While I went to Parochial, Private and Public schools in two states, I was mostly unschooled at home and partially homeschooled by my mother in specific areas.
I wanted to write and my mother didn't want me typing by the peck method, so she told me I had to learn to type with all my fingers. So at the age of 6 she started using the think system with me. We'd do this before bed. She'd say a letter and I had to give the hand, row and finger position.
Then we'd try it with the hand, row and finger position and respond with what letter it was.
Once I learned that in a few weeks she had me on the typewriter with the standard Secretarial school typing book (aaa space sss space).
So I was touch typing by age 7 and working on my first book which got panned by the Parochial School art festival when I was 8 years old (It was about exploring outer space and they said it "didn't glorify God" -- as I recall didn't God make the Heavens and Earth, so exploring it is NOT some type of glorification?.... Oh, well, we ALL know about critics, don't we!...).
Anyway I had a minor interest in music and my mother had been a professional musician before going into computer work. So she taught me the essence of sheet music writing between ages 5-7.
In the Chicago Public Schools grade 4 on the first day in Music the teacher put musical notations up on the board and ask what this and that and the other was.
I raise my hand on one and proudly said, as my mother had taught me
G Clef
She said, LOUDLY...
WRONG!
The answer she wanted was Treble Clef.
Now, go look this one up in the Dictionary or Encyclopedia. It can be called either way.
There are G Clefs, F Clefs and C Clefs in wide use in classic music.
The point I'm making is in Public School with a Music Teacher possessing a BA Degree in Music and Teacher Credentails she said
G CLEF is WRONG!
This is a big problem with the education system. It's not what's correct or incorrect but WHAT THE TEACHER WANTS TO HEAR.
Anyway, 4th grade Public School in Chicago was the start of my distaste for organized schools systems.
Middle School in California, which was a lock down situation, with white lines you could not cross, swat paddles and a bully Vice Principal with a megaphone saying GET OFF THE WALL!
My saviors were Private Schooling in electronics at the age of 12 (tube electronics, when I watched Acme School of Stuff and the presenter said he learned electronics -- three times, I think I'm one of the few people to get the joke) and unschooling in audio, motion pictures (8mm film) and observational astronomy.
Got me my first publication in Sky and Telescope at the age of 16.
Since I got D's in Algebra 1 two times, I was placed in Study Hall major in high school and denied access to Chemistry, Physics and other advanced classes.
So I studied on my own at home. I bought books, borrowed books from the library. At one point I had the entire Barnes and Nobel College Abstract series.
I found myself getting into history, which used to bore me in school.
I found myself getting into math. I decided to study Astrology.
Another story. At my second job one of the guys we hung out with was studying to be a Math Teacher in public schools so I asked him "Explain a logarithm to me" and he told me:
"It would take to long to explain it."
I eventually summized he didn't know himself.
Einstein once said if you can't explain it so your grandmother understands it you're not explaining it correctly or don't know what you're talking about.
Unfortunately his book on Relativity gives me as much of a headache as Martin Buber's I and Thou...
Anyway, in Astrology to get planetary placements right from a Noon or Midnight ephemeris (something I was used to working with from astronomy) you had to use a Proportional Logarithm table.
This was my first glimmer at understanding what Logarithms were about.
There's a lot of math in Traditional Astrology. And you have to look at angles of aspects, which is geometry and trig.
A friend of mine from the Astronomy club, who got all A's in school, went to JC parttime while in 12th grade, found himself in UCLA in an Astronomy major.
He handed me his calculus book and defied me to solve a problem.
I read the chapter, which explained how to do it and I did the problem.
I got the number right, but the decimal place wrong.
He was flabbergasted. He couldn't believe I actually got the number right!
He got a D in that class, by the way.
I unschooled myself in Audio and Film work for years. I was experimenting with anamorphics, dual projects, double system wild sound using sync marks, past producting dubbed in sound and voices.
All the stuff Stanley Kubrick did in his first two features, I found out later in time...
I also unschooled myself in photography, especially astrophotography.
Back in Chicago when I got into it, my astromer buddy had a telescope with a camera that attached to it and we kept trying to get pictures of the moon and got nothing when we took our Tri X and Verichrome Pan to Walgreens.
When I got to California there was a photo shop near me and I used to get inside and tell them my problems and they suggested I might want to try processing my own film.
