At breakfast yesterday, I ended up detailing my long educational history for a new friend. It’s a rather unorthodox one, although I had ever really thought about it that way before.

• Age 2 — Montessori
• Age 3 — recovering from spinal meningitis. Daily physical and speech therapy.
• Ages 4 and 5 — public school for learning-disabled children, which is where the state felt a deaf child belonged if she wasn’t over at the Deaf School.
• Kindergarten through Second Grades — regular public school, advanced track. I did my reading with the next-higher grade every day and then went to speech therapy several times per week.
• Third Grade — skipped.
• Fourth and Fifth Grades — Exclusive, private, college-prep school. I went to remedial math every day.
• Sixth through Eleventh Grades — Unaccredited, private, Southern Baptist school. Everything we did in Sixth grade was a repeat of what I had already done in Fifth at the other school. I was bored out of my mind and immediately campaigned to skip another grade. Request denied. I campaigned to home-school myself. Request denied on the grounds that I was already antisocial enough. (This was a reasonable response.) Then I applied to a state university for early admission, got in, and dropped out of high school after eleventh grade.
• Ages 16 through 18 — Full-time college student, part time pizza slinger.
• 19 through 21 — Autodidact and full-time shipping queen. No regrets about these years, because I read whatever I wanted to read about whatever I was interested in. I learned a tremendous amount during this period by reading copious amounts of nonfiction books and trashy magazines.
• 22 through 26 — Back to mid-level state university, double-majored in English and Technical Communication. Learned some but not enough, because I was working full-time while going to school full-time. If you can possibly avoid working while in college, you should do so.
• 26 through 28 — Master’s at same state university. Graduate Assistant and Instructor.
• 28 through now — PhD work in highly ranked program at Big 10 U. Seeing if I can make it.

Until I made this list, it also hadn’t occurred to me that I’ve been in school for approximately 25 of my nearly-30 years. Hmmm.