Looking back, I think we could have heavily optimized towards what is called today 'gifted and talented' in some areas of my education. That was kind of out of our world at that time. I particularly recall drills in math and recapitulating the same subject year after year (this was entirely the design of the curriculum - Saxon Math "Original"). It's important to note that I pursued other interests after schoolwork was done, and it was usually wrapped up by 3pm after 4th grade or so. This gave me, in effect, hours of self-teaching when I got interested in a subject (or hours of Legos, fooling around outside, and reading fiction). I self-taught DOS, QBASIC and C++, for instance. It was undirected, so not as fast and as thorough as a good curriculum, but it did serve. In general (maybe 90% of the time?), however, I liked school, outside of the part where it wasn't letting me play. My mother generally chose intellectually challenging curricula (one particularly notable example would be the US history course - 3 separate curricula combined into one, one each from conservative, centrist, and progressive viewpoints), upon which I found some meat to entertain my mind.
What I can attest to strongly is this: my k-12 teaching was far closer to college and the work world than anything I've ever read about from US public schools.
Your home schooling was already then, as I come to understand it, (at least in some regards) a very good implementation of optimized teaching. This lets me with the conclusion that some of the didactic material will just remain dull for someone regardless of the effort involved from the teacher's part.
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Looking back, I think we could have heavily optimized towards what is called today 'gifted and talented' in some areas of my education. That was kind of out of our world at that time. I particularly recall drills in math and recapitulating the same subject year after year (this was entirely the design of the curriculum - Saxon Math "Original"). It's important to note that I pursued other interests after schoolwork was done, and it was usually wrapped up by 3pm after 4th grade or so. This gave me, in effect, hours of self-teaching when I got interested in a subject (or hours of Legos, fooling around outside, and reading fiction). I self-taught DOS, QBASIC and C++, for instance. It was undirected, so not as fast and as thorough as a good curriculum, but it did serve. In general (maybe 90% of the time?), however, I liked school, outside of the part where it wasn't letting me play. My mother generally chose intellectually challenging curricula (one particularly notable example would be the US history course - 3 separate curricula combined into one, one each from conservative, centrist, and progressive viewpoints), upon which I found some meat to entertain my mind.
What I can attest to strongly is this: my k-12 teaching was far closer to college and the work world than anything I've ever read about from US public schools.
Your home schooling was already then, as I come to understand it, (at least in some regards) a very good implementation of optimized teaching. This lets me with the conclusion that some of the didactic material will just remain dull for someone regardless of the effort involved from the teacher's part.