasp who you were/where you came from. So glad I read all the way through this post - it was captivating. Yet, it wasn’t until I clicked on the link to the company you started “The Art of Problem Solving” that I jumped from my chair (not literally). My oldest son by his freshman year had the same complaints that they don’t teach you math & school was a waste of time. He would text me several times a week to ask me to call him out of school because he couldn’t stand being there. I devised a plan around all the state & local requirements that allowed him to graduate in 3 years taking all the AP courses they offered (w/no recognition upon graduation). It wasn’t until the plandemic when his youngest brother was stuck at home & we were concerned about how we were going to educate him that my older son recommended the Art of problem solving course. He said they were the only courses worth doing. Then I saw my oldest son’s bookshelves w/ the of AofP books & other math books (none from school). Wish he could’ve known or been in class with you. It’s exactly what he was looking for & school would’ve been exciting/fun rather than a prison that he was always trying to bust out of!
Wow, thanks for sharing this. It reminds me how fortunate I and my brothers were to grow up on a farm, with grandparents and parents that taught us by making us think versus by rote. Neither of my four grandparents graduated high school; yet, my grandmother taught us to read before we entered 1st grade - I was reading on a 4th grade level when “Dick and Jane” were boring to tears. My grandfather, 3rd grade graduate, taught us math, except he did not know the terms algebra, geometry or calculus - we learned, in school, these were the terms that referred to what he taught us. I look forward to one day using your curriculum with my grandchildren.
Wow, Mathew. Thank you. I enjoyed clicking into some of your past essays and some of the comments with them. I have been following you closely since sometime in 2021 and the sweep of your thought is good to review. I passed this to my son and daughter in law just now. They are beginning to home school as she is an educator and writes high school science curricula for a national company and attempting to resist the woke content being added. Both read your work. Your thoughts represent a better way forward.
I'm very glad to see the home school movement absorbing so many new people. I'm soon releasing a few thousand pages of my own curriculum for free use (I'm trying to work out a basic license that lends basic acknowledge of the source, but otherwise free).
They will plan on using it. She is an exceptional teacher who has taught in private schools and inner city schools very successfully. She grew up being bullied in school because she was white and was successful in teaching middle school in that same system.
The math piece aside - which is impressive and instructive on multiple levels - your description of childhood events and Matthew, the child, is a testament to something extraordinary about human potential that, as a culture, clearly some interests are determined to suppress. Both heartbreaking and inspirational. (I had similar feelings reading Angela's Ashes. I kept having to tell myself (reading those awful childhood stories) some version of - It's okay, he not only survived, he grew up intelligent, with his humor in tact - he wrote the book! )
Thank you for sharing it. Can't imagine it's easy.
Reading this was interesting on many levels. I have to say, I don't recall ever using a math book either. I was part of a school "wing" with grades K through 4th grade. The wing of the school had one classroom for each grade. We had "math folders" time where we would be advanced in our own personal math level into the hallway and work through laminated problem sheets. I am not sure why that was one of my fondest memories of elementary school, but it is. Maybe it was the feeling of possibility? I guess it also reminds me of first grade and being able to read through the alphabet book at your own pace... possibility. And then move to high school where my geometry teacher made that class super fun and the material tangible. I loved it. I am not good at simple accounting which frightens me because I own a small business. But geometry and factors etc, I was good at. Go figure! And most of this is to say, the teacher open up the world to me. That is a huge part of it. And having been part of the program of amazing teachers who kept K through 4th grade as a unit of community, well, priceless. I attribute my success to this time considering my parents were fairly dropped out of life. Thank goodness for amazing educators. Thanks for sharing your story. It makes me want to have some kids and give them the world of opportunity!
I got in trouble in the second grade for sneaking into the third grade classroom and taking their laminated sheets to work on when I got bored. I timed my bathroom break to their P.E.
