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I was called a "motor mouth" in elementary school and I had many, many people fooled into thinking I was a scientific genius because I loved to use words like "molecular" and "atomic" -- and can we agree that "molecular" sounds much better? I was merely imitating the techno-babble said by "smart" people on television, which I watched far too. I didn't know I wasn't saying anything because I didn't know those "smart" people on TV weren't saying anything. Also, I was cute, so I was praised.
I guess it makes sense that I fell in with science fiction, the perfect place for someone who agrees with the scientific paradigm yet can't do the math to access its precision. Asimov, Clark, and Bradbury were still easy enough to find both at the library and used books stores -- and, wonder of wonders, with complete series in the case of Asimov's Foundation and Clark's 2001.
In middle school I dabbled in poetry, memorizing scraps of Longfellow and Whitman. Also in middle school through sophomore year I got into philosophy, first scraps of eastern, then western. It was always scraps at that age; only years later would I learn what depth is and why it is important.
This Junior and Senior year I did debate, not the best of places to learn depth, but somewhere to cash in a motor mouth for some medals and trophies. Also, it was nice to not be lonely.
Meanwhile, I suppose you could call my academic path "the humanities," mostly history, with interest in literature, especially when literature was willing to play with language. I took every English "exploratory" class offered at my high school. (I had avoided history "exploratories" because they were mostly joke classes taught by athletic coaches, or and/were "current events." Is it possible that even at that young age I knew that current events were too chaotic to really study and that events are best understood digested by some time? Perhaps, or perhaps I just got the word that those classes sucked. Still, I read and read and read for my AP history classes and scored well on the tests. Ironically, this meant that I ended up not taking a single college class for my favorite subject in high school.
When I realized that I would become a teacher, I choose English as because as I said "there is more history in English than English in history," and I find this especially true for interesting and mind blowing sociological content, though I do in fact love memorizing events and dates (more on that some other time, if I feel like it). Also, it really is true that in Oklahoma social studies is by and large a system of make work for sports coaches.
In college, I didn't read as much of the assigned literature as I now would have liked, instead reading a bunch of political philosophy as well as books on economics and science. It was the loneliest time of my life, and I read for comfort. But comfort for me is synthesizing ideas, not following simple plots. The best book I read in that time was Douglas Hofstandler's Godel, Esher, Bach. I was seeking realities and Truths. . . but that's is a different story than the one I'm telling. (I have no idea when or even if I will want to write a piece on my personal history as a seeker).
In my career teaching English "Language Arts" and debate, I found a place to live and play in language a large portion of my days. When you teach, you have such a great opportunity to learn. No, not from the kids, at least not all that much beyond trivia that will be dated in a couple of years [1], but from sharing your subject to those with a novice minds. Day after day I shared literature, some of it fitting for the age, some of it from the great masters, and in working to make bridges between the narratives and where my students were at, my own education moved forward bit by bit. Debate was a wasteland, for one because students, at least the ones most forcefully trying to use up my time, were always demanding the easiest way out. There were not seekers, and were disrespectful of seeking. They had no integrity and were disrespectful of integrity. Luckily, every year I taught debate I also had some English sections.
After I said good bye to all that, I caught up on literature, at least to my satisfaction. I would describe this time as finally, more or less comfortably, using my own voice. It is the type of play that most fits my location in life's journey. It is also the extension of all of the playing came before it.
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[1] You also can develop strong instincts for human nature by teaching. You can read people and their motivations, and figure out approximate baselines for what people know when they are unlearned in a subject. All of this comes from proximity with a large cross-section of the population, not directly from their views on topics.
