person / environment mis-match.

thinking back... my mother played a lot of educational games with me. we had fun playing the games. she rewarded me for learning stuff and i developed a love of learning.

then pre-school was (partly) an extension of that. i remember learning how to skip (learning what skipping was). i remember learning how to draw people... things like necks and even bodies (you wouldn't believe how many legs and arms coming out of heads there were) and so on... again, learning was fun. conservation of shape with the water trough...

then school was an extension of that again. spelling words. and some stuff with numbers, i think i do remember. writing paragraphs... reading to younger kids and helping them improve...

then i moved to a public school with a much higher student to teacher ratio. the teachers... they didn't seem to have a love of learning. they were more focused on managing behavioral problems and / or the kids at the bottom of the heap... the kids whose parents didn't have love of learning, either.

partly it is about fit. i've developed an appreciation that i do (really and truly and genuinely) have a significant disability that is circumscribed to some contexts. some other people truly thrive in that context, but i don't. similarly... a lot of people really don't have an appreciation for things that delight me.

you can be turned on or off by teachers that resonate well or resonate badly... ditto for parents and peers and the like...

i know if i had kids... i probably would want to do a bunch of things myself (because i simply wouldn't want to trust others to teach / foster the things that i value that i'd like my kids to be encouraged to value, too). i would want to limit unsupervised play time (in order to prevent bullying). and so on... but then... i'd also want to have just the one and really invest a bunch of time / resources into that one rather than seeing what manages to survive (if any at all) from a tribe fairly much cast to the wind to fend for themself / take whatever they can get (or not)...