Joshua Lawrence Rivetz

Bio: I was born July 2, 1972 in Panorama City, CA. I went to Andasol elementary school for kindergarten. There were two kindergarten classes, one for older kids and one for younger kids. I was in the one for younger kids. For some reason, they wanted to put one of the students from the younger kids class into the older kids class. So, they decided to give everybody in the younger kids class a test and put whoever scored the highest in the older kids class. That was me. In the older kids' class, I was a better reader than everyone else so they gave me my own personal TA. After kindergarten, they were going to bus me to Pacoima. So, my parents put me in private school, where I stayed through 4th grade. I returned to Andasol in 5th grade. In 5th grade, I fought wars, sang songs about bombing and got in trouble in class. Fighting wars meant calling people names for days.   Each person represented a country and the person's name calling ability determined the country's military power. I even had a ranking system. I used the DefCon system from the movie War Games to determine when to go to war. In 5th grade I was in a special class for gifted students that met once a week. In 6th grade, I continued fighting wars and getting in trouble in class. I got sent outside 5 times in one day in 6th grade, a class record that was never broken. I was in the special class in 6th grade too. In 6th grade I was obsessed with the firebombing of Dresden. I sang songs about it. In 5th and especially 6th grade I had influence on people. They acted like me and even shared my interests. When the teacher assigned country reports in 6th grade, she made a one person per country rule because she was afraid the whole class would do Germany if she didn't. I graduated from elementary school in 1984. After elementary school I went to junior high, high school and college. I've visited 27 countries.