My most fond memory of lower school education was the self-paced reading system my school used. The teacher would focus her time on the kids who were struggling with reading, while allowing the better readers to work individually--we got to pick out whichever stories we wanted to read from a big selection, and then do question & answer sheets on them. The relative freedom to choose what I wanted to read from a huge smorgasboard felt like the greatest gift I'd ever been given. Imagine if all education was largely child-directed...we'd achieve so much more, which is exactly why the modern public school system is designed to constrain, limit, and control thought.
Wow. I can't wait until your autobiography comes out. You are not only a wiz at math and statistics, but you obviously have overcome the dyslexia and when you write these autobiographical stacks, I cannot stop reading and always want to hear more about your life. Thank you for sharing.
Brilliant- what a post. Being in the midst of raising 2 boys, one who was awarded the highest achievement in math at his recent 8th grade graduation, I have also come to realize that childhood education is complete shit. I have always felt that it is deliberately so. A real education is a dangerous thing to people in power.
My son recently graduated from UW Madison with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He too was a math prodigy and was solving complex problems at home with advanced math books from the library just for fun as a child. Even at the college level much of the math curriculum taught by washed up old tenured profs is crap. He was often frustrated when he could do a problem in his head, write out the correct answer but get marked down for not writing his work out using what ever method the shill wanted him to go through to get to the answer. Some people just have the gift and that is something to be celebrated not discounted.
"A bed with three draws that I could pull out, crawl behind, pull back, and would provide me with complete cover from the family. Primarily, I hid from an extremely violent brother, but also my mother whose emotional state largely drove his violence. It was during this time from ages five to nine, that I self-discovered most of the techniques that I used to become a lightning calculator. To me, handling numbers was like playing golf or solitaire—except that numbers were clearly more useful than most things I could be working on..."
And oddly enough, an unrealized interest in numbers surfacd as a way of coping and thus
surviving within a violent dysfunctional family creating the tenacity to be a kind of Michael Chang in mathematics.
Wouldn't life be grand, if every very young child were all mature enough to discover their special abilities and had the environment or resources to nurture this talent so they could reach their maximum potential.
Unfortunately, that lucky break of having two of those significant variables--talent and resources occuring simultaneously is usually reserved for a tiny few-- the affluent, or those with parents who happen to be devoted coaches.
Today for the most part public school systems, especially in working class or even middle-class neighborhoods are similar to prison systems in that it warehouses populations. This is even becoming more apparent as apparatchiks are turning school buildings into fortresses. Soon they'll be calling school principals wardens.😁
Nonetheless, what we're witnessing is a two-tiered educational system which is not that different from every other aspect of our lives. Perhaps, prior to globalization the ruling elite had a need, so hence desire to educate workers in order to keep manufacturing plants operating efficiently, but those days are long gone.
It's better to keep millions drugged on fentanyl and Opioids falling over in a stupor in feces infected streets, as a drug addicted population provides "no" threat to the status quo.
If the goal as we're blatantly told by the WEF and the UN Agenda 2030 is to eliminate the middle-class and all remaining vestiges of democracy replacing it with a neofeudal technocracy directed by AI components and a selected bunch of techno/fascist cyborgs🤖 then why bother wasting money and time on educating the useless.🤔
Aren't school principals "wardens"? Miss Hammer in grade school (who imposed Dick and Jane, forbade spelling bees, and totally f'd up "New Math"*; though somehow we had a real 6th grade science teacher) sure was! (Later principals tended towards worthlessness.)
*My dad was a physicist. He went to back to school night, somehow squoze into the desk, examined the text books stacked on the desk, and was highly impressed with New Math; until Miss Willis opened her mouth.
I dunno why they targeted the somewhat productive with these "vaccinations". Just put really cheap fentanyl (or krokodil or desmethylprodine with the "right" amount of MPTP) and furanmethamphetamine (thiophenemethamphetamine might also work) machines in every smoke and vape shop and 7-11 (and in worse neighborhoods, street corner; but make those free) and Malthuse the low-lifes! But then WEF wouldn't have these career criminals stealing everything from the rest of us to pawn off.
Intellectually schools might've always seemed like prisons, however, the security state wants to use the pretext of school shootings to turn them into barbed wire penitentiaries with only one way in and out.
