Read over this:
While I don’t agree with everything he says, I am surpirsed how much this essay rings true to my life in school, and I found it very interesting. What do you think?
School always felt like a prison to me contrary to the popular myth that your school years are the best years of your life. What a joke. I couldn’t wait to leave school. Thankfully I escaped it with my sanity more or less intact. I wasn’t what you’d define as a “nerd” in high school though; I was more like a ghost towards the end.
I’m sure that most of the older members here have much more pleasant memories of high school/secondary school.
Yeah, I’ve never understood that idea either: it must depend on what you do after you leave school. I can relate to the guy’s point about schools teaching kids a load of completely useless information, too: I remember learning strings of facts one night for an exam the next day, only to forget them completely within a week because they just weren’t relevant to anything else. The real purpose of that knowledge was to enable someone to pass the tests: the academic system was a game, really. A very boring one.
I can relate to that. It’s interesting that some people say your school days are the best time of your life, because now that I’ve left school and studying what I’m interested in, I’m enjoying myself a whole lot more.
I think it really depends what you’re doing. School is a very systematic place, yet I suppose a lot of jobs can be like that too. The people who say that their school days were the best times of their lives are often the people who are stuck in jobs they don’t really enjoy, and unlike in school, they have to continue doing them. The idea is to aim to get a job that you’ll enjoy; at least, that is what I’m aiming for.
Well, even if you don’t land a job that you enjoy, at least something that you can tolerate (and doesn’t require lots of overtime, preferrably). Because with money, you can use your free time to really do the things you want to do.
I see my time in school as nothing more than a stepping stone. It had it’s ups and downs… I enjoyed my time with the friends I met and a lot of the new experiences that I had, but it wasn’t necessarily a great and fun time. It’s what it is… and what you make of it.
I guess that mostly comes from my attitude that I try to live my life without too much regret and try not to hold onto anything that I feel would hold me back. It’s unnecessary baggage.
i bet they gave you an atomic wedgie and then a swirly! 
i didn’t read it all, but i was with it as far as i got. i personally didn’t really do highschool… aside from the classes i wanted to take. mainly computer classes, mythology, creative writing, etc. i just can’t tolerate tedium, especially when it’s a waste of my time. i, admittedly unlike most, knew what i wanted to do in life already. my counselors were really out of touch with reality… they had an almost religious zeal about the school system. despite all the undeniable problems i confronted them with and my school district continually being rated one of the worst in the nation : /
i refused to be shaped by their cookie cutter. needless to say i didn’t graduate. 
[quote=“Lance Way”]
Yeah, I’ve never understood that idea either: it must depend on what you do after you leave school.[/quote]
The people who believe in that myth must’ve felt like they had more freedom during their school years even if they were told what to do all the time. Perhaps because they were free from all the burdens of real life responsibilities.
Now that I’m the one in control of my life I don’t feel any nostalgia for the years I spent in school because I hated every moment of it. Surviving all the horrors that school had to offer was by no means an easy task. >:)
I don’t necessarily detest my years in school, but it doesn’t mean that I had it easy, persay. You shouldn’t make assumptions and generalizations like that.
Heck, not only was I in 3-4 AP classes at any given point, I was the head of our drama department, taught karate 20 hours a week, and worked at Disneyland on the weekends and during vacations so I could buy a computer/food/etc.
And when I got to college, I paid my own way through.
So, it’s not like I had “tons of freedom” and whatnot, but rather, I knew I had to put my time in just like everyone else, and I made the best of it. If someone had beef with me or thought low of me, I either ignored them, or found a way to change their mind.
Just because you go through the school system doesn’t mean you have to become a “cookie cutter” kind of person.
that’s true, i wrote that when i was very tired and forgot to say something.
it seemed to me like there were 3 types (in this sense) of highschool students. those who did exceedingly well, those who did not, and those who just followed the formula and didn’t make any bumps.
