6.7% of US kids are home schooled now, and it increased 10% year over year from 2016-2021.
One can hope.
We’re homeschooling which paradoxically ends up with our kids thinking school is some magical place where everything is great and you get to hang out with friends all day.
Oh, yeah because students from other countries don’t have them at all…. Anxiety is just an American thing, /s
I went to an American high school and a former commie one (Albania), and I can tell you the American HS was a walk in the park in comparison to the one back home.
My take is that this is a pretty universal occurrence.
Modern American and public do no useful conceptual work in that sentence. It’s exactly as true without them.
On the other hand, many children are born into circumstances so bad school is a welcome relief. Warmth, regular food, some intellectual stimulation, people who don’t hit them, ever. It’s not what you’d want for your child but it beats what lots of children get at home.
I'm not American and didn't go to American public school but still had the same kind of dreams way out of school. And article author mentions his is about college. So yeah sorry this doesn't fit your narrative.
High school in particular was by far the most stressful sustained period of time in my life—I've had the odd day or week that might measure up, here and there, but never months in a row (at least you get Summers off). I've very quickly quit jobs that turned out to be a small fraction as stressful as high school was—they're vastly worse than a decent work environment, but still not as bad as high school. It's that bad. And I had a pretty easy high school experience! No intense bullying, no gang violence happening at/around school, none of that stuff.
9-10 hours a day of work (if you're doing all your homework, anyway), plus more if you actually want to be earning any money. Rushed minutes-long passing periods several times every single day. Having to ask to go take a shit if you didn't manage to fit that in to your few moments of semi-free time. About 6 hours per day comprising ~50-minute stretches that are about as draining as sitting in that many meetings of that length in a day (which is quite the fuck draining). Super-early mornings in most places, in the time of the life that's the very worst for that kind of thing, physiologically and psychologically. The sheer weirdness of spending almost all your time with a whole bunch of people about the same age as you.
The number of people you are around and interact with in a day, navigating their emotions and demeanors and all that, teachers and students and administrators, exceeds what I've ever seen at any job by a long shot. That you may at any moment be subject to behavior that would get someone arrested or at least fired from a job in the adult world, but you'll still have to be around the perpetrator for potentially years with no real way to leave yourself.
Immovable extremely short deadlines and unchangeable scope—hope you don't have the odd day where you just don't feel up to it, because the thing they assigned you today is due tomorrow, period. All your work literally thrown in the trash soon after you finish it. Near-zero tolerance for real life getting in the way of the work. Sick? LOL, no, there's not someone to take on a little extra work so you're not doubling up when you get back—it's all on you, have fun with the pile of inane tasks to complete while you still feel kinda shitty. Personal days? "Mental health" days? LOL no.
It's very, very bad. Strict rules and enforcement, weird and toxic social environment, tight and short deadlines completing assignments that serve no external purpose whatsoever covering things you don't care about (sure, that's kinda just how education has to be, at least to some extent, but that doesn't make it not-demoralizing).
I don't love the comparison to prison but it really is one of the closer analogs from the "real world", or maybe notoriously-bad careers/jobs (Amazon warehouses?) that employ people with few other options, though in my experience even most low-wage, low-skill jobs aren't anywhere near as bad as high school (but I've also not worked in the notoriously-bad ones).
My high school dreams (well, nightmares) finally mostly stopped... in my early 30s. Mostly. That's a hell of an effect. And again, my experience was surely in the top half, at least, as high school experiences go.
I enjoyed high school and college -- found them to be fun more than anything -- and I still have "I screwed up/didn't attend a whole class/have a crazy test in school" dreams.
I think it has more to do with school being the first place you have those pseudo-professional experiences of "Ahhhh! I blew it! I didn't work hard enough!" So your brain is like, "I think I have this one in the archive somewhere."
Yeah, I find the stress/bad memory theory unsatisfying -- high school was one of the happiest times of my life and I rarely found it stressful, but I still have not-infrequent nightmares of being back in (my or another) high school and having skipped classes or not knowing where to find classrooms or whatever. These dreams are generally not similar to any actual events I experienced in high school.
I sympathize with this take but as someone who was fortunate enough to attend private schools throughout my education let me just say, I also have stress dreams about school. I finished college 8 years ago.
It's hard wired evolved response to surviving life-threatening experiences, such as being attacked by a predator. The brain processes those experiences over and over to help avoid them in real life in the future.
We don't get attacked by predators anymore, but we have the same brains circuits as animals who did. So the process just plays out on whatever unpleasant life experience it can grab onto.
It's terrible that something that should have been wonderful was so painful for you. I've completed 11 years of post secondary spread pretty evenly over 30+ years of adulthood and loved it more and more as I've continued. Thinking about starting a PhD in year 50!
I occasionally feel the calling to go back to school for the sheer joy of learning and mastery. It’s an odd feeling though, because I always hated school, from elementary to undergrad.
I was pretty traumatized with parental expectations in school. Starting from high school, to college, to graduate school, I always had the same dream at the start of semesters - I'm incredibly late to the first class to the point I basically miss it. It has a cascading effect where in the dream, I basically feel doomed to be behind all semester. I've never had this dream outside of when I was a student, and that includes a very long hiatus in finishing college.
This is story is one of those things where you read it and the explanation is so obvious, but it never hit you until you see it written out.
This is quite real. I did EECS at Berkeley Engineering and I still have nightmares about not finishing something and this is close to 20 years later. I’m going to a BBQ next week with some of my classmates and I’m going going to ask them. A buddy went to West Point and he had similar nightmares. My guess is that it’s more prevalent in the very demanding and competitive STEM majors and probably architecture. I remember humanities classes as being a lot of work, nothing at Berkeley was easy, but manageable and nothing like the STEM load.
For my EE120 review session when we staggered in, the GSI consoled us saying if it meant anything, we’d done as much in one semester as he’d done in two and a half at his school and he was a Berkeley grad student which is insanely competitive to get into in its own right.
Funny, I did EECS at Berkeley nearly a decade ago and also still have the occasional nightmare about forgetting to finish something, but remembering at the last minute. Something something about evolution rewarding anxiety and neuroticism.
I used to have the exam nightmares, for years after graduation, but they were replaced by nightmares where I have a pen of livestock somewhere I've just totally forgotten to feed for like, a month.
For awhile after my daughter was born those were replaced by one where I had another infant I was supposed to be caring for that I had totally forgotten about, but thankfully, those didn't persist as she grew and my brain went back to the livestock version.
I did CS at University of Washington in the early 2000s and I still have nightmares about it. I loved the coursework itself, but the whole meta game of the program was pretty traumatizing.
They (along with some other STEM programs) used first and second year calculus and physics courses to select who they would admit. So you needed to be within some top percentile of the students in those courses at the end of your second year or else you would need to transfer schools or choose a different major.
On top of this, the course registration system was similar to trying to get a PS5 on launch day. If you didn’t get your courses registered without time conflicts within 5 minutes of opening well, better luck next quarter. And then if you didn’t get the course you needed this quarter then you were at risk of having to overload yourself the following quarter to get back on track.
One strategy to mitigate the registration crunch was to sign up for more courses than you actually intended to take. You had a grace period of I think a week during which you could drop a course with no consequence (and folks on the wait list could take your place). This mechanic is the source of my recurring nightmares. In my dreams, I forget to drop the extra course in my schedule, and I only realize it after the second midterm.
The UW was absolutely awful (Probably Legislature's fault) with the bait and switching on the education they offered. Some other state schools have similar problems.
Hey! I’m an incoming UW CS student and I would love to hear what you mean by that! I’ve already taken my calc physics and CS at community college so after reading your comment it sounds like I’m in for the worst of it.
Thank god CS is direct to major now (I think it started in 2019?) so there isn’t that second year thing now.
If you're already in the CS program then you've got a great head start. Even 20 years ago they had a way to be admitted out of high school, and for the folks who were eligible (I wasn't) and took advantage of that it was great for them.
I can give some tips I wish I had known when I started. No guarantees any of this stuff still applies since it's 20 year old info, but I suspect some of it may still be good ...
- Aim to spend 2 hours studying or doing coursework in the library / lab for every hour you're in the class. So if a class is 5 credits it will take you 15 hours a week, 3 in lecture, 2 in section, and 10 studying or in office hours.
- For upper level math or CS courses, these are often only 3 credits because there's no section, but you still need to spend at least 15 hours a week on them (so 4 hours of work for every hour of lecture)
- Put the study hours in your calendar and stick to them even if you don't feel like you need them. If that means you get work done before it's due, that's great, now you can take it to office hours with your TA or prof and get a free check on your work before you need to submit it to be graded.
- Buy a paper notebook for each course at the start of the quarter. Attend all of the lectures and sections and write everything down the instructor presents in writing and also anything they say that might be important. It doesn't matter that the prof posts slides, notes, recordings or whatever on the website, write the material down anyway by hand because it forces you to pay attention and it helps you internalize the information. Use the notebook as your first stop when you have questions doing your coursework or reviewing for tests.
- I've heard registering for courses is still tough. You get a freebie your first quarter as an incoming student, but 2-3 weeks before the second quarter start looking at the course guide and plan what you want to register for. Approach it like you're a coach preparing for the NFL draft. You need to put down the courses you must have, and the ones you'd like to have, and your contingencies if things don't go to plan. Also pay attention to the instructors, ask around for students who have taken the courses you're planning to to get feedback on who teaches well and grades well and who doesn't -- if the course you need isn't being taught by the instructor you want, you may want to try to take it a different quarter if you can.
- Make an appointment with an advisor to get advice on your course schedule. Since you're in the CS dept, you can make an appointment with their counselors.
- On course registration day, wake up early and do your best to get the courses you want with the best schedule you can. If you can't get a course you can try showing up on the first day anyway and get on the wait list or email your advisor and ask for help.
- Do NOT try to take too much in one quarter. Try to do no more than 2 hard and 1 medium or 2 hard and 2 easy courses. Nobody will stop you if you take 5 hard 3 credit math or CS classes (assuming you have the prereqs) because it's only 15 credits, but by my thinking that's 75 hours a week of work. It's unsustainable and sounds insane but you will almost surely meet or hear about people who try it. Don't be one of them.
- If you tested out of your foreign language reqs, great. Don't try to do more than you have to, unless you're really serious about the language and want to double major in it or something. I tested out of Spanish and I should have left it that, but I stupidly spent a year taking Japanese which I didn't need and just took up a lot of mental bandwidth. If you want to pick up another language, go to language school over a summer or something, don't spend your university time on it.
- Make friends. Leave your dorm room door open as much as you can if you live in the dorms. Hang out in the CS lab as much as you can.
