Academic Freedom.

I started school in a one-room school house with nine grades but just six students. I was the entire kindergarten (called ‘primary’ in Iowa). The teacher would call us one by one to sit in the chair next to her desk. In my case, it was always a pleasant interlude. There was never a sense in my mind that she wanted me to do something. She would often mention something interesting and let it go at that. I spent most of my school time listening to her interacting with the other five students. I learned to read with pleasure and could add columns of numbers and do other arithmetic. I believe it was about that time I began to imagine patterns with numbers, but maybe that was later.