you sound like you did exceedingly well, surely not without effort. i did not do very well but i am currently paying my way through college, so hopefully i won’t end up pumping gas. in my senior year i was diagnosed with ADD, which explained a lot about me. my counselors and teachers all wanted me to come back next year saying that they would figure something out for me but i had had enough of their BS. the woman that tested me for ADD basically got to learn my life story going back to kindergarten. i had always been an insanely creative child; while others had been competing to do the same idea better, i was inventing my own. from age 2-4, just old enough to speak, i had obsessed over the philosophical question of “why do things have to die?”. i honestly asked my mom that question at age two. i wrote novel-legnth sagas in 4th and 5th grade using none of the cliches that the other kids did in their 4 page stories. this behavior continued on all the way through highschool. in all of my classes that enabled creative expression, i would typically knock my teacher’s socks off with what i did. after she had collected all this data on me and had diagnosed me with ADD, she fully supported me dropping out of highschool- much to my counselor’s dismay. she told me that this system was not for me and that she wished that she could have found me earlier and gotten me out of it.
she wrote this article: painterskeys.com/clickbacks/aadd.htm after dealing with me.
i can’t remember what i was getting at exactly… i think that what i meant to say was that you didn’t constrain to the cookie cutter either. the ones that do exceedingly well are misfits just as much as those who don’t do it at all. perhaps they are just misfits without ADD 
It sounds like you did very well, and made extremely good use of your time and abilities. I just hope you had time to enjoy yourself while doing all that stuff too! 
For me, although I passed most of my subjects at school, I didn’t enjoy a lot of them, and towards the end I was bored out of my mind. So my aim is to (ultimately) get a job doing something that I at least partially enjoy, otherwise there’s really little point, especially if you’re spending 40 hours a week doing it.
Hm… I don’t know if I did exceedingly well. I nearly failed Calculus (got a D), but got a 4 on the AP test, which pissed off my Calc teacher He was determined to fail me, but had to give me credit for doing decently on the test.
I dunno… I struggled, primarily through my junior year, and struggled throughout my first 2 years of college. College nearly broke me, but you’ve gotta make lemonade with what you’ve got.
I have friends whose memories of high school and stuff are much more bitter than mine, which I find interesting… considering we went through it pretty much side by side. Of course, there are many, many people who had horrible experiences of the likes that I could not imagine in school. But, for the rest, it’s possible that it’s just a matter of how you view life.
Hey. Don’t burst my bubble. :\
Well, I don’t like school as far as following all the systematic crap, yeah. But I think I’m enjoying my current life and friends and etc. pretty well.
Although… I could only be saying this because a) it’s summer, b) I haven’t officially entered high school yet, and c) I haven’t experienced this whole ‘real life’ thingy.
feels small and insignificant D:
Well then you’ll be pleased to know that it gets even better (from my experience)
Yeah, very true. I know some of my friends were perfectly happy at school, whereas some of my other mates couldn’t stand the place and were constantly wagging classes. What one man finds boring, another can find completely fasinating I suppose. Also, my first two years at high school (well, it’s actually called ‘college’ here, and goes from approximately ages 13 - 17) weren’t the best, so that definately affected my attitude towards the place and the concept of school in general.
School has been a pain in the butt at times, but I don’t regret it. I’d recommend it to anyone as a good experience. It’s just I think I would have gotten more out of school if it provided more options. High school was very rote. I took a bunch of AP classes, all the honor stuff intended to get me into a good college, and I did all the extracirricular stuff too (varsity track, school plays, academic competitions, etc). I wouldn’t call those the best years of my life, but I figure I learned something from them and I have no interest in changing anything. Nothing was a waste.
College was better, but I think they should do away with general education requirements. If GEs were eliminated from my college’s cirriculum I still would have had no trouble filling my schedule with classes. There were a lot of interesting subjects I passed up just because I didn’t have the room. I believe people get more out of learning when they’re stimulated by the subject and especially at the college level a student should have the freedom to learn whatever they want. I probably spent more energy debating on some message boards back during my college days than I did on writing some of my papers just because I really didn’t care about what I had to write. But if I did care I didn’t mind doing the work because I found it interesting. I probably would’ve been some crazy biology/linguistics/Asian history/writing student if my GEs had been eliminated.
By the way, Abadd’s Calculus AP note reminds me of my own AP experience. As further proof you don’t need to get a good grade in a subject to do well on the AP, I was constantly on the verge of being booted out of the English honors track all throughout high school and yet I scored a 5 on the English AP test. I so wanted my teachers to eat it after acing the test.
For whatever reason, even though I consider language and writing one of my stronger suites, I never do well on standardized english tests. My english score on the SAT was significantly lower than my math score, and I got a 3 on English AP.
