The education meme
Feb. 21st, 2026 03:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12I've been seeing this doing the rounds for a couple of weeks now, and have found everyone's different responses really interesting. I particularly appreciated people who are parents answering each question twice — once about their own experiences, once about those of their children, and teasing out the commonalities, continuities, and changes.
[This took me three hours to write so I'm not going back in and editing all the typos.]
Before I launch into my answers, I think providing some context is helpful.
I'm Australian, and was in primary and secondary education during the 1990s and early 2000s. In Australia, education policy is set at state/territory rather than national level, so there is variation between individual states. In Canberra, where I grew up, preschool (aged 4) was optional but for the most part pretty much all children attend. Primary school was seven years (kindergarten-Year 6, children aged roughly 5-11 years), high school was four years (Year 7-Year 10, children aged roughly 12-15), and college was two years in a separate school (Year 11-Year 12, aged roughly 16-17 with the majority of students turning 18 during the final half of Year 12). Private schools tended to put all secondary education (Years 7-12) in one school, but public (state) schools split up high schools and colleges.
In some other states in Australia, there are selective public high schools where prospective students have to take an exam and score highly in order to attend; in Canberra these didn't exist, but in my high school maths was 'streamed' into three levels, science into two levels, and English into two levels (I was in the highest level for all these subjects) for each year group, and in my college maths was streamed into four levels (I was in the highest one). In my high school, English, maths, science, a second language, and PE were compulsory from years 7-10, and other subjects were optional electives. In college, the only compulsory subject was English, but in practice most people treated maths as compulsory as well because not having studied maths to year 12 level severely limited options in terms of future university studies. My college was unique to Canberran public schools in that it offered the International Baccalaureate in parallel with the state-level 'Year 12 Certificate' (if you are from Canberra, this basically tells you which college I went to); I did the IB and this a) restricted the subjects I could study, and b) gave me two 'University Admissions Index' (UAI) scores (one through the IB, and one through the state-level assessment) and I was allowed to pick the better of the two when applying to university. Because of the IB and because of the demographics of the students who attended my college (very middle class, and very multicultural with a high proportion of diplomats' kids and immigrants/the children of recent immigrants from families that placed a huge emphasis on education), it had a reputation for being the most academically rigorous in Canberra, and repeatedly got the best UAI scores across various measures in the whole territory.
I'm the oldest of five sisters. My next sister down (who has both the same parents) went to the same public primary school as me, then two years at a co-ed Anglican private high school, and then the final four years of secondary school at one of the most expensive private girls' schools in Australia when she, Mum and I moved to Sydney. The other three sisters (same father, different mother; these sisters range in age from 17 to 29 years younger than me) have attended/are attending a mixture of Catholic primary schools, the hippie-ish John Marsden private primary school, and another of the most expensive private girls' schools in Australia. So I guess between us all I have a good understanding of quite a broad spectrum of Australian educational institutions.
I think knowing this is helpful before I give my answers to the questions, because so much of our educational experience is context-specific — country, class, immigration status of one's family/whether one's family is of the majority culture, and obviously specific family dynamics as well.
Now, on to the questions!
Adults responsible for your care actively helped facilitate your early learning. (Reading at bedtime, playing educational games, going to child-friendly museums...)
Absolutely! My mum read four picture books to me and my sister every night; at some point this morphed into reading portions of middle grade or YA novels, and at some point this morphed into each of us taking turns to read aloud to each other from whatever the selected novel was. She also used to create spelling/grammar or maths worksheets for us to complete (when I was aged about 5-6), and I remember her making a massive analogue clock out of cardboard, with big cardboard hands that could move, and she spent a few hours using this to teach me how to tell the time with analogue clocks, when I was aged four or so. We went regularly to Questacon and the National Gallery of Australia (so regularly in this latter case that I can still visualise perfectly the layout and artworks in the permanent collections and the sculpture garden, and feel the sensation and smell of the squashy black vinyl armchairs they used to have in their restaurant), and to the theatre and concerts. My mum worked in local radio for almost the entire fifteen years we were in Canberra, and she was given two free press tickets to every performance of the Bell Shakespeare company, and she used to buy one extra ticket and take me and sister #1 to every perfomance (there were two a year, usually one tragedy or history play, and one comedy). Her press tickets used to get us into the cast/crew afterparty after the opening night performance, and the father of one of my friends from gymnastics (who worked as a public servant at the then-Department of Communications and the Arts) also used to get free tickets, so my sister, friend and I used to roam around the afterparties, swiping canapés and getting the shows' casts to sign our programs.