>- Do NOT try to take too much in one quarter. Try to do no more than 2 hard and 1 medium or 2 hard and 2 easy courses. Nobody will stop you if you take 5 hard 3 credit math or CS classes (assuming you have the prereqs) because it's only 15 credits, but by my thinking that's 75 hours a week of work. It's unsustainable and sounds insane but you will almost surely meet or hear about people who try it. Don't be one of them.
>- Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
These things go together, and it's unfortunate that, no matter how much faculty advise students not to take on enormous course loads, so many of them insist on trying anyway. It's not just a matter of sustainability: you often won't learn as much as you would be able to learn by taking a few classes and being passionate about them. You simply won't have time. Good university courses are not situations where there is a fixed checklist of things to learn, or ceiling of perfection that you can spend a fixed amount of time reaching and then gain no more. As an undergraduate, the faculty at the physics department I was in would even give relatively easy research and independent study units to those of us they trusted would use the decreased number of courses (but same number of units) per term to think more about physics.
And yes, being known to the faculty as a promising undergraduate is useful. Their doors will be open for scholarly discussions and academic advice at a far more informal level. They can often give better, more specific advice on courses and plans, and can push administratively to make those plans possible. They can point you to topics and resources beyond your classes, and help you understand them. Departmental requirements that don't make sense for you individually can often be substituted or waived. And if you're interested in graduate school, research experience and strong faculty recommendations are all but required.
Getting this sort of reputation in a department usually involves going above and beyond in courses not by doing what is expected perfectly, but by doing things that aren't expected, and that takes passion and time (and choosing classes and professors where it is possible).
Wow thank you so much! I didn’t expect such a detailed response and I really appreciate it! Most of these still seem totally applicable so I’ll put them to good use. I didn’t realize classes were so hard to get in to (Looked it up and it still seems to be an issue) so I’m going to be prepared next quarter.
> For upper level math or CS courses, these are often only 3 credits because there's no section, but you still need to spend at least 15 hours a week on them (so 4 hours of work for every hour of lecture)
This confused me at first. In my orientation session (14 hours long over 2 days…) they never talked about this! At community college basically all classes were 5 credits so it was weird to see many hard classes only be 3 or 4. Sounds like they aren’t going to be any less difficult… Quite annoying!
> Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
I’ll give this a shot for sure! There are quite a few classes that I’m interested in taking and it’s probably worth putting in a extra effort on the stuff that’s actually important to me.
Thanks again! Your comment gave me a lot of insight about college and UW. Hopefully I won’t have too many nightmares about UW :)
My ee was from uiowa. Less pressure, but no money.
Harsh so much that I never want to go back to that kind of treatment, and their abuse after I graduated in trying to drag me back into a graduate program.
I'm going to be a repetitive guy with a Roman I know, so downvote me.
“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready. Dig deep, and it will ever flow." -Marcus Aurelius
> My guess is that it’s more prevalent in the very demanding and competitive STEM majors and probably architecture.
My spouse has a bachelors in architecture, and definitely experiences these. Sometimes it's a design presentation that is needed but wasn't done at all, etc.
Architecture degrees are immensely stressful to get, and then the licensure process is insane, and then there's no money in it unless you're a partner, but partners don't get to do much of the conceptual design and drawing stuff usually, which is what usually brings people into architecture school and is the bulk of the school work.
If people knew if you wanted to make a good living in architecture, you'd really just be babysitting contractors, trying to get electrical and hvac engineers to live with the consequences that arise because buildings need both light and ventilation, fighting with permitting offices, and stamping other people's drawings, student life could be a lot less stressful; it's not worth spending every night in design studio working when the job sucks.
Computer Engineering was a lot less work for a bachelors, even though it was a lot. Of course, my school had biomedical engineers, they worked their butts off.
Do you have any Chinese (i.e. went through mainland china middle school entrance exams / high school entrance exams / college entrance exams) friends who will share their dreams with you?
My Chinese friends tell me when they were kids, all students' grades were made public, so everyone knew exactly how each student was performing. Also, a student's grades were a direct reflection of the family. So, if a student was doing poorly, everyone knew about it, people generally looked down on the parents, like the poor performance was all their fault. I've heard stories about managers at work talking to employees about their child's performance in 3rd grade.
My friends are all in their 50s, and they all tell me they still have nightmares about school back in China. Not sure if school in China is still like that, though.
European. I dream about having to go back to high-school to finish some course, or take an exam covering something I know nothing about. It often occurs to me that I have an university degree, so it doesn’t make any sense, but it usually drags on for a little more before I finally wake up.
I'm from the colonies, now in Canada, and I get these dreams once in a while.
I was very sleep-deprived at university and once fell asleep after pulling an all-nighter for a Saturday morning exam, only to wake up on Sunday evening, with another exam looming Monday morning. Another time I overslept and was 2 hours late for a 3-hour exam. So, my dreams actually have roots in reality.
Australia here. I'm in my late 70's but still have dreams where I'm stressed about a coming exam, although in the dream I'm well aware that I'm no longer working and am long since retired.
I had a coworker from Vietnam tell me he still has nightmares about the university entrance exams. He has a PhD. Said it wasn't as stressful in comparison.
UK here - took me quite a few paragraphs to remember that in the US "school" can also mean university. I was wondering when the article would actually get on to the subject of school.
I've been told that people who actually do fail out of school tend to not have these kinds of dreams, or at least at a reduced rate.
I've asked some aquaintences over the years and their experiences didn't contradict that assertion.
I pretty much flunked outta college my first time around and "Failing and having to repeat grade X" and "Slept through the final" are two of my most common reoccurring nightmares
Not sure if it's true, but I like to think "Lightspeed Briefs" is a joke based on Fruit of the Loom (at least for a while, stylized as "FTL" in their branding).
FTL is also used as an abbreviation for "faster than light" in sci/scifi discussions of exotic methods of fast travel.
Bizarrely, I remember there was more to this dream sequence. After he runs through the hallway towards the camera, shot switches to Rivers running in dark mist saying "I need to find the exam!" The mist evaporates revealing students in stadium seating in an auditorium, and Nick asks if this was the physics exam, and the response is "where have you been all semester?" and someone else asks, "where are your clothes?" before the mist returns to white out, and then Nick wakes up relieved he's only being tortured by Nazis.
Me too. Overall I had a pretty good experience in college and grad school and I kind of miss those days. It was easier to make friends, it was easier to get exercise without even trying just from all the walking I did everywhere, and I guess I just always had this optimistic view of the future back then. :)
I remember being ~23 and telling someone a generation older, "Yeah, it's crazy; I've been out of college for 2 years but I still have awful dreams about being late for class and showing up for a test I forgot about." I was taken aback as they said, "Oh, I still get those." Sure enough, 20 years later, and so I do.
I once forgot that I’d registered for a course. Got an F in it, and had to contest the grade.
Another time, I had a two hour course, but I thought it was a one hour course, and always came an hour late. One day, the teacher finally snapped: “Are you EVER going to get here on time!?!” The answer was no. No way I was sitting through two hours of that. It was my easiest class in university.
Most of my school-related nightmares have stopped at this point in my life, but they generally weren’t much worse than reality.
> The reason school dominates as a go-to anxiety setting, Anderson said, is because school is where we build our understanding of how life works.
This was more or less my theory already. Our first, foundational experiences of anxiety, or at least specific kinds of anxiety.
I'm curious: was anyone here home schooled during high school and then didn't attend college? Where does your mind go to for the equivalent of the "institutional anxiety" dream scenario?
School is quite wrong on teaching "how life works", school push us to be competitive and individualist. While real life is much more abput cooperation.
School (at least in France) tell us beeing wrong is bad. But making mistakes is essential part of learning.
I have dreams of still being in the military. I always think “I couldn’t have been stupid enough to reenlist, this isn’t possible” while it’s happening.
I have these often as well. Had one the other night where I was headed back to bootcamp at 50. Somehow convinced myself in my dream that I could totally do it.
I always wake up with severe anxiety and have to look around to make sure I'm not living in the barracks.
I served in Israel, mandatory service, and I used to dream for the longest while that my discharge papers got lost and I just stayed there forever ;)
Since I'm making one random reply I might as well mention I used to dream about going to school and not being able to find my class. I think the dream had me skipping all classes (which I did, to go write code instead) for so long that I didn't even know what classes I was supposed to be in or where they were.
Part of my school PTSD is why we (mostly) home schooled our kids.
There's an acronym for it – PTSD. We put children and young adults through trauma in their formative years and are surprised when that stays with them forever.
Yeah I came here to say this too, though I don't think it'll be popular. Schools are like prisons your parents send you to every day so they have time to work.
Indeed. Glorified daycare. All those kids are there just to enable their parents to work during the day. At some point they figured they should do something useful with all that time so they started teaching stuff in classes which has the added benefit of structuring the children and making it easier for one teacher to manage them.
I remember friends and colleagues having literal panic attacks and numerous other symptoms immediately prior to exams followed by depression and binge drinking immediately after. In my school's history there are several suicide attempts, one of them in my class.
Is it related to the school and/or major? My major, Computer Science, was very difficult for me and I needed a lot of tutoring and couldn't miss anything. I saw some others not struggle at all through CS. Then I saw [redacted as to not be a jerk] majors and thought that was the easiest shit ever. The latter people shouldn't have any bad dreams of skating through Sociology. Whoops.
It may amuse you to know that, as a sociology major myself, I always envied my engineering school friends because they didn’t have to do nearly as much reading as me and it was possible for them to help one another on problem sets in a way that doesn’t make sense in writing-based liberal arts courses. The grass is always greener, I suppose!
You can help with writing skills-wise, but the thing with essays is that they are subjective and do not have a single correct answer. I took a few STEM courses and found that it was common for STEM students to work together on problem sets because they could compare answers to figure out if and how they had gone wrong. There is no equivalent to this in liberal arts.
Having dipped into the humanities and social sciences (but ultimately graduated with a Math degree), I'd say that the potential difficulties are different rather than absolute.
You often have to do a TON of reading and synthesis in H or SS fields. Mind-boggling reading lists aren't uncommon. If you're lucky the prose is a friendly style. If not... well, you know that feeling of trying to take in a math text quickly? It's not quite that bad, but it's related, lots of unfamiliar phrasing and terminology that you have to work out the connections between and condense semantics from. And then... you may not have well-defined problems. Essay questions/assignments amount to "come up with some thesis and supporting arguments that show familiarity with the material and the ability to generate interesting insight." Do "interesting" and "shows familiarity with the material" sound like uncomfortably subjective assessments? Why yes. Yes they are. Good luck! Also measuring things and experiments are hard. You can be reasonably dull in the natural sciences and still gather a useful amount of empirical observation; in the social sciences or humanities you're going to have to be pretty clever to get good empirical observations at all.
OTOH I would agree that CS and Math often have an additional level of conceptual difficulty, especially the more abstract the corner of the field you're working with, from "you'll definitely need some well-chosen concrete examples as introductory points and probably a bunch of graduated problem sets leading to the eventual brain-twisting revelation" to "you don't understand this, you just get used to it."
