Stick kids in an educational system where you only have to be “good enough”, and there’s no reward for going beyond that, in fact there’s no system, no challenge, no nothing for going beyond that. Now, assume that bar were set low. Whether it’s low or high is purely subjective of course. But if you spend 2/3 of the first 18 years of your life where your only goal is to be ‘good enough’, doing your best won’t come really natural. And when you run into less structured environments in life, your toolbox probably doesn’t fit.
Welcome to my life. Sadly, this pattern is still working out for me. B’s on the midsemester papers. B’s on the midsemester tests. It’s fucking grade inflation. I want a do-over on my life. I want sister dorothy gerlica (I only just now realized the potential pun value on that one) to shove her “wait for the rest of the class” attitude up her habit. I want mom and dad to support me getting a real goddamn education, including not deciding that “skipping a grade might stunt Stephen’s social life”. I want to have not internalized all these stupid “wait for it and good things will come” attitudes. Most especially that last one. The rest is incidental, and matters only as it leads into that.
Bitter, party of 1, your table is waiting.
Too late now, but I was thinking of UW Madison because they seemed to be less structured there, and it would have made me take more initiative, in theory. Hmmm. How to cultivate a habit of proactivity….
What makes you think UW-Madison is less structured? I got my degrees there, and I think the coursework and expectations were rigorous, and my professors almost always stuck to their syllabi. Sure, you weren’t required to go to class for the most part (performance classes, for obvious reasons, required attendance), but aren’t all universities like that? I found the grading systems between professors fairly uniform, as well, and generally unyielding.
It was more the particular department. Their public policy school is small, and not nearly so bureaucratized as the umn system’s pp school. Unfortunately, the umn school had the better concentration on what I wanted to be doing. Win some, lose some. That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I suppose. =)
Ah, I see. Because of the university’s breadth requirements, I took a lot of classes in a lot of different disciplines, but I never took any public policy courses. I didn’t even know they had their own department.
It’s very small, very new, and grad-student-only. Most of the courses they offer could probably be taken under a different department, stats, econ, political science, etc. There’s very little reason for anyone not pursuing the degree to know about it. =)
I actually had a cool English teacher in high school warn me about my first year in college. She was my favorite, but I still dismissed her advice. She even made a point of telling my parents that she though I should work for a year or two before college; that everything in high school came too easy and that she didn’t think I had the tools to thrive in a big university like UMN. Of course, she was absolutely correct. I slid through those intro courses with ease, and everything else was awful. I never learned to study in K-12, and it bit me in the ass when I suddenyl had a socail life, came out, and needed to study for the first time.
Would I do better now? If I were a fulltime student? Undoubtedly. Part time? No, work is too draining. Maybe I’ll be trying soon though. I’m at that point where I need to either commit to my career and start learning new skills, or find something new and start taking classes.
of course, skipping a grade only solves the problem for a very short period 🙂
Sure, but at least it would have taught me that the world responded to my actions rather than leaving me feeling like a product on an assembly line. (Finished 5th grade, pass him along to 6th).
I hear ya, bro.
In 7th grade, I was in a very progressive earth sciences course that had self-directed lessons. The teacher is there all hour to answer one-on-one questions, but you do your assignments in a sequence at your own pace. The secretary lady in the back office who handed out the assignments was furious with me for how fast I was going, and I was only 11 at the time so I took any sort of displeasure from an adult as a sign I was doing something wrong.
I skipped a grade, and really think it did a lot of harm. I felt very out of place all the way until CMU, because of the age, size, and maturity differences. It really hasn’t provided much benefit besides getting done with grade school a year earlier.
I slacked all the way through CMU, too. 😛
My social life was screwed long before the point where I could have skipped a grade and it didn’t get any better after I didn’t. Not to say it couldn’t have gone worse, but to do so would have involved some pretty serious disruptions (kids physically attacking me is about the only way it could have gotten worse). I was already out of place. Our situations may have been different. I viewed school as a prison, so every day I got closer to release was a mercy. Skipping a year would have been wonderful.
make that a table for 2
Interesting!!! I breezed through high school and my Latin teacher told me that I shouldn’t go to college. She’s one of 13 people in the world fluent in conversational ancient Latin. She told me that I lacked the discipline necessary for college. And she was right.
I hated college. I didn’t like the fact that if I didn’t go to class, no one forced me to. I didn’t like the fact that I had to read and understand textbooks, and then in class we’d go over material that only peripherally touched upon the reading. Nothing was explained. I wasn’t learning at all.
For me, high school was awesome. Every day going to class, learning in small bits and pieces, doing homework based on the current day’s lessons… that’s for me. Not this broad based loose goosey system. I know so many people who learned as much as they needed to know, took classes with easy professors, and skated through college. Why? All they wanted was the degree to help them get a job. Actually learning something wasn’t their goal.
Since leaving college after 1 year, I spent my time learning to use Microsoft Office and temping in businesses. I’m an Expert and Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and have some rocking Access skills. That’s what got me where I am today.
One of the things that high school didn’t do for me: make me passionate. I had no passion for pursuing any subject or career. And being on a computer playing video games probably overstimulated me… so classroom education was boring.
Re: make that a table for 2
Oh, I imagine there are few tables that would actually fit the entire crowd. =)
More a feeling than a fact. Of course, my subscribers signed on for a reason. Probably no few identify with my perspective, so it’s hardly shocking that I’d find a sympathetic ear here. =)