I've thought about your post and read other people's responses and I still don't know where I fit in. In some ways I was "fine" during school, bored, but I had friends. I do have some specific memories that stick with me and bother me. Like my K teacher who told the class that you couldn't subtract a larger number from a smaller number (and I was just thinking, duh, that means you have a negative number) or in 3rd grade how a teacher threatened to pull me out of the gifted program because I wasn't doing well on grammar worksheets (incidentally something that I hated, I was already missing class during that time due to algebra tutoring, and it didn't seem to affect my writing skills in general). I also remember being frustrated during elementary school that I had to wait to learn certain things or read certain books until I was older. But I also had some good teachers, or ones that I remember enjoying.
Once I moved on to middle school and high school they did more tracking so I was able to be almost entirely in honors/AP classes in high school. It wasn't always the perfect fit but I was the kind of kid that always pushed the system. For instance, I took some classes on the side as "independent studies" so I could fit in extra AP classes or more extracurriculars. I was always extremely busy but by my senior year I skipped enormous chunks of school due to boredom (but yet I always knew how to cover my tracks so I didn't get in trouble once!).
I chose to go to a smaller college that was free for me instead of a big university (very well recognized but I would've been paying off debt FOREVER!). It turned out to be a great move, though, because I was able to even create some new courses that I was interested in, study abroad multiple times, and really tailor my education to my needs instead of going by a set curriculum. Grad school was also good but I had to relearn a lot of study habits because once you took away the incentive of grads my motivation took a huge hit. I'm still recovering from that but I'll have to tell you later how that works out for me.
As a side note, though, I can see the effects of being forced into a lock-step curriculum with how much I tuned-out well into grad school. I was never an obviously gifted kid. I always knew how to get an A and then tune out (normally doing work either for another class or reading or working on stuff for my extracurriculars). I had had some teachers who were absolutely floored when I aced my AP tests because they never realized what I was capable of. In college I started getting better about talking in class but I still held back quite a bit (and tuned-out still).
All that being said, now that I have the experience as a parent I've decided that the whole system is flawed and am not looking to send DD to a traditional school at all. Right now we're looking at Montessori because I feel strongly about multi-age classrooms and child-led learning (granted, we have to see how well our local individual schools carry that out still...). I can also see how grades did a disservice to me (many times I was more focused on them than the process of learning). My parents advocated for me in that they did get me tested and put me in the gifted program but that was about it. Looking back I think I could've really benefited from a grad skip or at the very least more differentiation in math. What they DID get right was to always challenging me at home. However, they ALWAYS patiently answered my questions no matter how crazy (I remember some great talks we had about the beginning of the universe and capitalism vs. communism), although sometimes my questions were answered with new questions from them.