I'm considering a grad program that blends the two, so maybe I'll change my mind when I'm done.
Humanities can be just as hard, but easier to bluff. In STEM wrong is obvious, and the only hope of skating by is if the teacher is forgiving with the expectations.
Had the same problem, until one night I’ve realized - in my dream - that I’ve already graduated and I while I could still do all those things, like taking exams, their result won’t ever matter again. It happened once or twice again, with the same result, and it’s been gone ever since.
I find myself gifted in being able to have wild lucid dreams and remembering details, and even learning! I also have nightmares that I can't wake up from and they're terrifying. I often know it's a dream (or is it?) and can't wake up. You're missing out on a lot of fun, but you're also not tormented. If you want to remember your dreams, smoke less weed and concentrate on that blurry moment of going from awake to asleep. Our dreams are in the REM barely-asleep part of the sine wave.
I don’t do much lucid dreaming but agree with the last point. It’s why I find it hard to get up early in the morning sometimes. I know if I keep sleeping and waking up in short chunks that I’m going to get a lot more dream time in and I enjoy most of them.
I breezed through high school but I still have high school dreams maybe once a month.
It’s not that surprising that a situation you dealt with frequently in your teenage years is still there. I usually bluff my way through high school dream situations successfully. Feels good.
I’m 46 and still occasionally have dreams about college. I’m in my last semester and almost failing it’s finals and i cant find the building/roomn the exam is in. They’re always some variation of that.
Walking into class for the last course I need to graduate. Oh, didn't remember the final exam was today. I didn't even study for it. In fact, I don't think I even ever picked up the textbook. I get handed the test and I don't understand a single question. I'm going to fail and have to stay in school for another semester. Plus, apparently, I forgot to put on clothes when I left the house. I'm in class completely naked. Not again!
One of my regular dreams, along with the one where I get fired and go back to the manual labor job.
I'm 54 and have had the same high school nightmare several times.
I find myself in my old high school and stuff has changed and is really confusing. I end up being compelled to go to classes and somehow have a schedule foisted on me that's too complex to be readable. I feel anxiety that the other students will notice my graying hair!
I'm always in the middle of a test that I didn't study for. There's a nebulous higher stakes component to it beyond just failing. I can't read the questions for some reason, but I feel the topic of the test, and it's different every time. Some nights it's high school, others college, but now mostly licensure-related since I guess that was the last time I actually took a test.
For years after graduating I would have this sense of undirected foreboding every Sunday.
I finally realized it was just a carry over from years of being a real procrastinator when it came to getting my school work done and the gnawing panic I would get knowing I had a lot of work and little time to do it.
It was weird that after recognizing the source that feeling dissipated pretty quickly and I really embraced being free of it all
My big problem with schools (and likely a contributor to my own nightmares) is how they treat themselves as arbiters of what is good and right, above parent's wishes, and especially above the people sitting in the classrooms. High schools should be treating their students as equals to their teachers at the very least. They're adults at this point, but the inhumane regimentation and arbitrary expectations continue. The odd power dynamic boils my blood. It pounded the agency out of me until more than ten years after graduating high school. Students are customers of the school and therefore should hold vastly more power, yet they're treated as cattle. Yes there are amazing teachers who do everything they can, but they're swimming against a strong current.
I don't see how, but perhaps I'm missing your point.
If you interpret what they said as "I want freedom but explicitly chose not to find it until 10 years later" then sure, that might be a contradiction.
If you interpret it as "I really freedom because it took me 10 years to fully realize what happened to me and want others to avoid the same thing" then it's more clear it's not a contradiction. It wasn't a choice, but rather a path they were sent down unknowingly. That's different than thinking it doesn't matter until then. This was my interpretation of it at least.
The GP was framing the school as particularly toxic because it constrains people who really ought to be considered adults as if they were cattle.
In my view, an adult ought to be able to leap at the chance for agency as soon as they emerge from these constraints. Maybe not immediately, but in a year or two at least. Otherwise, it circularily casts doubt on the premise. The argument is that the definition of an adult has to meet a certain standard.
School can be traumatic, and people are allowed to feel bad even if others have it worse, but unless you are severely bullied I see many of the descriptions in this thread as being overly dramatic compared to the crap that people have to deal with in other parts of the world. Hundreds of millions of kids would kill for the chance to be stressed at an American or European school.
Granted, this is not a generous point of view. The only reason I'm making these comments is because I recognize myself so much in the GP's experiences.
I think the problem is the exact opposite. We would would much better off if we treated teachers as the community leaders they are
“Students are customers” - Hard disagree here. I had a great time in college but the effects of the neoliberalization of the university definitely diminished the experience. Schools are one of the only pre-capitalistic institutions left in society that situate folks in time and tradition. Now they are becoming another money grab.
Some are naturals at it and you’re lucky to be around them. Though quite a few don’t have it in their blood. We don’t reward our teachers too well so in the end we get the few naturals versus the it’s just a low paid job, don’t need to apply themselves too much to it. The naturals stick to it despite low pay and bureaucratic obstacles but truly enrich our lives. I remember fondly the few great professors that changed my perception on a subject.
I have four teenage sons. "treating them as equals" is super, duper silly. Their brains are totally, completely not regulated enough to make good decisions still, and that only changes usually VERY close to graduation.
While the "Dream analyst" said plausible things about the author's dream, I have no idea how they (the analysts) know it. So I tend not to believe that easy explanation.
The only consistent thing I can say is that if the dream situation occurs in real life, then my feelings and emotional response to the situation will likely be the same. That's been the sole valid anchor for me.
Anxiety about "authority figure" is a little odd, for example, relating to my school dream of having to vacate my hostel room and realising I lost the key..a friend comes up with "I think I have it" and upon checking the keybunch, it doesn't have my room's key. I'm not panicking but don't want the room door to be smashed down when I'm not around. I have something old and precious inside I need to grab.
I feel like this is because school, especially college, and particularly exams, is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get, so they look back at that time as peak-anxiety. Think about it: you're being evaluated and the result of that evaluation shapes the next step in the pipeline, and ultimately the trajectory of the rest of your life! Well, at least that's what the university officials, professors, your peers and parents all tell you. You pretty much have a series of "one chance" events that you must pass or you're done for. Failure of any step is permanent, and affects your average (seemingly) forever.
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
I've found that it also sets some really bad habits for the real world, particularly for the types of higher upside / capped downside scenarios that you often see in startups or some of the arts (eg trying to make it big as an actress).
> is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get
I don't think that's the case, but more that kids are being put in these "high stakes" situations without the mental capacity to handle them. Turning in an assignment late, underpreparing or waking up late for an exam, getting a B+ instead of an A, fumbling during a presentation – these are all insignificant and completely artificial problems in the grand scheme of life. However when you are a student going through them it feels like the end of the world, and that memory sticks.
True, but as you get further towards "A" average, the seeming difference between an A and a B gets more important.
The only person I have ever known to have cried over grades was someone who cried over getting a B+ instead of an A. I know many more people who got D's instead of C's -- they didn't care.
Yeah, MIT versus SUNY essentially. I got A-Bish grade average but did well enough on the SAT to get a scholarship to a SUNY and said F it to the prestigious schools. Happily in less debt now. Didn't make a difference (well, retrospectively, perhaps in a different timeline, I'm a well-respected researcher with a PHD.)
I cared when I got a D instead of a C in my statistics course, but only because I retook it to get the D off my transcript. What really stung was I got the basically the same grade the second time around, but the professor (same professor) did a curve that year. I replaced that D with an A. Where was that curve the first time around?
I think this is one of many explanations. While exams were stressful. I loved learning and would love to go back for my PhD or even a brand new discipline if I had the funds to support my family with that lifestyle.
I think this is only true because your life has been so short at that point. The idea of having to repeat an exam next quarter or god forbid, next year feels like an unacceptable waste of time
When am sufficiently stressed at work - a recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.
But overall school and college was a great experience - the tests and assignments sucked, but what I remember is the great friends that I made, the interesting people that I met and all the personal exploration that I did.
No regrets that I took my sweet time to finish undergrad, in the grand scheme of life it was not time wasted, but time well spent.
Adulting does not offer the same opportunities - so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it.
I dropped out of college and never have the forgotten exam dreams. However I did do four years of theater and I regularly have the opening night, don't know my lines nightmare.
I have a recurring dream where the university revokes my diploma years after graduating because I actually somehow dropped out of all my classes and forgot to finish the final projects/exams.
That never happened, but I did drop a couple classes before the withdrawal deadline to fix the workload. It feels so real though.
Hell, I have dreams that I've forgotten to attend class all semester long in grad school and the final exam is tomorrow, and I never even went to grad school! It's like my brain subconsciously realized the undergrad panic dreams no longer make sense as that's too long ago, so now they've evolved to something more suitable for later in life, even though I never did that thing.
Yes, I have this recurring nightmare maybe once a year and I graduated more than a decade ago. I am all stressed out because I realize I haven't attended one of my classes even once because I completely forgot about it.
I have had a few dreams about forgetting that I have registered for a class, and realizing late that I have an exam.
A more recurrent dream for me is finding myself in the backseat of an empty, moving car, able to reach the steering wheel, but unable to control the brakes.
Wow I have had a dream very similar quite a few times. I'm driving on some very unstable road, often made of sand and the car falls into the lower levels of that road, getting stuck... Sometimes it's a curvy bridge the car needs to climb and it constantly tends to fall off. I thought the school exams were the only common dreams that I had, but at appears that similar ones to this one is dreamt by others too!
Yeah it’s very surreal, during the dream I realize that hmm, this is pretty dangerous, but am still somehow casual about it, and then I don’t complete the turn and the car starts plummeting down and I start saying I love yous and I wake up
I've had that backseat driving one a lot, and it tends to come and go throughout my life.
Sometimes I'm alone in the car. Other times there is someone else in the front but they are incapacitated, or unwilling to bring the car back under control. I'm usually alone, though.
On a few occasions I was able to climb into the front seat, but of course then the brakes either did nothing or were so ineffectual that trying to use them to slow down only distracted me and made matters worse.
(1) do you have a feeling that you have control of your own life? Maybe it feels that you are in a prison where "your hand is forced" and you cannot take own decisions, have to play the bad hand you received
(2) are you doing something risky, like working in a failing start up? Or a company thay is going towards bankruptcy?
These are the dreams that I have all the time as well. Usually the set up is: I dropped a class but it didn't go through in the system, I go all semester not attending said class thinking that I had dropped it, but then the last week of the semester comes and I realize that I am failing the class from missed assignments and tests, and the only way out is to ace a final I know nothing about so I can scrape by with a C.
This is my dream as well. About 10 years (god has it been that long?) ago I took an informal poll of my small office and was shocked at how many of them had this specific dream. Not just some school anxiety dream. That specific dream where you have a class you either forgot you enrolled in or never attended and have the final coming up. It was like 60% of the office!
