8<)
I got fouled up the other way coming out of St Thomas More in San Antonio after 1-8 there. Mom was enrolling us in the local high school, and the counselor asked if I had algebra yet while she wasn’t at the desk. I didn’t recognize the name “algebra” but I knew i couldn’t lie about anything.
So I asked, “What’s algebra?”
Ooopsie. They stuffed me back in the regular/catch-up classes, rather than the advanced science and math. Yep - I had all of Algebra I already, and a running start at geometry - but the nuns didn’t it “algebra.” Long story short, I did some substituting and fixing in the sophomore year, and got Algebra II, geometry, physics, chemistry caught up with the other AP classes so I could get to Trig, calculus,chemistry II, physics II in the senior year.
But mom learned her lesson too.
All 7 following brothers and sisters got registered “right properly” by HER rules each following year!
The interesting thing about this “test”, that the teacher admits she had devised herself, is that the other skill that my son flunked was using scissors to cut a circle out of construction paper freehand. Apparently, my son’s circle was lopsided and crooked. He was 5.
I asked the teacher what kind of scissors did he use. Were they “left handed” scissors? No. Turns out that 11 out of the 13 boys chosen for this “special” class were/are left handed. Several moms pulled their kids out, like I did, and when the “left handed boys’ class” assembled in the fall it had only about 9 of the original 13 left.
One of the boys almost died in a horrific house fire in his second year in the class. We had moved to TX (this crazy educational experiment was in CA) and didn’t learn about Scott’s tragedy until a couple of years later. After 12 operations and a year of home tutoring, he rejoined his class. It was then that the other mothers “woke up”. Scott (despite months of horrifying pain) was way ahead of his classmates. The other mothers complained and demanded that an end be put to this ridiculous experiment.
BTW, my son won the top Science Fair prize at his Catholic School when he was 6. His older sister copied his experiment at her school in TX when she was 10 and won a blue ribbon there with the same experiment. LOL.