I grew up in a milieu in which physical education — giving children the tools to move with energy and confidence through their physical world — was also considered an important part of childhood education, and my family definitely facilitated this as well: we went bushwalking regularly with other families in nearby national parks, we were taught to swim and be confident in the water (including in rough surf at any familiar or unfamiliar beach), and were taken regularly to playgrounds, and on cycling trips around the big lake in the centre of Canberra.
You had a library card.
Yes. I had a card for my local public library since the age of three, and at all my school libraries. The latter was essential in high school and college as pupils there did not buy textbooks or set texts for English class — we borrowed them each term or semester from the school library.
Our public library had children's reading group activities on Saturdays and my mum took sister #1 and me to these events every week until I was aged 8 or so. The librarians remembered me for the rest of my life — even after I returned to Canberra aged 22 after four years away in Sydney, and went in to get a new library card, the librarian knew who I was and remembered me as one of the children from her reading group 15 years earlier.
Adults in your life involved you in tasks that involved mathematics skills.
I cooked a lot with my mum, and a bit with my dad (not because he cooked less than Mum, but just that in general he was kind of an absent parent), and baked sometimes with my maternal grandmother, but I didn't really clock at the time that these activities involved maths. My parents cooked by eyeballing and memory, so there wasn't much formal measuring involved.
If you started falling behind in school, you received help from a private tutor.
My mum paid for me to do Kumon for maths from age 9 (when she realised I couldn't understand conceptually how to do long division) until age 15 (after which point the kind of maths I was doing in school became more conceptual and abstract and therefore made the Kumon method — which relies on drilling and repetition of maths problems with an emphasis on speed and accuracy — completely useless). She paid for a private maths tutor for me for the duration of college. She also paid for me to have phonics/spelling tutoring for about three months, but I read and wrote so much that I essentially picked up the rules of English phonics and spelling by osmosis, so this was less due to falling behind and more to do with her ideological opposition to the way we were taught spelling at school.
You went to a well-funded school.
I went to incredibly well resourced public (state) schools. The facilities, equipment, and (with some notable exceptions) teaching were all excellent, although nothing in comparison to the absolutely insanely resourced private schools my sisters attended.
You typically attended school adequately clothed and fed.
Yes.
Adults responsible for your care were able to help you make decisions when it came time to pursue higher education.
Yes. Both my parents had attended university (the first in their families to do so), and it was the norm in all my social circles (most of the adults in my life were university educated, and most of my friends' parents had university degrees), so it was essentially something I'd grown up expecting to do. My mum helped guide my choices in terms of subjects studied in secondary school in order to ensure I would have lots of options when it came to university, and I can remember lots of conversations about my potential future, and what sorts of university options would help me move towards my intended careers. My mother was very firmly of the opinion that being good and comfortable writing in a variety of contexts, plus attending university on any course that was interesting to me (but that would give me as many opportunities as possible to hone and develop my writing skills) was the surest path to career security in adulthood ('as long as you're able to write, you can do anything' is a sentiment I remember hearing her express repeatedly), and while she wasn't fully able to anticipate the world we live in now, I would say in general that this advice stood me in good stead.
If you were disabled and/or neurodivergent, you were classified by your school and received support through the education system.
This isn't applicable to me, but I would say in general that disabled and neurodivergent students were really failed in my schools. There was one boy in my primary school who had Down syndrome (a year older than sister #1) who was educated alongside his nondisabled peers, but I don't know what happened to him after primary school. There were definitely a several kids in my grade who had undiagnosed ADHD or dyslexia, and I can remember them being essentially treated as having disciplinary problems or being 'stupid'. The school was also really bad at handling behavioural problems that stemmed from kids' trauma or bad home life.
You generally felt physically and emotionally safe at school.