God, to make these dreams even worse, I once literally did completely miss an exam in college, as in, I somehow missed the announcement of when it would be, and skipped the study period in the morning when it was given, and then only learned about it later that day in the lecture when everyone was talking about the exam!
Once you actually live that experience, it (or versions of it) will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life.
It's such a common dream! I wonder how school-themed stress dreams would have manifested for people who lived before what we would recognize as "modern" educations system...
> I am an assistant professor. Suddenly I receive express orders from the dean to teach osteology at the very last minute. Anxiety, anguish * * * when going over the bones in my memory. I enumerate those of the hand: scaphoids, capitate, and I did not know any more. Meanwhile the class awaits me, the students yell. I ask to myself how I will lecture about bones if I have almost forgotten them? Growing anguish and I awaken with a sense of well-being, upon realizing that I am not a professor, I am old and no one is directing me.
Mine was that I had forgotten to take a class or that the records were lost and I had to redo the last years of college. It was a nightmare I had even a decade after getting my degree.
Same here -- my classmates and I go back to high school for taking one history class, as due to administrative difficulties one requirement for the degree was not met, and noone noticed until now. I went there more than 20 years ago.
Ughhh, I had a dream within the last couple months where I had to go back to high school for a very similar reason, to finish one last class or something. I couldn't tell you why, as things in dreams often don't make sense, other than that I had to. And it was very strange having to be in those hallways with all the school kids as an adult.
I have persistent dreams in which I decide to change my career to something more interesting, but requiring a different university degree that the one I have now (CS). In these dreams, I decide to go back to high school to improve on my final grades, so that I have higher chance of getting into my new university of choice (HS grades are a large component of that in Poland). Through these dreams, I attend the HS classes (as a 40-year old), sweat about the homework and exams etc. It's not a nightmare, it's just bizzare.
I had a recurring dream for a few years after I'd graduated that I still had to sit my final year! The dream was so real one time that I woke in a panic and check my certificates to make sure! I studied in my thirtees as it was something I'd always wanted to do, so although I didn't have any career aspiration pressure the finals were stressful enough and I wonder if this was some sort of sub-consious shedding. Interesting to read the comments about similar experiences.
I legit had a dream recently that I had enrolled in a graduate degree and then forgotten I was enrolled for months and now it was a week before exam time I had just had a realisation of "Oh hey, didn't I enrol in a degree?"
I have no idea where that dream came from or why I had it. I have never had a "didn't study" dream before, university was a relatively stress free time for me compared to my earlier years
I guess I'm brimming with enough (over)confidence to avoid the "didn't study" dreams or the "sitting in the back seat of an empty car" dreams, but I occasionally dream I signed up for some class and then didn't bother to attend it, wasting my time and snubbing the teacher.. "ah shoot, sorry guys"
> so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it.
Depends on the perspective, I guess. I was working in several different places, and sometimes I had hard time. Even working in the worst places, I felt better than in school.
I hated elementary school, because kids were cruel (some time I came back to home with chocking marks) and teachers decided to just not see bullying. Or decided to give me a hard time, too. When someone destroyed my textbook by writing on it while I was not at the desk, I got note to the parents because supposedly I told someone to do that.
I kinda liked liceum because finally people were more mature. But man, long term, it was very exhausting. The lesson schedule looked like it was set randomly. For example, in second class, being 16-17 yo, Thursdays I had lessons from 9 AM to 6 PM, and the next day I was starting at 7 AM. I was tired all the time and had no time for social interactions.
Please note that the following paragraph is not personal. It applies to the entire phenomenon. For me, it is annoying when grown-ups tell children that it is the best time in their life. When I was a kid, I felt fear a lot. As a teenager, I was depressed and tired all the time. And, you know, if it is the best time in my life, why should I care about my future at all? It is going to be terrible anyway...
Everyone has its own perspective. Maybe you had great time in school. Maybe for my mother, school years actually are the best years of her life. But telling young people that they are living the best time in their lives, and it will be only worse later, is... unfair.
I share your experience. I always felt out of place and struggled through school. Tired, extremely bored, constantly felt inadequate. There were a few teachers that basically carried me through because they saw something in me. But other than that it often felt like torture.
Very much agree with this. I often (day-)dream about using a time machine to tell my younger self a few words that would have changed the whole experience drastically. The main advice would be: stop trying to care. You, my young friend, are not the stakeholder in the institutions you're forced to attend. The system doesn't have your well-being and your benefit as a first priority. The interests of the faculty, parents, and in some cases future employers, are much more important, and you have no way to influence that, no matter what you do. When they think about you it's invariably an afterthought and they have a world of incentives to deny reality, bias the analyses, and treat you and your friends as means to some end.
I hated school. I hated the inadequacy of lesson - some were obviously way too easy for me, while others way too hard. The number of lesson hours per week per subject didn't align with my interests nor the difficulty of the subject. The amount of wasted time was staggering. For example, it so happened that I didn't attend high-school for half a year in my fourth semester. I had enough scores in some subjects to pass, but for a few I didn't, and was given a few weeks to prepare for oral exams. I managed to learn half a year worth of biology, history, and chemistry in 3 weeks, and passed the exams. It was a Pyrrhic victory - I passed to the next grade, but at the same time I realized that I'm wasting (6 months - a few weeks) each semester. I started questioning the meaning of going to school; I realized that I could learn faster on my own, then realized that I would have learned a whole lot more if I could learn with a mentor who'd have my best interests in mind. I also realized that no teacher has an interest in working with someone like me, and that the system is actively hostile to all the non-standard approaches and needs. By the next year, I was diagnosed with depression and missed the whole year while trying to come to grips with that harsh reality.
Later on, I was locked in a constant harassment from an English teacher (a second language here). I learned English in private lessons and on the Internet and I was good at it. That was unacceptable for her. I was to sit quietly in the corner and when I tried to participate in the lesson, I was branded her enemy. The unfair treatment was to the point where I barely graduated, yet I got 97% score on the matriculation exam. I had an urge to find her and throw the results in her face, but I knew I would never recover the lost time and expended psychological effort to persevere.
If I could do it all again, I would focus all I had on breaking out of the system. That system very obviously wasn't made for people like me, but I felt helpless, knowing there's no alternative. It was wrong. The alternatives are always there, even if deliberately hidden as to not "encourage abnormal behavior". I could have tried harder to get away from the system that damaged my health and gave me next to nothing in exchange. And if I couldn't find an alternative, I would have changed my attitude at least: look, Mr. teacher, you're being paid to teach me, and I'm not being paid to learn. So, Mr. teacher, act like I'm a paying customer, please. Because otherwise, Mr. teacher, I'll go through all possible means to fuck you up, cheerfully and as a hobby. Just as you've been doing to me all this time.
I don't think it's a perspective - I believe I was fortunate to have the support system that I had. As a child you are supposed to be protected and cared for. And I hope that I can do the same for my children.
Maybe you mistook my perspective for hubris - but it is what childhood should be - innocent and pure and if it's not, then society is failing.
I am sorry if I misunderstand something here – to be honest, English never was my forte, so I may miss some subtlety.
I did not take your post as a form of hubris. What I meant when I wrote about perspective is that personal experiences shape our assessment of reality. I agree that childhood should be innocent and pure. But sometimes, it is not.
No offense taken at all - I agree those formative years of childhood shape our view of the world.
Hope we don't let the bad experiences color the future.
I want to echo this sentiment, albeit for different reasons.
When I have a particularly bad day as an adult, I often think back to being a child (or worse, teenager) in school forced to follow arbitrary rules by tired adults who were more interested in making sure nobody wore a baseball cap than keeping kids safe from anaphylactic allergic reactions.
When I think back to my school days and how anxious, stressed, unheard, and restricted I felt almost 100% of the time, I usually feel immediately better.
I remember being 16 in high school, and during the school day I couldn't just take a walk, because that would be truancy to skip class.
I couldn't just take a walk at night because our municipality instituted a curfew past I don't know, 10pm or something for those under 18, and a police car actively patrolled my neighborhood for violations.
I lived 18 years like that. Allowed to make no choices about where I went to school or at what time.
So now, as an adult, sometimes I just exit my apartment and walk down a city street when I feel like it, and it feels extremely empowering.
Taking a mental health day and not showing up to work, or better yet, handing in my resignation, also feel extremely empowering.
From my perspective, being a child sucked. I hated almost every moment of it, despite being reasonably popular in high school, having a close circle of friends, and never worrying about my grades.
Being an adult is amazing by comparison and I would never want to go back.
But I also understand that to some degree, that's a result of the freedom that comes with a high salary and an in-demand skillset that allow me to leave jobs and take days off with little risk. Many adults don't have that opportunity, and I totally understand how in some cases they could see their childhood as having been better due to a lack of responsibilities.
> recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.
I get these exact nightmares. I wonder how common is this.
I have no idea how common the nightmare is. I have never had them. But I did mix up the dates for my exam.
My friend called me as I was about to go to the gym and asked where I was, with a very concerned voice. It turned out that I was supposed to be at an exam. I rushed home, changed clothes and went like crazy to school. Luckily they let me in as the last one of the day - of course I had not prepared in the slightest - but did absolutely fine :)
> When am sufficiently stressed at work - a recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.
Because my high school Biology course (A Levels in the UK) was divided into modules assessed throughout two years I came to the last exam pretty sure that I didn't have to score many marks to get the grade I was aiming for.
I ended up in a weird situation where my instinct was to prepare really well but, in practice, I should skimp on revision for Biology and concentrate on subjects that weighted the end-of-year exams higher.
The strategy worked out - I hit what I was aiming for in Biology and in the other subjects. But that whole very tactical approach so went against my character that, to this day, anxiety dreams manifest about not having done the work for that specific exam. Often they're further exaggerated (e.g. I've simply forgotten to go to any lessons all year, etc) but it focuses around that event.
I find it weird that my subconscious prefers that over arguably even more stressful (and sometimes less successful!) exams at university. Maybe I was just more equipped to deal with it by then.
I honestly have recurring PTSD from some of the violence I was forced to walk into day after day to graduate, where all school authorities were more interested in a coverup than helping. My grades were shockingly not that good in this environment and I was just told I was too stupid to learn any topic about computers I wanted and had to learn some less prestigious topics after graduation. In this environment I could hardly enjoy good times with friends, there was just too much of a shadow lurking over the whole thing.
I had to leave school to learn, and now that I’m a computer programmer, I feel apprehension that I might have to go back to school to four years to pretend to learn topics I learned independently just to assuage the school systems ego enough that they will give me an accreditation. The idea of going back to school makes me tense up at this point. Adulthood is so much less traumatizing because it feels like you have so much more choice to avoid abuse, and you can choose to confront abusive situations on your own schedule. You’re valued for so many more reasons than your ability to tolerate abuse and produce good test scores.
> Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever!
What? That's so far from the truth. If you fail in school you just get to try again. You may not get into Stanford but realistically your life can still be great no matter how many times you fail.
I don't think the commenter still believes that. But it's certainly reflects what I was told by schools growing up. Friends aren't important and work hard else your life will be menial labor until you die.
I'm not really one to bash my country, the US, but we have to pay for school here so you really only get about 1 -> 1.5 shots before your debt is too high to keep attending.
Most definitely. When I was doing computer science the threat of failing a class and costing myself money and sure that I was anxious pretty much the entire time I was in college. I had a lot of fun though
>The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
I left high school in junior year (intending to go straight to college — didn't work out, long story). I took the GED test, and I was SO MAD because I realized I could have aced that test straight out of 8th grade.
Has anyone ever asked about my GED? No. Lol. Has lacking a college degree held me back? No (though there are definitely fields where it would have).
One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting out which bits of "received wisdom" actually deserve that label versus being cached now-bullshit that your parents and teachers don't know is obsolete. My parents were right about a lot of interpersonal stuff, but dead wrong about whether I needed to go to college in order to obtain good jobs.
Yeah, and all the advice we get is lagged by 10-20 years. Parents are pretty far removed from the reality of entry level job markets and changes in industries
In California you can't take the test until you're 18 (or perhaps a year or two earlier if you can convince your local school district to give you permission).
It appears that the limits for the CHSPE are still being at least 16 years old, or having completed part of tenth grade, which have been the requirements for as long as I can remember. However, it does appear the interpretation of that has changed. When I took it, if you were home schooled, even if you were home schooled for the express purpose of taking the exam, you could have your parents attest that you were working at a tenth grade level; I took it when I was thirteen by doing this, and know a number of others, some considerably younger, who did as well. It appears that the current requirements actually do require some form of official school district approval, which may have been in response to that method of taking the test early. If that's the case, it's unfortunate; I certainly don't regret having taking the route I took. If anything, I somewhat regret listening to the advice of those around me who kept advising me against it, and giving the normal school system, which made me miserable, more chances than I needed to.
As for the commenter's point on people caring or not caring about the GED/CHSPE; apart from needing it for my initial community college admission immediately after getting it, it never came up for me at all, despite teachers insisting for years that getting a diploma that way would ruin us. I don't even remember any the details of it, or where the documentation is: there's little point in having anything pre-university on a CV.
> One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting out which bits of "received wisdom" actually deserve that label versus being cached now-bullshit
Eh, I still dream about school sometimes, and it was as low stakes as it can get for me.
I never studied for anything, never did any homework, and to enter university in Germany I just needed good enough grades to pass high school (Gymnasium). GPA was irrelevant.
Of course, I don't wake up with any cold sweat over it.
For me as well, in the last years of Gymnasium they didn't control homework or even attendance much. I missed many classes in the last 2-3 years, because I preferred to stay at home and get some sleep or whatever. Or maybe it is more that I missed most classes by sleeping in class. Memories are hazy at this point. Which could be one reason that I've started to have these dreams where I notice I didn't attend this particular class all year and it's too late.
In Poland, if you want to get into any university, High School diploma is all you need. However, if you want to go the best ones, or to a popular subject (psychology, computer science) in a mediocre one, you need good grades.
The situation is similar in Germany, where I grew up. You need good grades to study the popular subjects. For mathematics, they took anyone who was willing.
The issue is, people believe that to be the case. That sixth grade exam on long division you got a 17/100 on? It doesn't really have any bearing on what you do as an adult.
I can't say I ever felt like that during school, Uni maybe a bit but not school. My final school year was stressful during exam time but that's to be expected I guess since my uni application hinged on my exam results.
But having said that I imagine it could feel pretty different depending on what expectations you set for yourself, or more importantly - what expectations your parents set for you. If you've got mum and dad looming over your shoulder 24/7 pushing you for more so you can be a doctor/lawyer/CEO/whatever then you're probably going to feel pretty differently about the whole situation.
One of my favorite engineers dropped out of college because the university (UC) demanded an English proficiency test for the diploma after completing 4 years of of school.
Now they have 40+ patents and confounded 3 biotech companies with 9 digit exits.
Friends from the old days ironically refer to them as Dr.<Name> because they are the smartest person they know.
I knew a few people who were stuck in that mindset of "if I don't get straight As in everything I'm going to be doomed forever" mindset in both highschool and university. It did not seem to make them very happy, and it's entirely bullshit, especially in highschool.
It took me five, almost six, years to graduate high school. Underachiever is an understatement. I still dream about not having graduated. It feels so real in the dream, the failure. I am a successful business owner who has no issues with financial security. My lizard brain or whatever it is just likes replaying it to screw with me I think.
I think it has more to do with the "mode" in which a child brain is, absorbing and learning durably. I can look at a class photo from 30 years ago and name all the kids I was with. I will struggle with colleagues I worked with 5 years ago. I think that's why the stress and trauma you live through as a child follows you all your life the way an experience as an adult might not.
Like other commenters, this doesn't fit my anecdotal evidence of sample size 1.
For me, both elementary and high school were easy. I would do a minimal amount of work, show up to the exam and get maximum marks. Exams weren't especially stressful.
As a stereotypical school nerd, PE was stressful though - I do remember lots of anxiety being asked to jump the vaulting horse, do somersaults, handstands, and that kind of things I wasn't able to do.
And yet, I regularly dream about not having passed some non-PE high-school subject and having to retake the exam and/or go to class (even when these subjects were easy for me) and don't dream about PE.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean it didn't worry you. I recall significant amounts of stress about passing tests on subjects I never got lower than an 80% on. Just always expecting to do the test, thinking I did well, and then get slapped with a fail. Never happened, still worried me.
I'd honestly not be surprised if the whole "dreams about school" thing turns out to be world-wide low grade PTSD.
I never experienced any anxiety from exams or performing well in the elementary school. School was easy for me and also, coming from one of the Nordic welfare countries, I never thought that my life would somehow be ruined if I didn't do well in school. I felt much more anxiety about other kids in school since I was quite nerdy and didn't fit in well.
Consequently, I never have dreams about exams. However, I do have dreams that I have to go back to school as an adult for some reason (usually because I missed some classes or exams or something and I have to do them now). The dreams are also never about the actual classrooms but just hanging around in the school with the teenagers and feeling weird about it.
ok, that tracks because I don't look back on that as peak-anxiety, and I don't have dreams about being back in school. But I do have dreams about peak anxiety events that I will not be sharing here.
I really wish school could some how be completely overhauled to project-based learning. I feel live tests and exams optimize for the wrong thing and in general don’t help anyone except making it easier for schools to score students.
I usually learned the most out of take-home exams. You’d usually need to study and brush up on things, but then having a week to thoroughly work out everything was always a great learning experience. It is a way of the professor saying “you should know this and if not, know how to figure it out”. It was an actually good test of your knowledge and skill and didn’t rely on being able to spit something out in one or two hours in a stressful environment.
I think you’re right that no adult experiences moments like you get in school exams. Almost never are you required to know some relatively arbitrary thing or solve some problem within an hour or teo. There are crunches and moments of needing to fix something quickly and important presentations, but in every case you are presented with something you already know about or have day to day experience with. And failure is usually not some drastic adjustment of your future. If the professor is not good, which is the norm, then exams are a bit of a toss up.
This. school isn't teaching you the topic, it's teaching you to pass an exam. I had a physics teacher that fully understood this. All we did was past papers for like 6 months of I don't really remember much physics but I got a good grade in this class and it helped get me into uni so who cares.
If schools really cared about passing on knowledge then most things should be project/course-work based with a small write-up explaining what you did etc depending on the subject to make sure you know what you're talking about.
though we'd probably see much higher grades overall, but we wouldn't know if this is because it's a better way to judge knowledge or because the teacher just told them what to write.
It would be nice if they were able to emulate some of the more security focused interviews I've had. It consists of sitting in a room, and just a discussion about random things. For example, say an operating systems final, where it consists of you sitting with a professor and just having a conversation about the class, like "Tell me what you understand about access times for devices? What about x, y and z?'. I know there's biases, but I feel like when a person can use conversational computer science about the subject, it shows they understand the concepts enough and are ready for the real world.
At my current company, the security positions are focuses like that and actually test people, the Dev interviews are two leetcode questions and a conversation to make sure you arn't a complete dunce. I havn't met a single dumb person on the other side of the fence, but I have met alot of dumb devs here.
The primary problems arise from (1) mass education and (2) cheating.
Project-based learning can't be managed with 40:1 student teacher ratios. The best learning has always come from projects and apprenticeship/mentorship style systems, but even managing that with 3 classes with a 10:1 student teacher ratio becomes hard. This should make sense, almost all the economic evidence is that parent characteristics are hands down the largest factors in what a kid's future income will be (mentorship).
Cheating is rampant which is why take-home exams rarely exist.
The reality is the world would be far better off with 3 times as many teacher, but you can't keep teachers wages as high as they are with 3 times the supply.
I disagree with this. In school I didn't feel much anxiety and didn't try very hard at exams. I didn't think my life would be over if I didn't do this or that. I simply didn't have those thoughts back then.
Now I'm older I understand what stress is and I do feel like my actions (or inaction) could ruin the rest of my life. There have been several key moments in my adult life that I can pinpoint as high stakes and peak anxiety. Yet I still have the school dreams. I had one just last night, in fact.
That's what I find fascinating honestly. We let our kids undergo grueling periods while we as adults live a leisurely life. Kids have incredible strict rules to adhere to. It was almost completely unheard of for a kid to come in late in school. Kids can't do the things they want to do because parents stop them. That in combination with the high-pressure environment of school... I think the only reason they accept it is because they don't know any better.
Comparatively most adults have incredible comfortable lives. Besides going to work they can basically do whatever they want. There is no pressure to strive for anything. It's baffling to me how people can lay such high pressure on their children but let themselves go in their own life.
Half joking: where can I find this adult leisure? School meant free food and post school meant (really, really) struggling to stay afloat financially. It took nearly a decade to get to a point where I could take a vacation without risk of financial ruin (like get evicted or not be able to pay for fuel to get to work). Now things are much better financially but I still don't do what i want to do because i still have a lot of responsibilities. My kids however are leisurely creatures who i wish would take school more seriously as I'm worried about their ability to support themselves as they come to that age.
Of course everyones adult life is different but if you have a decent job you generally never have to worry about money, unless you spend it on unneeded stuff(I admit this assumes a western country). That doesn't mean it matches your experience, but an outlier doesn't invalidate the general point I made.
