All that time and effort wasted and even
doing harm.  Extracting defeat from the
jaws of victory.<p>Pre-school &quot;academic&quot; <i>what</i>? I can&#x27;t
think of anything very significant
and non-trivial 
in <i>academics</i> before, say, the ninth
grade.  <i>Academics</i> can start to
get severe for some majors by, say,
the junior year of college, e.g., a
physics major may want to know
differential geometry and exterior
algebra.  The real challenge in
academics is research, if want to
take such a career direction.<p>Learn &quot;the days of the week&quot;?  Can&#x27;t
remember when I didn&#x27;t know those.
Maybe Mom or Dad went over them
say, several times over a period of
two weeks.<p>The alphabet?  There is a little
song for that.
Reading?  Somehow by the
second grade or so, I basically knew
how to read.  Arithmetic?  Learn
to add and subtract single digit
numbers and memorize 
the multiplication table, and then
apply those to the rest of arithmetic.<p>I have a friend who went to a terrible
school, and somewhere in the early 
grades got sick and was at home for
some days.  There his mother was
shocked to discover that he couldn&#x27;t
read.  So, in two weeks, she taught
him.  He was PBK at Suny and got his
Ph.D. in mathematics at Courant.<p>Here&#x27;s one:  Since we are awash in
computers, early on teach <i>touch
typing</i> -- that is, let the kids
learn where the a-z keys are.<p>K-12?  Let be mostly play.