Mostly yes. I was physically and psychologically bullied aged 8-9, and then aged 11 in primary school (the gap between those years was because I moved into a different — non-bullying — friendship group, but that group fell apart when one of the girls moved back to East Timor and I went back to the bullying group of friends), and aged 13-14 my highschool friendship group kind of didn't know how to maturely handle the fact that the other three girls and I no longer had much in common, and the other girls chose to deal with this by basically excluding me. But because I had such solid friendship groups outside school (at gymnastics classes, Kumon tutoring, musical theory classes, among my extended family and family friends), and, aged 13-14, also a good group of other friends with whom I spent most of my time in classes, I had so many other avenues in which I felt safe, respected and appreciated that the difficulties at school shrank in significance. I still feel incredibly bitter that the girl who was the worst physical bully went on to become a primary school teacher, though.
You were in relatively good physical and mental health.
The above stuff did take its toll mentally, but only to a small extent. On the physical side, I was in incredible health — full of energy, unbelievably strong, and with incredible stamina. 12 hours a week of gymnastics training will do that to you! (As an illustrative example, I used to be able to climb up and down a rope, using only my arms, with my legs held straight out in a straddle position, with 3kg weights tied to each ankle, and I found it easy.) I was just in generally a very athletic and physically active child — sister #1 and I spent most of our free time climbing trees, running around the garden, dancing in the living room, swimming for hours in the pool or at the beach, and so on. I had lots of energy and loved moving.
For the most part, you were able to study and complete assignments without any struggle.
Yes, apart from maths in the final two years of secondary school. I had made the strategic decision (with the support of my mum and teachers) to put myself in the highest of the four 'streams' of maths at the school, because the International Baccalaureate maths exam was known to be at a level that was lower than our school's highest maths level, but higher than the second level down, and I wanted the IB exams to be comparably comfortable. I really wasn't good enough for that level of maths and used to fail every exam (but because all four levels of maths were graded on a curve, my overall grade would scale up to about a low B), and there was nothing I could do to fix this — tutoring, spending every afternoon doing huge amounts of maths homework, etc had no effect. I still think it was the right decision, but it was incredibly exhausting at the time.
One thing that stood me in really good stead throughout my entire childhood (and onward into tertiary education) was that I had a really good sense of exactly how much work and effort on my part was required to get the desired outcome (specific grade, authority figures thinking well of me, and my mother not worrying and hassling me about studying/exams/grades/etc), and this proved correct in almost every single context. People always thought I was very studious and hardworking (and I did spend a lot of time studying, practicing piano, doing gymnastics training and so on), but what they never understood that this was born of a fundamental laziness on my part: I wanted good outcomes and no pressure or conflict with authority figures, I figured out what to do to achieve that, and then I just did it.
Test-taking came easily to you.
Yes, apart from the aforementioned highest-level maths exams in my college years — although I was correct, and the IB maths exam was easy in comparison.
In test taking, I was helped by my ability to memorise and regurgitate a lot of information. I used to walk around the room reciting things and using mnemonics to fix information in my mind — I can still remember that I memorised the entire IB Biology textbook the day before the exam, and then just sort of poured the memories out of myself like water streaming from a jug, into the exam paper. I was also really good at writing essays on humanities/social sciences subjects in exam conditions.
The memorisation thing was obviously not genuine learning and knowledge, but it served the specific purpose (obtaining a particular grade) extremely well. I was still making use of this technique right into postgraduate studies when I had to translate set texts in medieval languages in my MPhil exams — the lecturers specifically warned us that they'd be able to tell if you just memorised the set texts, but on the basis of the grade I got ... not really.
You seldom faced difficulty understanding assignments.
Never, and my mum always expected me to look over the assignment, ensure I understood it, and ask the teacher to clarify things if I didn't understand.
You read at grade level or above.
Yes, although it took me a little to get the hang of things. I could recognise and write individual letters of the alphabet in preschool, but it took me a few months in the first year of primary school before it really clicked. I can still remember the exact moment, when I was trying to read my school reader (those books assigned to kids to teach them to read, with lots of rhyming and repetition of phrases) to my mum and suddenly realised that I'd made the connection between runs of letters, and sounds, and whole words. It felt like magic!
Your mathematics skills were at grade level or above.