No need. An acquaintance was sent to the "country club" (of Watergate fame) part of Lompoc federal penitentiary. A fellow inmate was a jogger. The other inmates gave him money. He hopped the hedge (some "barbed wire"!) right after morning roll call, ran in to town, bought liquor, and returned easily in time for noon roll call.
All that trauma, Matthew, and you are thriving!!!!! God is so good. I describe my childhood as "chaos" and seldom tell people that I escaped at age 16 by hitchhiking across the country because I knew they (the so-called adults) would destroy me. My testimony is that God protected me every single step of the way and no harm came to me during those 2 years. A miracle in late 1970s. Went on to become a Big6 CPA and then international CFO. Mom of 2, and GREATEST relationship with daughter! Best life ever and there is still more to come!
Bravo, Matthew. Bravo!!
Please solve the riddle in the 2nd to last paragraph. My browser (Brave) is not cooperating with safe sites. What were those remarks in 1999?
Michael, you overcame immense hardships. My three adult children were crippled by easyships. They had everything given to them, spoon fed, snowflake strokes., gold stars, etc. and all failed.
Especially in relationships. My question for you is more personal. Have you been able to build a solid marital relationship despite the awful model you had? How did you do it?
This is a lot of history I was only peripherally aware of. I was trying to think about what I did over my 6th and 7th grade summers and it was probably lots running around in the woods and playing SEGA genesis. Now I want to know who was on your winning team and what all happened to Mrs. Breckenridge. I had her for pre-Algebra and in hindsight I was really lucky to have her and Mrs. Tipton as math teachers, no one else ever came close (many would actually retard my developments in math).
Mrs. Breck was unhappy in her first marriage. Of course, you know her twin sons who were a bizarre level of trouble. It's hard to think that they were related. She divorced and remarried at some point (named changed to Wright).
The other members of the Alabama were Tim (whom you know), and two kids from Mt. Brook---Mark and Lee-Dicks (the latter of whom is who went to work for Microsoft).
I had always assumed she adopted them or that her husband was a total mismatch for her to have sons like that. Very sad.
Wow, Tim, I knew he was good at math but I didn't know he was that good.
A year earlier, I thought Tim would make the team. When Johnny moved to our school, he worked most consistently, and I thought he would make the team. He outscored Tim 80% of the time in practice. Tim worked hard during the months right up to the State competition. He's whose house I would get in trouble with his mom for biking over to (from where I lived to Dolly Ridge), but we would work problems in his basement, so she mostly ignored it.
In high school, Johnny, Tim, Sushanth, Ty, Sarah, Craig, amd others all worked hard at times, so while Johnny outperformed them a bit, it wasn't clear how good they all were because all of them were good---on the cusp of making the top 150 (US Math Olympiad). I think only Johnny qualified, but everyone else was close.
That was riveting Matthew. Thanks for sharing all that I’m so glad you got that power of mind and soul. It is a treasure!
I wrote most of this a long time ago, and did not share for a lot of reasons. I'm grateful if it is received well. Most of all I want for people to know how much children can learn when freed from the system, not taught to hate the subjects they might find temporary or permanent passions for.
II agree Mathew! I hated math growing up...I hated school...I’m in my late 50’s and I still hate school!😂 So I homeschooled all 4 of our children, and I was determined not to use typical school books (bc I hated them). they learned multiplication at age 5 by singing skip counting songs, which led directly into telling time and counting coins, etc. They learned basic fractions by baking and sewing, and after baking a pan of brownies we did more fractions when we cut it up to eat! They learned to calculate sales tax each week when we went grocery shopping. they were doing algebra and geometry in middle school because it was all just games for them. My husband helped in much of the more advanced math. It was a family effort, and it was fun. Thank you for opening so many doors for the young people in your circle. You were blessed with a gift and you blessed others by sharing it. There is much honor it that.
I was the youngest of four. We would play “school”, and I was the student. My sibs would play teachers and give me the lessons they had at school that day. I knew how to add, subtract, multiply and divide in kindergarten. I could also read and spell hard words. All because it was fun and I was simply playing. The school had me “skip” first grade. Not sure if that is still the practice for “more able learners”, as I was called.