Perhaps it would have helped if I actually read all the books we were supposed to, though
In all seriousness, though, most of what you learn in high school is either useless, outdated, or sometimes flat out wrong (particularly with history). The curriculum is so screwed up at this point, it’s a joke. But, you have to start somewhere. It gives you a basic knowledge of various fields so that when (if) you do go to college, you don’t start out with a blank page and have to learn everything from scratch.
I disagree about GE in college, though. I think it’s absolutely necessary (at least, my experience at Cal taught me so). I relearned everything. I likened it to my experience when I reached black belt. My sensei sat me down and told me to forget everything that I had learned up until that point, and that he was going to re-teach it to me the right way. I felt like my eyes had been opened (even though I hated studying it :P)
This should be the official thread picture.
I was extremely unpopular in high school. I could go for well over a month without doing anything with other people outside of school and work. I plan on being more outgoing when I go to college in August to boost my popularity, at least a little.
I would reccomend school too, kind of like how I would reccomend that Native American ritual where people hang from metal hooks that go through their chest for several hours…
I didn’t do very well on the English portion of the SAT compared to my math score. I blame the multiple-choice tests. It seems that if I’m allowed to write an essay I tend to score better, which is funny because the essays were always what dragged my grades down in class.
The GEs at UC San Diego were rather… odd based on our five college/one university system. (I think San Diego and Santa Cruz are only two of the UC schools that divide colleges up by academic philosophy rather than major.) Depending on which college a student went to the GEs would vary and perhaps because I didn’t like GEs I gravitated to the college that had the least.
My particular college had the most flexible set of requirements of the five at UCSD. But it was so flexible that in a way it seemed silly to have them at all. With the exception of the critical writing class, which was specific to my college, all the other GEs were just regular classes to the rest of the school, so the professors didn’t necessarily teach the classes a rite of passage everybody had to go through. I’m not sure if it was necessarily bad or good, but instead of telling a student “you have these humanities classes to choose from” I would rather have been told “you have to take three humanities classes and they can be anything you want.”
I wound up enjoying two of the linguistics classes I took for my GEs, but I had to take a third that didn’t interest me just so I could meet the requirement for graduation. If I had more selection I would’ve been happy to take another linguistics class–just one more closely tailored to my interests.
Actually, Cal was set up the same way.
The thing that pissed me off the most was that despite majoring in Japanese Language and Literature, I still had to take an “International Studies” class. I guess Japan isn’t international enough o_O
So, I ended up taking Scandanavian Eskimo Folklore That was… interesting.
Dopefish: Popularity is a fickle thing. Once you’re out of high school, you’ll realize that it’s based on arbitrary things. I actually was surprised reading through that article because I came to many of the same conclusions as the writer after analyzing my experiences in school. It’s surprising how much people “change” once they get to college (actually, it’s more like people are finally allowed to be themselves without the pressures of an immature social structure). For instance, I was really good friends with the valedictorian of our class. Back in high school, she was very nerdy, preppy, etc. Not necessarily despised or anything, but not necessarily popular. However, when she got to college, she started opening up, partying a bit, but still maintained her grades. She really relaxed and became a much more rounded person.
Everyone gets a second chance in college. It’s all about maintaining an open mind. I overheard a few gangster types at the gym the other day that really made me smile. A guy walks in with his friend (heads shaved, tattoos all over, etc.) and they were talking about their time in school. One of them said, “I don’t care if someone’s a jock, a preppy, a nerd, whatever. I’ll introduce myself first. If they don’t reciprocate, that’s fine. They can take that stance. But, I treated them with respect by offering my name and a handshake. What they do with it is their own call.”
I think that mentality is awesome. No matter who you are, what your position in life, you should offer the same respect to everyone, unless they do something to disrespect you. There is no reason someone shouldn’t deserve your respect at first. If they don’t show you respect after that, it’s not your fault. No skin off your back. You did your part, they didn’t. And if that happens, they probably weren’t worth the effort anyway.
Scandanavian Eskimo Folklore? I’m not sure I’ve taken a class with half so wacky a title, though my fantasy literature class had to take the cake as one of my best electives since I got to read the Lord of the Rings and get credit at the same time. It’s the only class where I’ve been able to write a paper on the evolution of elves in popular fantasy literature.
I like the attitude of that guy in the gym. I wish more people were like that.