Wow. Your experiences are definitely worse - but I went through the system a decade later, which probably has something to do with it (and I know there's a fairly large regional variation in quality of public schools in the US: Alabama's are near the very bottom for the most part, but I was lucky to grow up in the home of the flagship university). From what other people have said in these comment threads, it looks like I was unusually lucky in terms of how much reading I was able to get away with! Your math experiences are really sad. And to me, at least, doing the same math you already know over is more boring than reading an old or below-level book, although God knows elementary reading classes are agonizing enough. But I wonder if your dad would have gotten results from demanding the school push you forward, or test you? My parents had to do that a few times, and I knew other children whose parents did even more over the years.