I was back to home schooling for the fourth grade which meant I was
back to not doing much at all. I spent a lot of time building the fort and using power tools to build a few things but the days were
unstructured and I was usually always looking forward to the school
day being over so I could go play with my friends who were confined
to the regular 8:30 to 3 grind. I read lots of books, mostly world
book encyclopedias, and wrote some pretty weird reports which were
generally my speculations on dinosaur physiology or about air force
jets. Instead of looking up some information in a book I would sketch
out the foot bones of a sauropod and then a elephant foot and then
write my completely speculative ideas about the different anatomical
variations evolved to support extremely bulky animals. I was not
really learning anything because my information on the subject was
always incomplete and my report was always unfounded personal
conjecture. I had reports of the same style about how helicopters
work, and the nature of the human psyche. There is one weird one
about human cognition which involves a two way conversation between
the conscience and sub-conscience mind of a person involved in an
accident. My mom would read these and save them and I have a couple
still in scrapbook she has to this day. Besides those things we would
go to the natural history museum and the field house which we called
the run-around-place. I fell like my schooling, or lack thereof was
instructive in alternative was as Paul Simon once sang, ' My lack of
education hasn't hurt me, I can read the writing on the wall.'