> My kids however are leisurely creatures
How so? They are forced every weekday under duress of the law to go to a place they didn't choose to be. If they don't perform in their forced labor they are put into more forced labor. They have to listen to you and you probably very often take away their agency to do what they desire. Kids do have more "free" time, but that time is not actually free. But the way the can spend is very narrow. But more time does not equal better.
> Of course everyones adult life is different but if you have a decent job you generally never have to worry about money, unless you spend it on unneeded stuff(I admit this assumes a western country). That doesn't mean it matches your experience, but an outlier doesn't invalidate the general point I made.
You grew up middle or upper class and the person you’re responding to didn’t, or had no or very bad relations with their family such that they didn’t or couldn’t help.
Don’t forget that school is the most orderly environment lots of children experience, the one where they’re most likely to be around educated people, intellectual stimulation, the least violent, the one where they’re reliably fed. Without the pretense that it’s about education that would be hard to keep up.
>It's baffling to me how people can lay such high pressure on their children but let themselves go in their own life.
The reason why most adults are not very motivated when it comes to learning is because school has killed their learn drive. The recurring dreams may very well be a sign of a traumatic experience.
Instead of putting pressure, parents should take away this very crippling aspect of today's schools by telling their children that grades are not so important and that the often required cramming does more harm than good.
If a child's learn drive survives school it will surpass many of its peers futher down the road.
Interesting theory. One data point for your theory: i never dream of school - school was the easiest part of my life and i seldom prepared for tests. I viewed it all as a req'd time sink to get a good job to escape poverty. My equivalent dream is being unable to punch or fight (like a kitten could take the punishment and keep napping) or move fast enough.
School was not very stressful for me. I never had especially high grades, but didn't do that bad either (3.4ish GPA in undergrad). There were specific classes that were annoying either because of the content or teacher. I'm sure there was some temporary stress over a few of those finals, but not excessive.
Work is much more stressful and high stakes. There's no real structure, no contract or performance guide (like a syllabus), and I need this job to support my family. Getting another job would be very difficult.
It’s the easiest way to do ranking and sorting in a consistent way for large populations and reduces opportunities for corruption/favouritism/teacher bullying. Once you think of school as a place for ranking at least as much as for learning things make more sense.
I mean this in a polite way, but if college is the highest stakes one has experienced, then that's a pretty narrow experience of anxiety and difficulties life has to offer.
To me that seems like a very fortunate life experience.
I don’t know about that, I was never particularly stressed at college or school. I’m way, way more effected by stress at work where failure to deliver has massive consequences on the state of my startup or the lives of the people that work there.
I used to dream about school/college, but stopped after my 30s – nowadays it's such a distant memory that it feels like a previous / someone else's life.
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[ 3.8 ms ] story [ 304 ms ] threadFuture generations will look back in horror, if we're lucky.
One can hope.
We’re homeschooling which paradoxically ends up with our kids thinking school is some magical place where everything is great and you get to hang out with friends all day.
I went to an American high school and a former commie one (Albania), and I can tell you the American HS was a walk in the park in comparison to the one back home.
My take is that this is a pretty universal occurrence.
On the other hand, many children are born into circumstances so bad school is a welcome relief. Warmth, regular food, some intellectual stimulation, people who don’t hit them, ever. It’s not what you’d want for your child but it beats what lots of children get at home.
High school in particular was by far the most stressful sustained period of time in my life—I've had the odd day or week that might measure up, here and there, but never months in a row (at least you get Summers off). I've very quickly quit jobs that turned out to be a small fraction as stressful as high school was—they're vastly worse than a decent work environment, but still not as bad as high school. It's that bad. And I had a pretty easy high school experience! No intense bullying, no gang violence happening at/around school, none of that stuff.
9-10 hours a day of work (if you're doing all your homework, anyway), plus more if you actually want to be earning any money. Rushed minutes-long passing periods several times every single day. Having to ask to go take a shit if you didn't manage to fit that in to your few moments of semi-free time. About 6 hours per day comprising ~50-minute stretches that are about as draining as sitting in that many meetings of that length in a day (which is quite the fuck draining). Super-early mornings in most places, in the time of the life that's the very worst for that kind of thing, physiologically and psychologically. The sheer weirdness of spending almost all your time with a whole bunch of people about the same age as you.
The number of people you are around and interact with in a day, navigating their emotions and demeanors and all that, teachers and students and administrators, exceeds what I've ever seen at any job by a long shot. That you may at any moment be subject to behavior that would get someone arrested or at least fired from a job in the adult world, but you'll still have to be around the perpetrator for potentially years with no real way to leave yourself.
Immovable extremely short deadlines and unchangeable scope—hope you don't have the odd day where you just don't feel up to it, because the thing they assigned you today is due tomorrow, period. All your work literally thrown in the trash soon after you finish it. Near-zero tolerance for real life getting in the way of the work. Sick? LOL, no, there's not someone to take on a little extra work so you're not doubling up when you get back—it's all on you, have fun with the pile of inane tasks to complete while you still feel kinda shitty. Personal days? "Mental health" days? LOL no.
It's very, very bad. Strict rules and enforcement, weird and toxic social environment, tight and short deadlines completing assignments that serve no external purpose whatsoever covering things you don't care about (sure, that's kinda just how education has to be, at least to some extent, but that doesn't make it not-demoralizing).
I don't love the comparison to prison but it really is one of the closer analogs from the "real world", or maybe notoriously-bad careers/jobs (Amazon warehouses?) that employ people with few other options, though in my experience even most low-wage, low-skill jobs aren't anywhere near as bad as high school (but I've also not worked in the notoriously-bad ones).
My high school dreams (well, nightmares) finally mostly stopped... in my early 30s. Mostly. That's a hell of an effect. And again, my experience was surely in the top half, at least, as high school experiences go.
I think it has more to do with school being the first place you have those pseudo-professional experiences of "Ahhhh! I blew it! I didn't work hard enough!" So your brain is like, "I think I have this one in the archive somewhere."
It's hard wired evolved response to surviving life-threatening experiences, such as being attacked by a predator. The brain processes those experiences over and over to help avoid them in real life in the future.
We don't get attacked by predators anymore, but we have the same brains circuits as animals who did. So the process just plays out on whatever unpleasant life experience it can grab onto.
No, there are no good schools.
High schools went downhill when teachers stopped spinning homespun silk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
I occasionally feel the calling to go back to school for the sheer joy of learning and mastery. It’s an odd feeling though, because I always hated school, from elementary to undergrad.
Loving higher ed is pretty common. Loving high school, way, way less so.
Wew. I find this remarkable that someone has been in every school of the world and is now posting here to report back on his experience.
I was pretty traumatized with parental expectations in school. Starting from high school, to college, to graduate school, I always had the same dream at the start of semesters - I'm incredibly late to the first class to the point I basically miss it. It has a cascading effect where in the dream, I basically feel doomed to be behind all semester. I've never had this dream outside of when I was a student, and that includes a very long hiatus in finishing college.
This is story is one of those things where you read it and the explanation is so obvious, but it never hit you until you see it written out.
For my EE120 review session when we staggered in, the GSI consoled us saying if it meant anything, we’d done as much in one semester as he’d done in two and a half at his school and he was a Berkeley grad student which is insanely competitive to get into in its own right.
For awhile after my daughter was born those were replaced by one where I had another infant I was supposed to be caring for that I had totally forgotten about, but thankfully, those didn't persist as she grew and my brain went back to the livestock version.
They (along with some other STEM programs) used first and second year calculus and physics courses to select who they would admit. So you needed to be within some top percentile of the students in those courses at the end of your second year or else you would need to transfer schools or choose a different major.
On top of this, the course registration system was similar to trying to get a PS5 on launch day. If you didn’t get your courses registered without time conflicts within 5 minutes of opening well, better luck next quarter. And then if you didn’t get the course you needed this quarter then you were at risk of having to overload yourself the following quarter to get back on track.
One strategy to mitigate the registration crunch was to sign up for more courses than you actually intended to take. You had a grace period of I think a week during which you could drop a course with no consequence (and folks on the wait list could take your place). This mechanic is the source of my recurring nightmares. In my dreams, I forget to drop the extra course in my schedule, and I only realize it after the second midterm.
Thank god CS is direct to major now (I think it started in 2019?) so there isn’t that second year thing now.
If you have any tips I’d love to hear em!
I can give some tips I wish I had known when I started. No guarantees any of this stuff still applies since it's 20 year old info, but I suspect some of it may still be good ...
- Aim to spend 2 hours studying or doing coursework in the library / lab for every hour you're in the class. So if a class is 5 credits it will take you 15 hours a week, 3 in lecture, 2 in section, and 10 studying or in office hours.
- For upper level math or CS courses, these are often only 3 credits because there's no section, but you still need to spend at least 15 hours a week on them (so 4 hours of work for every hour of lecture)
- Put the study hours in your calendar and stick to them even if you don't feel like you need them. If that means you get work done before it's due, that's great, now you can take it to office hours with your TA or prof and get a free check on your work before you need to submit it to be graded.
- Buy a paper notebook for each course at the start of the quarter. Attend all of the lectures and sections and write everything down the instructor presents in writing and also anything they say that might be important. It doesn't matter that the prof posts slides, notes, recordings or whatever on the website, write the material down anyway by hand because it forces you to pay attention and it helps you internalize the information. Use the notebook as your first stop when you have questions doing your coursework or reviewing for tests.
- I've heard registering for courses is still tough. You get a freebie your first quarter as an incoming student, but 2-3 weeks before the second quarter start looking at the course guide and plan what you want to register for. Approach it like you're a coach preparing for the NFL draft. You need to put down the courses you must have, and the ones you'd like to have, and your contingencies if things don't go to plan. Also pay attention to the instructors, ask around for students who have taken the courses you're planning to to get feedback on who teaches well and grades well and who doesn't -- if the course you need isn't being taught by the instructor you want, you may want to try to take it a different quarter if you can.
- Make an appointment with an advisor to get advice on your course schedule. Since you're in the CS dept, you can make an appointment with their counselors.
- On course registration day, wake up early and do your best to get the courses you want with the best schedule you can. If you can't get a course you can try showing up on the first day anyway and get on the wait list or email your advisor and ask for help.
- Do NOT try to take too much in one quarter. Try to do no more than 2 hard and 1 medium or 2 hard and 2 easy courses. Nobody will stop you if you take 5 hard 3 credit math or CS classes (assuming you have the prereqs) because it's only 15 credits, but by my thinking that's 75 hours a week of work. It's unsustainable and sounds insane but you will almost surely meet or hear about people who try it. Don't be one of them.
- If you tested out of your foreign language reqs, great. Don't try to do more than you have to, unless you're really serious about the language and want to double major in it or something. I tested out of Spanish and I should have left it that, but I stupidly spent a year taking Japanese which I didn't need and just took up a lot of mental bandwidth. If you want to pick up another language, go to language school over a summer or something, don't spend your university time on it.
