I think the entire public school system is outmoded and outdated.

I went to a well-funded, well-rated school system and easily 2/3rds of the time I spent in class from the time I was in kindergarten through high school was a complete waste. In one ear and out the other.

I found it miserable. My education was outside of school on my own time. Even the field I am in is a result of self-education, and as I learned to read from home, I can't even credit school with that.

I think algebra and basic geometry, were maybe the only things I learned in school which have been of any use.

We live in the information age, with massive amounts of information available to anyone who wants to take the time to read it - including analysis and criticism and forums where people discuss the stuff.

This idea of sitting in a classroom paced toward the average while slower students fall behind and faster students fall asleep and claw their faces off in boredom is something which needs to change. If school taught me one thing, it was how to space out and daydream for hours a day.

The concept of a "well-rounded education" is always tied up in this idea of compulsion: of forcing people to learn stuff they're going to learn just well enough to pass the tests, and probably forget an hour into the summer is a complete waste of time. I still can't remember shit about the endless civil war battle details we were forced to memorize, nor do I care (incidentally, the obsession with these details by bad history teachers resulted in not enough time in the curriculum to cover anything past WW1. I have never had even five minutes of classroom study of that conflict.)

When I think back on schooling, and I include my pointless undergrad degree, most of what I remember is boredom and clock-watching. And figuring out exactly what classes I needed to go to, and which ones I could skip.

I skipped a lot. Because as bad as grade school and high school were, I have never run into a more useless bunch than I ran into in college. Holy shit, these people are chair warmers.

I got an A in Shakespeare 350 at Rutgers, a required course for English majors, by never going to class. I skipped every single lecture but the first day and the test days, knowing little about Shakespeare and simply reading the plays, and got an A. After this, it became clear real fast that the difference between a person with a liberal arts degree and someone without was that one person could afford it and one couldn't.

This was extreme, but it is not the only time I just blew off the classroom experience entirely and did fine. I supplemented the material by reading from the mountains of criticisms and analysis crowding library stacks.

On one hand I do sort of feel for teachers. On the other hand, I can remember perhaps five out of several dozen I had over the years.

Great teachers are great. The rest of them are babysitters.

So, sick out all you like, Detroit Public School Teachers. The time lost by students will neither be missed, nor remembered, five years from now:

It flat-out doesn't matter.