Yes, but I had a distorted sense of this in the final two years of secondary school for the reasons I outlined above. My entire social group was studious and nerdy, and tended to equate 'being clever and studious' with 'being really good at maths' (for context, for example, my closest friend was the daughter of two parents with PhDs in maths, she went on to get a PhD in maths and married a guy with a PhD in maths), and this really messed with my head at the time in a way that I only properly registered much later.
Adults responsible for your care supported your academic journey for the better and for the worse.
Yes, although I mostly mean my mum here. My dad was a really neglectful parent — he didn't hinder my learning or academic journey in any way, he just kind of wasn't there.
The family/cultural attitude towards education – and also the attitude of your peers.
I think it's pretty obvious from my other answers to the above. Education was incredibly valued in all my social circles growing up. It was perceived as crucial for social mobility, and both in my family, among my parents' friends, and among the families of most of my school friends, doing well academically was considered of utmost importance, and the expectation was that their children would go on to university and careers that required a tertiary education. I would also say that, unintentionally (due to class and cultural blind spots) non-academic skills, and working in sectors that did not require university education were devalued and looked down on. My mum would try to instill horror in me at doing things that she said would cause people to think I was 'badly educated' (holding pens and pencils the 'wrong' way, talking with a rising inflection or using 'like' as a filler word), with the implication that to be perceived as such was the worst thing in the world.
Intellectual activities outside of school and family were available and facilitiated.
Yes, I had piano lessons and music theory lessons from the age of 12-18, sister #1 did various types of musical lessons (piano, violin, trumpet and French horn), we went to art and music day camps during school holidays.
Working above grade level was encouraged when possible and the resources were available to do this.
There weren't any formal opportunities for this, so I don't really know what this would look like. The closest thing I can think of is that my reading material wasn't monitored in any way, and I quite happily skipped between middle grade, YA, fiction and nonfiction aimed at adults, from about the age of nine onwards.
Wow, that took a really long time to fill in! I had a lot to say! On balance, my entire experience of education as a child was a very positive one, due to various privileges that are presumably obvious from my answers to all those questions. The fact that I had an excellent education at pretty well resourced public (state) schools in a country where the divide between public and private schooling has continued to grow in the intervening years shows that good state education can be done, if it's adequately resourced. It's also left me with a bit of a chippy lifelong belief that (outside of disabilities that public schools are not resourced to support, and a small handful of other cases) private education shouldn't exist, and if it has to exist, it should be very rare.
[This took me three hours to write so I'm not going back in and editing all the typos.]
Before I launch into my answers, I think providing some context is helpful.
I'm Australian, and was in primary and secondary education during the 1990s and early 2000s. In Australia, education policy is set at state/territory rather than national level, so there is variation between individual states. In Canberra, where I grew up, preschool (aged 4) was optional but for the most part pretty much all children attend. Primary school was seven years (kindergarten-Year 6, children aged roughly 5-11 years), high school was four years (Year 7-Year 10, children aged roughly 12-15), and college was two years in a separate school (Year 11-Year 12, aged roughly 16-17 with the majority of students turning 18 during the final half of Year 12). Private schools tended to put all secondary education (Years 7-12) in one school, but public (state) schools split up high schools and colleges.
In some other states in Australia, there are selective public high schools where prospective students have to take an exam and score highly in order to attend; in Canberra these didn't exist, but in my high school maths was 'streamed' into three levels, science into two levels, and English into two levels (I was in the highest level for all these subjects) for each year group, and in my college maths was streamed into four levels (I was in the highest one). In my high school, English, maths, science, a second language, and PE were compulsory from years 7-10, and other subjects were optional electives. In college, the only compulsory subject was English, but in practice most people treated maths as compulsory as well because not having studied maths to year 12 level severely limited options in terms of future university studies. My college was unique to Canberran public schools in that it offered the International Baccalaureate in parallel with the state-level 'Year 12 Certificate' (if you are from Canberra, this basically tells you which college I went to); I did the IB and this a) restricted the subjects I could study, and b) gave me two 'University Admissions Index' (UAI) scores (one through the IB, and one through the state-level assessment) and I was allowed to pick the better of the two when applying to university. Because of the IB and because of the demographics of the students who attended my college (very middle class, and very multicultural with a high proportion of diplomats' kids and immigrants/the children of recent immigrants from families that placed a huge emphasis on education), it had a reputation for being the most academically rigorous in Canberra, and repeatedly got the best UAI scores across various measures in the whole territory.