- Make friends. Leave your dorm room door open as much as you can if you live in the dorms. Hang out in the CS lab as much as you can.
- Hit the gym for an hour a day. UW has a...
>- Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
These things go together, and it's unfortunate that, no matter how much faculty advise students not to take on enormous course loads, so many of them insist on trying anyway. It's not just a matter of sustainability: you often won't learn as much as you would be able to learn by taking a few classes and being passionate about them. You simply won't have time. Good university courses are not situations where there is a fixed checklist of things to learn, or ceiling of perfection that you can spend a fixed amount of time reaching and then gain no more. As an undergraduate, the faculty at the physics department I was in would even give relatively easy research and independent study units to those of us they trusted would use the decreased number of courses (but same number of units) per term to think more about physics.
And yes, being known to the faculty as a promising undergraduate is useful. Their doors will be open for scholarly discussions and academic advice at a far more informal level. They can often give better, more specific advice on courses and plans, and can push administratively to make those plans possible. They can point you to topics and resources beyond your classes, and help you understand them. Departmental requirements that don't make sense for you individually can often be substituted or waived. And if you're interested in graduate school, research experience and strong faculty recommendations are all but required.
Getting this sort of reputation in a department usually involves going above and beyond in courses not by doing what is expected perfectly, but by doing things that aren't expected, and that takes passion and time (and choosing classes and professors where it is possible).
> For upper level math or CS courses, these are often only 3 credits because there's no section, but you still need to spend at least 15 hours a week on them (so 4 hours of work for every hour of lecture)
This confused me at first. In my orientation session (14 hours long over 2 days…) they never talked about this! At community college basically all classes were 5 credits so it was weird to see many hard classes only be 3 or 4. Sounds like they aren’t going to be any less difficult… Quite annoying!
> Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
I’ll give this a shot for sure! There are quite a few classes that I’m interested in taking and it’s probably worth putting in a extra effort on the stuff that’s actually important to me.
Thanks again! Your comment gave me a lot of insight about college and UW. Hopefully I won’t have too many nightmares about UW :)
Harsh so much that I never want to go back to that kind of treatment, and their abuse after I graduated in trying to drag me back into a graduate program.
I'm going to be a repetitive guy with a Roman I know, so downvote me.
“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready. Dig deep, and it will ever flow." -Marcus Aurelius
My spouse has a bachelors in architecture, and definitely experiences these. Sometimes it's a design presentation that is needed but wasn't done at all, etc.
Architecture degrees are immensely stressful to get, and then the licensure process is insane, and then there's no money in it unless you're a partner, but partners don't get to do much of the conceptual design and drawing stuff usually, which is what usually brings people into architecture school and is the bulk of the school work.
If people knew if you wanted to make a good living in architecture, you'd really just be babysitting contractors, trying to get electrical and hvac engineers to live with the consequences that arise because buildings need both light and ventilation, fighting with permitting offices, and stamping other people's drawings, student life could be a lot less stressful; it's not worth spending every night in design studio working when the job sucks.
Computer Engineering was a lot less work for a bachelors, even though it was a lot. Of course, my school had biomedical engineers, they worked their butts off.
As for the OP site, it is not even possible to scroll down... it's stuck in the top. Shitty JS.
I don't know anyone who ever dreams about school (non-US obviously)
My friends are all in their 50s, and they all tell me they still have nightmares about school back in China. Not sure if school in China is still like that, though.
I finished high-school 25 years ago.
I was very sleep-deprived at university and once fell asleep after pulling an all-nighter for a Saturday morning exam, only to wake up on Sunday evening, with another exam looming Monday morning. Another time I overslept and was 2 hours late for a 3-hour exam. So, my dreams actually have roots in reality.
Funnily enough, I thought this was a Korean thing...
Could be an interesting research topic.
So you might be on to something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvDFJVUaXUI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=seoxjh0Ckfs
FTL is also used as an abbreviation for "faster than light" in sci/scifi discussions of exotic methods of fast travel.
Another time, I had a two hour course, but I thought it was a one hour course, and always came an hour late. One day, the teacher finally snapped: “Are you EVER going to get here on time!?!” The answer was no. No way I was sitting through two hours of that. It was my easiest class in university.
Most of my school-related nightmares have stopped at this point in my life, but they generally weren’t much worse than reality.
This was more or less my theory already. Our first, foundational experiences of anxiety, or at least specific kinds of anxiety.
I'm curious: was anyone here home schooled during high school and then didn't attend college? Where does your mind go to for the equivalent of the "institutional anxiety" dream scenario?
I always wake up with severe anxiety and have to look around to make sure I'm not living in the barracks.
And I'm either deployed overseas back in combat or getting ready to leave. And I can't find my weapon or parts of my uniform or equipment.
Since I'm making one random reply I might as well mention I used to dream about going to school and not being able to find my class. I think the dream had me skipping all classes (which I did, to go write code instead) for so long that I didn't even know what classes I was supposed to be in or where they were.
Part of my school PTSD is why we (mostly) home schooled our kids.
A couple games have riffed on this:
https://www.maristane.com/school-or-prison/
https://schoolprisons.com/
You often have to do a TON of reading and synthesis in H or SS fields. Mind-boggling reading lists aren't uncommon. If you're lucky the prose is a friendly style. If not... well, you know that feeling of trying to take in a math text quickly? It's not quite that bad, but it's related, lots of unfamiliar phrasing and terminology that you have to work out the connections between and condense semantics from. And then... you may not have well-defined problems. Essay questions/assignments amount to "come up with some thesis and supporting arguments that show familiarity with the material and the ability to generate interesting insight." Do "interesting" and "shows familiarity with the material" sound like uncomfortably subjective assessments? Why yes. Yes they are. Good luck! Also measuring things and experiments are hard. You can be reasonably dull in the natural sciences and still gather a useful amount of empirical observation; in the social sciences or humanities you're going to have to be pretty clever to get good empirical observations at all.
OTOH I would agree that CS and Math often have an additional level of conceptual difficulty, especially the more abstract the corner of the field you're working with, from "you'll definitely need some well-chosen concrete examples as introductory points and probably a bunch of graduated problem sets leading to the eventual brain-twisting revelation" to "you don't understand this, you just get used to it."
I'm considering a grad program that blends the two, so maybe I'll change my mind when I'm done.
It’s not that surprising that a situation you dealt with frequently in your teenage years is still there. I usually bluff my way through high school dream situations successfully. Feels good.
Maybe this dream is due to the fact that I missed at least half of all my classes because of basketball at the rec center.
Walking into class for the last course I need to graduate. Oh, didn't remember the final exam was today. I didn't even study for it. In fact, I don't think I even ever picked up the textbook. I get handed the test and I don't understand a single question. I'm going to fail and have to stay in school for another semester. Plus, apparently, I forgot to put on clothes when I left the house. I'm in class completely naked. Not again!
One of my regular dreams, along with the one where I get fired and go back to the manual labor job.
I find myself in my old high school and stuff has changed and is really confusing. I end up being compelled to go to classes and somehow have a schedule foisted on me that's too complex to be readable. I feel anxiety that the other students will notice my graying hair!
I'm always in the middle of a test that I didn't study for. There's a nebulous higher stakes component to it beyond just failing. I can't read the questions for some reason, but I feel the topic of the test, and it's different every time. Some nights it's high school, others college, but now mostly licensure-related since I guess that was the last time I actually took a test.
I finally realized it was just a carry over from years of being a real procrastinator when it came to getting my school work done and the gnawing panic I would get knowing I had a lot of work and little time to do it.
It was weird that after recognizing the source that feeling dissipated pretty quickly and I really embraced being free of it all
If you interpret what they said as "I want freedom but explicitly chose not to find it until 10 years later" then sure, that might be a contradiction.
If you interpret it as "I really freedom because it took me 10 years to fully realize what happened to me and want others to avoid the same thing" then it's more clear it's not a contradiction. It wasn't a choice, but rather a path they were sent down unknowingly. That's different than thinking it doesn't matter until then. This was my interpretation of it at least.
In my view, an adult ought to be able to leap at the chance for agency as soon as they emerge from these constraints. Maybe not immediately, but in a year or two at least. Otherwise, it circularily casts doubt on the premise. The argument is that the definition of an adult has to meet a certain standard.
School can be traumatic, and people are allowed to feel bad even if others have it worse, but unless you are severely bullied I see many of the descriptions in this thread as being overly dramatic compared to the crap that people have to deal with in other parts of the world. Hundreds of millions of kids would kill for the chance to be stressed at an American or European school.
Granted, this is not a generous point of view. The only reason I'm making these comments is because I recognize myself so much in the GP's experiences.
“Students are customers” - Hard disagree here. I had a great time in college but the effects of the neoliberalization of the university definitely diminished the experience. Schools are one of the only pre-capitalistic institutions left in society that situate folks in time and tradition. Now they are becoming another money grab.
The only consistent thing I can say is that if the dream situation occurs in real life, then my feelings and emotional response to the situation will likely be the same. That's been the sole valid anchor for me.
Anxiety about "authority figure" is a little odd, for example, relating to my school dream of having to vacate my hostel room and realising I lost the key..a friend comes up with "I think I have it" and upon checking the keybunch, it doesn't have my room's key. I'm not panicking but don't want the room door to be smashed down when I'm not around. I have something old and precious inside I need to grab.
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
I don't think that's the case, but more that kids are being put in these "high stakes" situations without the mental capacity to handle them. Turning in an assignment late, underpreparing or waking up late for an exam, getting a B+ instead of an A, fumbling during a presentation – these are all insignificant and completely artificial problems in the grand scheme of life. However when you are a student going through them it feels like the end of the world, and that memory sticks.
The only person I have ever known to have cried over grades was someone who cried over getting a B+ instead of an A. I know many more people who got D's instead of C's -- they didn't care.
But it’s fairly hard to truly mess it up.
But overall school and college was a great experience - the tests and assignments sucked, but what I remember is the great friends that I made, the interesting people that I met and all the personal exploration that I did.
No regrets that I took my sweet time to finish undergrad, in the grand scheme of life it was not time wasted, but time well spent.
Adulting does not offer the same opportunities - so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it.
That never happened, but I did drop a couple classes before the withdrawal deadline to fix the workload. It feels so real though.
Or I don’t have a HS diploma even though I graduated college and have had a job for 20 years.
You earned your degree, and your subconscious needs to needs to acknowledge it.
Why would you be drug down by this question? Perhaps there is a deeper reason.
“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready. Dig deep, and it will ever flow." -Marcus Aurelius
This one is a recurring dream for me and sometimes the context is middle or high school which makes even less sense.
A more recurrent dream for me is finding myself in the backseat of an empty, moving car, able to reach the steering wheel, but unable to control the brakes.
I wonder what this means. It is unnerving.