I also homeschooled my kids and used a pan of brownies to teach fractions! Great minds think alike 😁😁😁
Brownies, cake, pizza...we ate it all!
Among other things, you've written a great tribute to Mrs Breckenridge.
I recognise much of the environment that you've described and can substitute other names and so forth, but the piece here resonates strongly with me - albeit at a much lower level of mathematical performance.
Thanks to your prompt, I shall raise a glass this evening to my own saviours such as Mr Radford, Dr. Dempster and also to . . . Mrs Breckenridge. She would have been a time-shifted but kindred spirit.
A great many students appreciated Mrs. Breck (as we called her). She worked hard to create a program for learning math through solving harder problems.
It must have been a joy to have a teacher like her. I, on the other hand, had Sister Rose Alicia, who I am sure is burning in her own special corner of hell. She insulted, shamed, and humiliated her students for stupidity on a regular basis. It's been almost fifty years, and I'm barely over my terror of anything mathematical. When I homeschooled my son, I would sit up nights drawing pictures of fractions to learn the 'why' of multiplying and dividing them. I taught myself so much in the process. I wish I had another lifetime to learn it properly.
so many thoughts about what you have written…most pressing is how you were able to survive and somehow thrive growing up in the family environment you describe…or maybe that is how you were able? i think you wanted to make this about education and realizing /nurturing all the untapped potential among us, but the impact of your experience was, for me, awe at the resiliency of the human spirit. thank you!
Activities can be escapes. Climbing trees, rope climbing in the woods, mapping the neighborhoods on bike, skateboarding, and math team were all escapes. This is part of why a safe neighborhood is important for healthy children. Children can find what is healthy, even when other things are not.
I think that's massively understated wisdom.
And also, because children in cities need protecting and chaperoning, they're a bigger burden for their parents and family size tends to stay smaller.
Congrats on an amazing article, Matthew. I loved it.
I have no idea how I started following you - obviously it was from an interesting/insightful post but I still could not grasp who you were/where you came from. So glad I read all the way through this post - it was captivating. Yet, it wasn’t until I clicked on the link to the company you started “The Art of Problem Solving” that I jumped from my chair (not literally). My oldest son by his freshman year had the same complaints that they don’t teach you math & school was a waste of time. He would text me several times a week to ask me to call him out of school because he couldn’t stand being there. I devised a plan around all the state & local requirements that allowed him to graduate in 3 years taking all the AP courses they offered (w/no recognition upon graduation). It wasn’t until the plandemic when his youngest brother was stuck at home & we were concerned about how we were going to educate him that my older son recommended the Art of problem solving course. He said they were the only courses worth doing. Then I saw my oldest son’s bookshelves w/ the of AofP books & other math books (none from school). Wish he could’ve known or been in class with you. It’s exactly what he was looking for & school would’ve been exciting/fun rather than a prison that he was always trying to bust out of!
Wow, thanks for sharing this. It reminds me how fortunate I and my brothers were to grow up on a farm, with grandparents and parents that taught us by making us think versus by rote. Neither of my four grandparents graduated high school; yet, my grandmother taught us to read before we entered 1st grade - I was reading on a 4th grade level when “Dick and Jane” were boring to tears. My grandfather, 3rd grade graduate, taught us math, except he did not know the terms algebra, geometry or calculus - we learned, in school, these were the terms that referred to what he taught us. I look forward to one day using your curriculum with my grandchildren.
Wow, Mathew. Thank you. I enjoyed clicking into some of your past essays and some of the comments with them. I have been following you closely since sometime in 2021 and the sweep of your thought is good to review. I passed this to my son and daughter in law just now. They are beginning to home school as she is an educator and writes high school science curricula for a national company and attempting to resist the woke content being added. Both read your work. Your thoughts represent a better way forward.
I'm very glad to see the home school movement absorbing so many new people. I'm soon releasing a few thousand pages of my own curriculum for free use (I'm trying to work out a basic license that lends basic acknowledge of the source, but otherwise free).