I'm the oldest of five sisters. My next sister down (who has both the same parents) went to the same public primary school as me, then two years at a co-ed Anglican private high school, and then the final four years of secondary school at one of the most expensive private girls' schools in Australia when she, Mum and I moved to Sydney. The other three sisters (same father, different mother; these sisters range in age from 17 to 29 years younger than me) have attended/are attending a mixture of Catholic primary schools, the hippie-ish John Marsden private primary school, and another of the most expensive private girls' schools in Australia. So I guess between us all I have a good understanding of quite a broad spectrum of Australian educational institutions.
I think knowing this is helpful before I give my answers to the questions, because so much of our educational experience is context-specific — country, class, immigration status of one's family/whether one's family is of the majority culture, and obviously specific family dynamics as well.
Now, on to the questions!
Adults responsible for your care actively helped facilitate your early learning. (Reading at bedtime, playing educational games, going to child-friendly museums...)
Absolutely! My mum read four picture books to me and my sister every night; at some point this morphed into reading portions of middle grade or YA novels, and at some point this morphed into each of us taking turns to read aloud to each other from whatever the selected novel was. She also used to create spelling/grammar or maths worksheets for us to complete (when I was aged about 5-6), and I remember her making a massive analogue clock out of cardboard, with big cardboard hands that could move, and she spent a few hours using this to teach me how to tell the time with analogue clocks, when I was aged four or so. We went regularly to Questacon and the National Gallery of Australia (so regularly in this latter case that I can still visualise perfectly the layout and artworks in the permanent collections and the sculpture garden, and feel the sensation and smell of the squashy black vinyl armchairs they used to have in their restaurant), and to the theatre and concerts. My mum worked in local radio for almost the entire fifteen years we were in Canberra, and she was given two free press tickets to every performance of the Bell Shakespeare company, and she used to buy one extra ticket and take me and sister #1 to every perfomance (there were two a year, usually one tragedy or history play, and one comedy). Her press tickets used to get us into the cast/crew afterparty after the opening night performance, and the father of one of my friends from gymnastics (who worked as a public servant at the then-Department of Communications and the Arts) also used to get free tickets, so my sister, friend and I used to roam around the afterparties, swiping canapés and getting the shows' casts to sign our programs.
I grew up in a milieu in which physical education — giving children the tools to move with energy and confidence through their physical world — was also considered an important part of childhood education, and my family definitely facilitated this as well: we went bushwalking regularly with other families in nearby national parks, we were taught to swim and be confident in the water (including in rough surf at any familiar or unfamiliar beach), and were taken regularly to playgrounds, and on cycling trips around the big lake in the centre of Canberra.
You had a library card.
Yes. I had a card for my local public library since the age of three, and at all my school libraries. The latter was essential in high school and college as pupils there did not buy textbooks or set texts for English class — we borrowed them each term or semester from the school library.
Our public library had children's reading group activities on Saturdays and my mum took sister #1 and me to these events every week until I was aged 8 or so. The librarians remembered me for the rest of my life — even after I returned to Canberra aged 22 after four years away in Sydney, and went in to get a new library card, the librarian knew who I was and remembered me as one of the children from her reading group 15 years earlier.
Adults in your life involved you in tasks that involved mathematics skills.
I cooked a lot with my mum, and a bit with my dad (not because he cooked less than Mum, but just that in general he was kind of an absent parent), and baked sometimes with my maternal grandmother, but I didn't really clock at the time that these activities involved maths. My parents cooked by eyeballing and memory, so there wasn't much formal measuring involved.
If you started falling behind in school, you received help from a private tutor.
My mum paid for me to do Kumon for maths from age 9 (when she realised I couldn't understand conceptually how to do long division) until age 15 (after which point the kind of maths I was doing in school became more conceptual and abstract and therefore made the Kumon method — which relies on drilling and repetition of maths problems with an emphasis on speed and accuracy — completely useless). She paid for a private maths tutor for me for the duration of college. She also paid for me to have phonics/spelling tutoring for about three months, but I read and wrote so much that I essentially picked up the rules of English phonics and spelling by osmosis, so this was less due to falling behind and more to do with her ideological opposition to the way we were taught spelling at school.