I bought a Yankee kit at the age of 14 for like $15 and it had tank, tray, Tri Chem pack, tongs, clips and a contact printer.
First roll I did yelded perfect pictures of the full moon.
I was astonished. Sharp. You can see Copernicus and the rays of Tycho.
But it was small.
Now, when I was 4 and 5 years old I used to play around with Stereo optigons (look that one up in your Funk and Wagnals), the mostly widely remembered of which is the GAF (I used to work for them) Viewmaster Viewer.
Now obsolete.
Well, I found out if you had a white wall and a flash light and put it at the back side ground glass you could PROJECT an image on the wall by moving the unit back and forth to get a focus.
This Earth shaking discovery of mine (second only to my house cat who used to show me how he discovered Gravity) went unnoticed by the Nobel Committe, but I remembered it at age 14 and used a magnifying glass, a shoe box, a toilet paper tube, some Scotch tape (must invest in that company one day) and I managed to project a much larger image of the moon from one side of the shoe box to the other.
I taped Velox paper and started making various exposures to light and I got an enlargement.
I got the moon to fill 3" of the 4x6 paper I was using.
When I took photo in Highschool some years later I did get to play with devices I would eventually sell, that were too costly for me.
XRay Timers, TimeoLights, GraLab Timers, Calumet View Cameras and Bessler Englargers.
I got an A of course, just like I got an A in 8th grade Typing 1 due to my homeschooling in typing and writing interests.
Anyway at age 19 I moved to 16mm work and started doing documentaries for teachers out of Cal State Northridge doing research on things like why people put there kids into Ballet classes and I'd film it for them.
I started doing my own short films.
I couldn't afford sync systems to I post dubed it.
I marked off my camera settings and ran tape on my Roberts recorder and tried to find a spot that gave me at least 30 seconds of close sync.
Then I'd shoot for a minute or so. Do another angle. Have enough coverage so I could re-sync the sound.
I worked with natural sounds.
I devised transitions, such as the coffee pot going from full to empty.
Without any experience in sync sound work I got a job producing a TV commercial for a local firm.
One day of shooting at their location with an Arri BL camera and a sound guy we brought in who had his own Nagra.
My still photo lights.
We rented the Arri, two battery packs, a Miller Head and wood Tripod with an Angenieux 20-200 zoom.
I already had an account at Foto Kem so we used it.
Then we edited for 2 days at the F&B Ceco center.
Saturday Morning at 8 am to Monday morning at 6AM
We got moved from a faulty Moviola to a Kem flat bed.
We did both the work print and negative conforming and came out with 2 30 second commercials that played all over for ages.
We got paid $2.5K for that one.
Then I got into multi-track recording with Teac and Dokkorder 4 track machines, then Tascam 8 tracks then Ampex 16 tracks then MCI 24 tracks.
I ended up getting trained and gaining experience from #1 hit artists and people putting music into Ghostbusters and 48 Hours.
I finally produced some albums and singles for an indepdent lable that got ASCAP current performance work.
This all came from my battery Japanese tape recorders at age 8 to a Silverton Tube stereo recorder at age 11 to my Roberts at age 19.
At 17 I started getting more into music and my mother homeschooled me on theory and harmony.
She taught me the number system and how to count
(1, 1 1/2, 2, 2 1/2, 3, 4, 4 1/2, 5, 5 1/2, 6, 6 1/2, 7, 8)
I quickly became an arranger able to change keys for singers on the spot.
I'd also figure out songs by ear from tapes and records.
I never did reach my mothers level or sheet reading 1 page ahead, in fact I don't read well at all, but I do write music notation very well.
I did one song, an original I produced for a band, as a sheet music and when I got into computer systems I plugged it into the Midi set up and found out I got 98% of it correct.
I was wrong on two rests.
They should have been dotted.
So I was 1/16th off in two places.
It's quite interesting to take a sheet notation you write with your ear and the piano or guitar, by hearing the song in your head and couting the beats for each note and rest and then you write it down.
Then you plug it into a MIDI computer system the way you wrote it and play it back and it's ALMOST perfect on first try.
Makes you feel good.
I homeschooled in computers. I'd walk into Radio Shack and there are these 10 year old on the TRS80 and I felt a little impotent.
With my earning from my first record I bought an Atari ST with a ton of software.