They will plan on using it. She is an exceptional teacher who has taught in private schools and inner city schools very successfully. She grew up being bullied in school because she was white and was successful in teaching middle school in that same system.
Could one or other of the Creative Commons license not be of use, Matthew? Https://Creative Commons.org
The math piece aside - which is impressive and instructive on multiple levels - your description of childhood events and Matthew, the child, is a testament to something extraordinary about human potential that, as a culture, clearly some interests are determined to suppress. Both heartbreaking and inspirational. (I had similar feelings reading Angela's Ashes. I kept having to tell myself (reading those awful childhood stories) some version of - It's okay, he not only survived, he grew up intelligent, with his humor in tact - he wrote the book! )
Thank you for sharing it. Can't imagine it's easy.
Reading this was interesting on many levels. I have to say, I don't recall ever using a math book either. I was part of a school "wing" with grades K through 4th grade. The wing of the school had one classroom for each grade. We had "math folders" time where we would be advanced in our own personal math level into the hallway and work through laminated problem sheets. I am not sure why that was one of my fondest memories of elementary school, but it is. Maybe it was the feeling of possibility? I guess it also reminds me of first grade and being able to read through the alphabet book at your own pace... possibility. And then move to high school where my geometry teacher made that class super fun and the material tangible. I loved it. I am not good at simple accounting which frightens me because I own a small business. But geometry and factors etc, I was good at. Go figure! And most of this is to say, the teacher open up the world to me. That is a huge part of it. And having been part of the program of amazing teachers who kept K through 4th grade as a unit of community, well, priceless. I attribute my success to this time considering my parents were fairly dropped out of life. Thank goodness for amazing educators. Thanks for sharing your story. It makes me want to have some kids and give them the world of opportunity!
I got in trouble in the second grade for sneaking into the third grade classroom and taking their laminated sheets to work on when I got bored. I timed my bathroom break to their P.E.
You were a real rules breaker😂. And to imagine giving a kid a hard time for self advancing and learning 🤔
Don't you know advancing and learning, different from others, is not allowed?
That’s the “consensus” these days!
My most fond memory of lower school education was the self-paced reading system my school used. The teacher would focus her time on the kids who were struggling with reading, while allowing the better readers to work individually--we got to pick out whichever stories we wanted to read from a big selection, and then do question & answer sheets on them. The relative freedom to choose what I wanted to read from a huge smorgasboard felt like the greatest gift I'd ever been given. Imagine if all education was largely child-directed...we'd achieve so much more, which is exactly why the modern public school system is designed to constrain, limit, and control thought.
Wow. I can't wait until your autobiography comes out. You are not only a wiz at math and statistics, but you obviously have overcome the dyslexia and when you write these autobiographical stacks, I cannot stop reading and always want to hear more about your life. Thank you for sharing.
Is that a Freudian slip in the 4th paragraph meditation/medication?
More likely an autocorrect. Fixed. Thanks.
Brilliant- what a post. Being in the midst of raising 2 boys, one who was awarded the highest achievement in math at his recent 8th grade graduation, I have also come to realize that childhood education is complete shit. I have always felt that it is deliberately so. A real education is a dangerous thing to people in power.
My son recently graduated from UW Madison with a degree in Mechanical Engineering. He too was a math prodigy and was solving complex problems at home with advanced math books from the library just for fun as a child. Even at the college level much of the math curriculum taught by washed up old tenured profs is crap. He was often frustrated when he could do a problem in his head, write out the correct answer but get marked down for not writing his work out using what ever method the shill wanted him to go through to get to the answer. Some people just have the gift and that is something to be celebrated not discounted.
Ha! We just left a school where my younger son would get 100% correct answers but receive an F for not showing work in the exact way they want.
Absolutely concur and congrats, from a stranger, to your son!
"A bed with three draws that I could pull out, crawl behind, pull back, and would provide me with complete cover from the family. Primarily, I hid from an extremely violent brother, but also my mother whose emotional state largely drove his violence. It was during this time from ages five to nine, that I self-discovered most of the techniques that I used to become a lightning calculator. To me, handling numbers was like playing golf or solitaire—except that numbers were clearly more useful than most things I could be working on..."
