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I was very excited to be asked to be a guest blogger for Penguin because for years I have been working on a plot to infiltrate the system and inject it with my subversive ideas.

You represent stage 3 in my plan.

World domination aside, what I really wanted to share with you is a bit about how I was formed as a human being. My story begins like this...

I did not do very well in school. I think my attendance may have had something to do with it.

(The only other person who was absent more than me had cancer.)

I began to see that my perception of the world was different than the other kids, and that school was largely about making the teacher happy, and had little to do with actual learning.  One of my early school memories is me at the age of six noticing that the other kids were getting attention from the teacher because they were struggling with reading.  I had learned to read at age four and found all the reading material too easy.  Feeling left out I decided to choose a random word and go up to the teacher and ask the pronunciation just so I could have her notice me.  The word was "sandwich".  The teacher looked surprised at my asking.

In the book How Children Fail, John Holt states:

When children are very young, they have natural curiosities about the world and explore them, trying diligently to figure out what is real. As they become "producers " they fall away from exploration and start fishing for the right answers with little thought. They believe they must always be right, so they quickly forget mistakes and how these mistakes were made. They believe that the only good response from the teacher is "yes," and that a "no" is defeat.

At this point I became very creative.  I found as many inventive ways as I could to stay home from school. 

Luckily my parents were a bit distracted with work and I was mostly free to stay home, watch tv, and make stuff.

This is Not a Book Keri Smith Wreck This Journal Perigee