This was back in the days when a XT was $4,000
A hot computer, back then, had double sided 3" 1.2 MB floppy drives or a 20 MB hard drive and 1 MB RAM.
I taught myself BASIC, C and Modual2
I actually started with a Kaypro II and MBASIC and moved to the Atari and ST Basic.
I moved to the XT I got used at an auction for $150 with 640 KB RAM and dual sided 5" drives.
I moved to Quick Basic
I got a Compiler for my Atari
I got access to a Mac 68k and Mac BASIC and worked with that
I got an Amiga and worked with Amiga BASIC
One of the first programs I wrote was to figure all the aspects for Astrology work.
I would put in the positions and the Proportional Logarithm and it would do the math for me and give me an orb for each aspect.
Now remember I got Ds in Algebra in Middle School
Here I am doing geometry programming on a computer
I moved to Visual BASIC and designed data bases for libraries so users could down load their offerings and see what rental and sales prices were, what titles and important information was available.
I did this by extracting from that main data base I expanded from one created by a Software Developer who eventually went to work for Norton.
I took his basic dBase design and expanded it three times using Alpha 4 and then Alpha 5
I created invoices, order forms, forms for each items to show in, out and upcomings.
The data bases merged with each other.
A customer calls up and I call up the order form, import the customers shipping and billing info from past history or CREATE A NEW ONE of the fly.
Then I call in the items they want, find out which print is avaiable (we dealt with films) and earmarked it for them.
I moved them from a "tubs" file system using cards (much like Hopsitals used to use) to a virtual system that did the orders, marked the outs and ins, did the billing and did the UPS manifest.
I did their web site and downloadable items like that Data Base.
We used to teach college professors at that archive where I worked.
My boss was one of the FOREMOSTS experts in Cinema History, Animation History, Music Film History (he was a jazz buff and a jazz musician, so we got along well), History of Color, History of Sound on Film.
Our clients included Leonard Maltin, DAvid Shepard, Kevin Brownlow, Pauleen Kael, Tony Slide, Hugh Hefner, Entertainment Tonight, ABC News, Donald Crafton, Gerald Mast, Bruce Kawin (go look them all up -- Google them), Douglas Trumbull, Lucas Film - THX, Warners, Fox, Epic Records, Dick Scott and every major film school and univeristy in America. We worked on the AFI special projects which yelded their compendiums on films from 1895 to the 1950s, we had one of the largest collections of early women filmmakers, animation, Snader Telescriptions and Soundies.
20 years there turned me into one of the foremost experts in Cinema History.
I turned that into an article for Technical Photography.
Which all leads back to me at age 6 wanting to write an my mother homeschooling me in touch typing.
Today I am exploring Organic Chemistry with one of the foremost professors in the field on the INTERNET, free of charge.
I do this because I'm interested in it and was denied it by the school system because I got a D in Algebra 1 two times.
My working programming took me into LOG e (I have a cousin who is a math professor and I called him about Log e and he couldn't tell me much, despite the fact he wrote a book on the Slide Rule and taught math for 40 years).
Sine, Cosine.
My work in video also took me into Sine and Cosine.
TV is based on this concept.
That's how your analog broadcast signal works, from A/C line current SINE
I'd ask college graduates about SINE and COSINE and all they'd tell me is it's a ratio
I wanted to know about HARMONY
They tell me that's advanced Masters material
I learned a little about it from the internet by exploring and looking at waves on boats on waves.
Why is this important, because in programming we use it to draw circles and arcs
Because SIN, COS, TAN are all part of programming.
They are TRIG functions
I wanted to know how they interact.
I used to go to three colleges to reasearch things. At one I found, by accident, a translations of an Astrology Book from 300 BC and I copied it. It was a Doctorial Dissertation. Found it quite interesting.
They used SQUARE star charts instead of round ones like we use today.
I was actually there researching women filmmakers for a book and found this one by accident.
So I segued
I'd be researching dozens of sources from six libraries and hear and undergraduate girl complaining
MY HISTORY PROFESSOR WANTS SEVEN REFERENCES!
I was on my 50th reference and couldn't help but laughing.
My article would only pay about $400 and I was going to many libraries and reading hundreds of books and photocpying 50 reference works.
She was complaining about seven for a class she was paying for!
Kids....
It's a shame youth is wasted on the young!