And oddly enough, an unrealized interest in numbers surfacd as a way of coping and thus
surviving within a violent dysfunctional family creating the tenacity to be a kind of Michael Chang in mathematics.
Wouldn't life be grand, if every very young child were all mature enough to discover their special abilities and had the environment or resources to nurture this talent so they could reach their maximum potential.
Unfortunately, that lucky break of having two of those significant variables--talent and resources occuring simultaneously is usually reserved for a tiny few-- the affluent, or those with parents who happen to be devoted coaches.
Today for the most part public school systems, especially in working class or even middle-class neighborhoods are similar to prison systems in that it warehouses populations. This is even becoming more apparent as apparatchiks are turning school buildings into fortresses. Soon they'll be calling school principals wardens.😁
Nonetheless, what we're witnessing is a two-tiered educational system which is not that different from every other aspect of our lives. Perhaps, prior to globalization the ruling elite had a need, so hence desire to educate workers in order to keep manufacturing plants operating efficiently, but those days are long gone.
It's better to keep millions drugged on fentanyl and Opioids falling over in a stupor in feces infected streets, as a drug addicted population provides "no" threat to the status quo.
If the goal as we're blatantly told by the WEF and the UN Agenda 2030 is to eliminate the middle-class and all remaining vestiges of democracy replacing it with a neofeudal technocracy directed by AI components and a selected bunch of techno/fascist cyborgs🤖 then why bother wasting money and time on educating the useless.🤔
Aren't school principals "wardens"? Miss Hammer in grade school (who imposed Dick and Jane, forbade spelling bees, and totally f'd up "New Math"*; though somehow we had a real 6th grade science teacher) sure was! (Later principals tended towards worthlessness.)
*My dad was a physicist. He went to back to school night, somehow squoze into the desk, examined the text books stacked on the desk, and was highly impressed with New Math; until Miss Willis opened her mouth.
I dunno why they targeted the somewhat productive with these "vaccinations". Just put really cheap fentanyl (or krokodil or desmethylprodine with the "right" amount of MPTP) and furanmethamphetamine (thiophenemethamphetamine might also work) machines in every smoke and vape shop and 7-11 (and in worse neighborhoods, street corner; but make those free) and Malthuse the low-lifes! But then WEF wouldn't have these career criminals stealing everything from the rest of us to pawn off.
Intellectually schools might've always seemed like prisons, however, the security state wants to use the pretext of school shootings to turn them into barbed wire penitentiaries with only one way in and out.
No need. An acquaintance was sent to the "country club" (of Watergate fame) part of Lompoc federal penitentiary. A fellow inmate was a jogger. The other inmates gave him money. He hopped the hedge (some "barbed wire"!) right after morning roll call, ran in to town, bought liquor, and returned easily in time for noon roll call.
As a child If he knew he possessed such athletic talent he might've become an Olympian.😁
All that trauma, Matthew, and you are thriving!!!!! God is so good. I describe my childhood as "chaos" and seldom tell people that I escaped at age 16 by hitchhiking across the country because I knew they (the so-called adults) would destroy me. My testimony is that God protected me every single step of the way and no harm came to me during those 2 years. A miracle in late 1970s. Went on to become a Big6 CPA and then international CFO. Mom of 2, and GREATEST relationship with daughter! Best life ever and there is still more to come!
Bravo, Matthew. Bravo!!
Please solve the riddle in the 2nd to last paragraph. My browser (Brave) is not cooperating with safe sites. What were those remarks in 1999?
When my friend was graduating from Yale in 1999, Mandelbrot made that comment to her about her future employer, Bill Gates.
Michael, you overcame immense hardships. My three adult children were crippled by easyships. They had everything given to them, spoon fed, snowflake strokes., gold stars, etc. and all failed.
Especially in relationships. My question for you is more personal. Have you been able to build a solid marital relationship despite the awful model you had? How did you do it?
You are the definition of self reliance and charity to others. God bless you.
Indeed.