OMG at the "why are you learning just what the teachers tell you to learn" and the "learn above and beyond" because that is literally what my APs and particularly my anal-retentive control freak AD said to my brother and me ALL. THE. TIME growing up!
It wasn't just words, either. They even made us spend almost ALL of our weekends, school holidays/vacations and summer breaks doing math problems and other schoolwork that they would assign. They even got our teachers to give them our school textbooks & workbooks for the next year, ahead of time, so that we could use them to study from during our summer vacation.....................and that's IN ADDITION to making us ALSO take summer school all through middle school and high school (and I'm sure if summer school had been offered back then at the elementary level they would have forced us to attend that too -- and even still, all through elementary school they made us do something called GRASP which stands for Grand Rapids Academic Summer Program, and was basically a math and language arts/English correspondence course for kids in Kindergarten through 5th [or now, maybe 8th] grade)
Worse, it didn't even help us (or at least me!), academically much anyway. Because as it is, I had a LOT of trouble in school growing up, due to several issues (including autism/PDD-NOS [Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified], ADHD, and SPD [Sensory Processing Disorder] among others), that I struggle with, and ON TOP OF THAT, having little or no time to unwind/de-compress/relax and JUST BE A KID on any weekends, and on holidays or other school breaks just worsened those problems, and led to a situation akin to being totally "burned out" by the time the new school year rolled around. As a result, I'd either totally zone out OR read other non-school related books (such as novels like The Baby-Sitters Club series, the Sweet Valley High/Sweet Valley Twins/Sweet Valley Kids series, the Sunfire historical romances, the Ramona Quimby books by Beverly Cleary, stuff by Judy Blume, or other FUN reading) during class since I had very little freedom and enough free time to read them at home. I'd even HIDE my book in between the covers of whatever school book that I was supposed to be reading in class, to try to get away with it, though I rarely did!
Also another problem with reading fun books in class (aside from being caught by the teachers) is that, by using, or rather, HAVING TO USE, class time to read stuff that I should have had enough free time at home to read all I wanted, resulted in me missing out on important academic material that the teachers covered in class. But because I'd already been forced to study that stuff during the school breaks, I was too burned out and/or bored of it, to pay attention in class -- and yet, because most (or at least some) of the time, my parents hadn't really TAUGHT that material, but rather, would assign work from the textbooks, just expecting it to somehow be figured out, it was neither here nor there.
While my brother (who not only does NOT have the issues I do but was even in an enrichment program for the gifted in elementary school, among other stuff like that) was able to not only pick things up, learn and excel in school in spite of, or even BECAUSE of that, it had the opposite effect on me.
Because I didn't or wasn't able to learn that stuff at home, and was too burned out and/or bored of all of it, by the time that material was covered in school, I missed a LOT of important information necessary to pass quizzes, tests and exams, not to mention, was so sick of schoolwork that when I had homework I did it totally half-assed or outright just didn't do the assignments but pretended I did, whenever I could get away with it, without my parents noticing (though in retrospect it was pointless, because even if/when my teachers did not assign any homework, my APs would invariably assign their own, anyway!). Not surprisingly, my grades SUCKED, which just made my APs force me to spend EVEN MORE of the little free time I had, studying, not only making me more & more burned out on/in/about school, and on & on like a vicious circle/cycle, but also was a big contributing factor in driving me into self-injurious & suicidal depression, resulting in me spending most of my high school years either hospitalized, or kicked out of school after suicide attempts or self-injury (cutting myself) or just in a total dark fog -- and ultimately graduated high school (against my will, but that's another story!) with a 1.9 out of 4.0 GPA, and dropping out of college without any degree after trying on & off for 6 years.
Now I'm 44 and living on permanent disability since 2007, and my life has been totally ruined, almost all because of all the crap my APs, but in particular, my anal-retentive control-freak possibly narcissist AD!!!!