Ah, memories. My 7th grade life science class schedule involved watching The Crocodile Hunter for the first half of class, and then doing graded word-searches the second half. That prepared me to take "honors" level biology in 8th and 9th grade where the teacher would talk about his memories of watching world war 2 news reels as a teenager. In highschool, I took a lot of AP level courses which are set by some nation-wide group, and I think that really helped me.

Of course I could also talk about the writing education (follow a very algorithmic method to write, grading is based on the number of misspelled words/grammar mistakes), the math education (I couldn't take any math in my senior year because the state standards don't require 12th graders to take any math), reading education (when I was 15, we sat around and listened to audiobooks during class), and sex ed (if you ever have sex with someone that has ever had sex with someone else, you will get an std - which is both incurable and 100% fatal.)

In spite of this, I've recently been offered interviews for PhD biology programs at two colleges (both ranked in the 5-10th range), so the story of my education seems like it'll have a happy ending. It's just unfortunate that grade school wound up playing the role of the villain.