You went to a well-funded school.
I went to incredibly well resourced public (state) schools. The facilities, equipment, and (with some notable exceptions) teaching were all excellent, although nothing in comparison to the absolutely insanely resourced private schools my sisters attended.
You typically attended school adequately clothed and fed.
Yes.
Adults responsible for your care were able to help you make decisions when it came time to pursue higher education.
Yes. Both my parents had attended university (the first in their families to do so), and it was the norm in all my social circles (most of the adults in my life were university educated, and most of my friends' parents had university degrees), so it was essentially something I'd grown up expecting to do. My mum helped guide my choices in terms of subjects studied in secondary school in order to ensure I would have lots of options when it came to university, and I can remember lots of conversations about my potential future, and what sorts of university options would help me move towards my intended careers. My mother was very firmly of the opinion that being good and comfortable writing in a variety of contexts, plus attending university on any course that was interesting to me (but that would give me as many opportunities as possible to hone and develop my writing skills) was the surest path to career security in adulthood ('as long as you're able to write, you can do anything' is a sentiment I remember hearing her express repeatedly), and while she wasn't fully able to anticipate the world we live in now, I would say in general that this advice stood me in good stead.
If you were disabled and/or neurodivergent, you were classified by your school and received support through the education system.
This isn't applicable to me, but I would say in general that disabled and neurodivergent students were really failed in my schools. There was one boy in my primary school who had Down syndrome (a year older than sister #1) who was educated alongside his nondisabled peers, but I don't know what happened to him after primary school. There were definitely a several kids in my grade who had undiagnosed ADHD or dyslexia, and I can remember them being essentially treated as having disciplinary problems or being 'stupid'. The school was also really bad at handling behavioural problems that stemmed from kids' trauma or bad home life.
You generally felt physically and emotionally safe at school.
Mostly yes. I was physically and psychologically bullied aged 8-9, and then aged 11 in primary school (the gap between those years was because I moved into a different — non-bullying — friendship group, but that group fell apart when one of the girls moved back to East Timor and I went back to the bullying group of friends), and aged 13-14 my highschool friendship group kind of didn't know how to maturely handle the fact that the other three girls and I no longer had much in common, and the other girls chose to deal with this by basically excluding me. But because I had such solid friendship groups outside school (at gymnastics classes, Kumon tutoring, musical theory classes, among my extended family and family friends), and, aged 13-14, also a good group of other friends with whom I spent most of my time in classes, I had so many other avenues in which I felt safe, respected and appreciated that the difficulties at school shrank in significance. I still feel incredibly bitter that the girl who was the worst physical bully went on to become a primary school teacher, though.
You were in relatively good physical and mental health.
The above stuff did take its toll mentally, but only to a small extent. On the physical side, I was in incredible health — full of energy, unbelievably strong, and with incredible stamina. 12 hours a week of gymnastics training will do that to you! (As an illustrative example, I used to be able to climb up and down a rope, using only my arms, with my legs held straight out in a straddle position, with 3kg weights tied to each ankle, and I found it easy.) I was just in generally a very athletic and physically active child — sister #1 and I spent most of our free time climbing trees, running around the garden, dancing in the living room, swimming for hours in the pool or at the beach, and so on. I had lots of energy and loved moving.
For the most part, you were able to study and complete assignments without any struggle.
Yes, apart from maths in the final two years of secondary school. I had made the strategic decision (with the support of my mum and teachers) to put myself in the highest of the four 'streams' of maths at the school, because the International Baccalaureate maths exam was known to be at a level that was lower than our school's highest maths level, but higher than the second level down, and I wanted the IB exams to be comparably comfortable. I really wasn't good enough for that level of maths and used to fail every exam (but because all four levels of maths were graded on a curve, my overall grade would scale up to about a low B), and there was nothing I could do to fix this — tutoring, spending every afternoon doing huge amounts of maths homework, etc had no effect. I still think it was the right decision, but it was incredibly exhausting at the time.
One thing that stood me in really good stead throughout my entire childhood (and onward into tertiary education) was that I had a really good sense of exactly how much work and effort on my part was required to get the desired outcome (specific grade, authority figures thinking well of me, and my mother not worrying and hassling me about studying/exams/grades/etc), and this proved correct in almost every single context. People always thought I was very studious and hardworking (and I did spend a lot of time studying, practicing piano, doing gymnastics training and so on), but what they never understood that this was born of a fundamental laziness on my part: I wanted good outcomes and no pressure or conflict with authority figures, I figured out what to do to achieve that, and then I just did it.
Test-taking came easily to you.
Yes, apart from the aforementioned highest-level maths exams in my college years — although I was correct, and the IB maths exam was easy in comparison.
In test taking, I was helped by my ability to memorise and regurgitate a lot of information. I used to walk around the room reciting things and using mnemonics to fix information in my mind — I can still remember that I memorised the entire IB Biology textbook the day before the exam, and then just sort of poured the memories out of myself like water streaming from a jug, into the exam paper. I was also really good at writing essays on humanities/social sciences subjects in exam conditions.
The memorisation thing was obviously not genuine learning and knowledge, but it served the specific purpose (obtaining a particular grade) extremely well. I was still making use of this technique right into postgraduate studies when I had to translate set texts in medieval languages in my MPhil exams — the lecturers specifically warned us that they'd be able to tell if you just memorised the set texts, but on the basis of the grade I got ... not really.
You seldom faced difficulty understanding assignments.
Never, and my mum always expected me to look over the assignment, ensure I understood it, and ask the teacher to clarify things if I didn't understand.
You read at grade level or above.
Yes, although it took me a little to get the hang of things. I could recognise and write individual letters of the alphabet in preschool, but it took me a few months in the first year of primary school before it really clicked. I can still remember the exact moment, when I was trying to read my school reader (those books assigned to kids to teach them to read, with lots of rhyming and repetition of phrases) to my mum and suddenly realised that I'd made the connection between runs of letters, and sounds, and whole words. It felt like magic!
Your mathematics skills were at grade level or above.
Yes, but I had a distorted sense of this in the final two years of secondary school for the reasons I outlined above. My entire social group was studious and nerdy, and tended to equate 'being clever and studious' with 'being really good at maths' (for context, for example, my closest friend was the daughter of two parents with PhDs in maths, she went on to get a PhD in maths and married a guy with a PhD in maths), and this really messed with my head at the time in a way that I only properly registered much later.
Adults responsible for your care supported your academic journey for the better and for the worse.
Yes, although I mostly mean my mum here. My dad was a really neglectful parent — he didn't hinder my learning or academic journey in any way, he just kind of wasn't there.
The family/cultural attitude towards education – and also the attitude of your peers.
I think it's pretty obvious from my other answers to the above. Education was incredibly valued in all my social circles growing up. It was perceived as crucial for social mobility, and both in my family, among my parents' friends, and among the families of most of my school friends, doing well academically was considered of utmost importance, and the expectation was that their children would go on to university and careers that required a tertiary education. I would also say that, unintentionally (due to class and cultural blind spots) non-academic skills, and working in sectors that did not require university education were devalued and looked down on. My mum would try to instill horror in me at doing things that she said would cause people to think I was 'badly educated' (holding pens and pencils the 'wrong' way, talking with a rising inflection or using 'like' as a filler word), with the implication that to be perceived as such was the worst thing in the world.
Intellectual activities outside of school and family were available and facilitiated.
Yes, I had piano lessons and music theory lessons from the age of 12-18, sister #1 did various types of musical lessons (piano, violin, trumpet and French horn), we went to art and music day camps during school holidays.
Working above grade level was encouraged when possible and the resources were available to do this.
There weren't any formal opportunities for this, so I don't really know what this would look like. The closest thing I can think of is that my reading material wasn't monitored in any way, and I quite happily skipped between middle grade, YA, fiction and nonfiction aimed at adults, from about the age of nine onwards.
Wow, that took a really long time to fill in! I had a lot to say! On balance, my entire experience of education as a child was a very positive one, due to various privileges that are presumably obvious from my answers to all those questions. The fact that I had an excellent education at pretty well resourced public (state) schools in a country where the divide between public and private schooling has continued to grow in the intervening years shows that good state education can be done, if it's adequately resourced. It's also left me with a bit of a chippy lifelong belief that (outside of disabilities that public schools are not resourced to support, and a small handful of other cases) private education shouldn't exist, and if it has to exist, it should be very rare.