It really sucks lol
Sometimes I'm alone in the car. Other times there is someone else in the front but they are incapacitated, or unwilling to bring the car back under control. I'm usually alone, though.
On a few occasions I was able to climb into the front seat, but of course then the brakes either did nothing or were so ineffectual that trying to use them to slow down only distracted me and made matters worse.
(1) do you have a feeling that you have control of your own life? Maybe it feels that you are in a prison where "your hand is forced" and you cannot take own decisions, have to play the bad hand you received
(2) are you doing something risky, like working in a failing start up? Or a company thay is going towards bankruptcy?
Once you actually live that experience, it (or versions of it) will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life.
Here's one from the early 20th century: https://nautil.us/read-the-lost-dream-journal-of-the-man-who...
There were indeed dreaming of school:
> I am an assistant professor. Suddenly I receive express orders from the dean to teach osteology at the very last minute. Anxiety, anguish * * * when going over the bones in my memory. I enumerate those of the hand: scaphoids, capitate, and I did not know any more. Meanwhile the class awaits me, the students yell. I ask to myself how I will lecture about bones if I have almost forgotten them? Growing anguish and I awaken with a sense of well-being, upon realizing that I am not a professor, I am old and no one is directing me.
I have no idea where that dream came from or why I had it. I have never had a "didn't study" dream before, university was a relatively stress free time for me compared to my earlier years
I guess I'm brimming with enough (over)confidence to avoid the "didn't study" dreams or the "sitting in the back seat of an empty car" dreams, but I occasionally dream I signed up for some class and then didn't bother to attend it, wasting my time and snubbing the teacher.. "ah shoot, sorry guys"
School is supposedly the best experience in life, and simultaneously the most frequent source of nightmares decades later. What a curious coincidence!
Depends on the perspective, I guess. I was working in several different places, and sometimes I had hard time. Even working in the worst places, I felt better than in school.
I hated elementary school, because kids were cruel (some time I came back to home with chocking marks) and teachers decided to just not see bullying. Or decided to give me a hard time, too. When someone destroyed my textbook by writing on it while I was not at the desk, I got note to the parents because supposedly I told someone to do that.
I kinda liked liceum because finally people were more mature. But man, long term, it was very exhausting. The lesson schedule looked like it was set randomly. For example, in second class, being 16-17 yo, Thursdays I had lessons from 9 AM to 6 PM, and the next day I was starting at 7 AM. I was tired all the time and had no time for social interactions.
Please note that the following paragraph is not personal. It applies to the entire phenomenon. For me, it is annoying when grown-ups tell children that it is the best time in their life. When I was a kid, I felt fear a lot. As a teenager, I was depressed and tired all the time. And, you know, if it is the best time in my life, why should I care about my future at all? It is going to be terrible anyway...
Everyone has its own perspective. Maybe you had great time in school. Maybe for my mother, school years actually are the best years of her life. But telling young people that they are living the best time in their lives, and it will be only worse later, is... unfair.
I hated school. I hated the inadequacy of lesson - some were obviously way too easy for me, while others way too hard. The number of lesson hours per week per subject didn't align with my interests nor the difficulty of the subject. The amount of wasted time was staggering. For example, it so happened that I didn't attend high-school for half a year in my fourth semester. I had enough scores in some subjects to pass, but for a few I didn't, and was given a few weeks to prepare for oral exams. I managed to learn half a year worth of biology, history, and chemistry in 3 weeks, and passed the exams. It was a Pyrrhic victory - I passed to the next grade, but at the same time I realized that I'm wasting (6 months - a few weeks) each semester. I started questioning the meaning of going to school; I realized that I could learn faster on my own, then realized that I would have learned a whole lot more if I could learn with a mentor who'd have my best interests in mind. I also realized that no teacher has an interest in working with someone like me, and that the system is actively hostile to all the non-standard approaches and needs. By the next year, I was diagnosed with depression and missed the whole year while trying to come to grips with that harsh reality.
Later on, I was locked in a constant harassment from an English teacher (a second language here). I learned English in private lessons and on the Internet and I was good at it. That was unacceptable for her. I was to sit quietly in the corner and when I tried to participate in the lesson, I was branded her enemy. The unfair treatment was to the point where I barely graduated, yet I got 97% score on the matriculation exam. I had an urge to find her and throw the results in her face, but I knew I would never recover the lost time and expended psychological effort to persevere.
If I could do it all again, I would focus all I had on breaking out of the system. That system very obviously wasn't made for people like me, but I felt helpless, knowing there's no alternative. It was wrong. The alternatives are always there, even if deliberately hidden as to not "encourage abnormal behavior". I could have tried harder to get away from the system that damaged my health and gave me next to nothing in exchange. And if I couldn't find an alternative, I would have changed my attitude at least: look, Mr. teacher, you're being paid to teach me, and I'm not being paid to learn. So, Mr. teacher, act like I'm a paying customer, please. Because otherwise, Mr. teacher, I'll go through all possible means to fuck you up, cheerfully and as a hobby. Just as you've been doing to me all this time.
Maybe you mistook my perspective for hubris - but it is what childhood should be - innocent and pure and if it's not, then society is failing.
I did not take your post as a form of hubris. What I meant when I wrote about perspective is that personal experiences shape our assessment of reality. I agree that childhood should be innocent and pure. But sometimes, it is not.
When I have a particularly bad day as an adult, I often think back to being a child (or worse, teenager) in school forced to follow arbitrary rules by tired adults who were more interested in making sure nobody wore a baseball cap than keeping kids safe from anaphylactic allergic reactions.
When I think back to my school days and how anxious, stressed, unheard, and restricted I felt almost 100% of the time, I usually feel immediately better.
I remember being 16 in high school, and during the school day I couldn't just take a walk, because that would be truancy to skip class.
I couldn't just take a walk at night because our municipality instituted a curfew past I don't know, 10pm or something for those under 18, and a police car actively patrolled my neighborhood for violations.
I lived 18 years like that. Allowed to make no choices about where I went to school or at what time.
So now, as an adult, sometimes I just exit my apartment and walk down a city street when I feel like it, and it feels extremely empowering.
Taking a mental health day and not showing up to work, or better yet, handing in my resignation, also feel extremely empowering.
From my perspective, being a child sucked. I hated almost every moment of it, despite being reasonably popular in high school, having a close circle of friends, and never worrying about my grades.
Being an adult is amazing by comparison and I would never want to go back.
But I also understand that to some degree, that's a result of the freedom that comes with a high salary and an in-demand skillset that allow me to leave jobs and take days off with little risk. Many adults don't have that opportunity, and I totally understand how in some cases they could see their childhood as having been better due to a lack of responsibilities.
I get these exact nightmares. I wonder how common is this.
My friend called me as I was about to go to the gym and asked where I was, with a very concerned voice. It turned out that I was supposed to be at an exam. I rushed home, changed clothes and went like crazy to school. Luckily they let me in as the last one of the day - of course I had not prepared in the slightest - but did absolutely fine :)
Because my high school Biology course (A Levels in the UK) was divided into modules assessed throughout two years I came to the last exam pretty sure that I didn't have to score many marks to get the grade I was aiming for.
I ended up in a weird situation where my instinct was to prepare really well but, in practice, I should skimp on revision for Biology and concentrate on subjects that weighted the end-of-year exams higher.
The strategy worked out - I hit what I was aiming for in Biology and in the other subjects. But that whole very tactical approach so went against my character that, to this day, anxiety dreams manifest about not having done the work for that specific exam. Often they're further exaggerated (e.g. I've simply forgotten to go to any lessons all year, etc) but it focuses around that event.
I find it weird that my subconscious prefers that over arguably even more stressful (and sometimes less successful!) exams at university. Maybe I was just more equipped to deal with it by then.
I had to leave school to learn, and now that I’m a computer programmer, I feel apprehension that I might have to go back to school to four years to pretend to learn topics I learned independently just to assuage the school systems ego enough that they will give me an accreditation. The idea of going back to school makes me tense up at this point. Adulthood is so much less traumatizing because it feels like you have so much more choice to avoid abuse, and you can choose to confront abusive situations on your own schedule. You’re valued for so many more reasons than your ability to tolerate abuse and produce good test scores.
What? That's so far from the truth. If you fail in school you just get to try again. You may not get into Stanford but realistically your life can still be great no matter how many times you fail.
I do not agree with this at all.
Has anyone ever asked about my GED? No. Lol. Has lacking a college degree held me back? No (though there are definitely fields where it would have).
One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting out which bits of "received wisdom" actually deserve that label versus being cached now-bullshit that your parents and teachers don't know is obsolete. My parents were right about a lot of interpersonal stuff, but dead wrong about whether I needed to go to college in order to obtain good jobs.
As for the commenter's point on people caring or not caring about the GED/CHSPE; apart from needing it for my initial community college admission immediately after getting it, it never came up for me at all, despite teachers insisting for years that getting a diploma that way would ruin us. I don't even remember any the details of it, or where the documentation is: there's little point in having anything pre-university on a CV.
This actually never stops I think.
I never studied for anything, never did any homework, and to enter university in Germany I just needed good enough grades to pass high school (Gymnasium). GPA was irrelevant.
Of course, I don't wake up with any cold sweat over it.
Do you mean 3rd grade?
But having said that I imagine it could feel pretty different depending on what expectations you set for yourself, or more importantly - what expectations your parents set for you. If you've got mum and dad looming over your shoulder 24/7 pushing you for more so you can be a doctor/lawyer/CEO/whatever then you're probably going to feel pretty differently about the whole situation.
One of my favorite engineers dropped out of college because the university (UC) demanded an English proficiency test for the diploma after completing 4 years of of school.
Now they have 40+ patents and confounded 3 biotech companies with 9 digit exits.
Friends from the old days ironically refer to them as Dr.<Name> because they are the smartest person they know.
Sort of a community bestowed honorary doctorate.
There was way more stress later on.
For me, both elementary and high school were easy. I would do a minimal amount of work, show up to the exam and get maximum marks. Exams weren't especially stressful.
As a stereotypical school nerd, PE was stressful though - I do remember lots of anxiety being asked to jump the vaulting horse, do somersaults, handstands, and that kind of things I wasn't able to do.
And yet, I regularly dream about not having passed some non-PE high-school subject and having to retake the exam and/or go to class (even when these subjects were easy for me) and don't dream about PE.
I'd honestly not be surprised if the whole "dreams about school" thing turns out to be world-wide low grade PTSD.
Consequently, I never have dreams about exams. However, I do have dreams that I have to go back to school as an adult for some reason (usually because I missed some classes or exams or something and I have to do them now). The dreams are also never about the actual classrooms but just hanging around in the school with the teenagers and feeling weird about it.
Guess it's also compensated by the number of dreams where there are car problems and parking tickets of all kinds.
ok, that tracks because I don't look back on that as peak-anxiety, and I don't have dreams about being back in school. But I do have dreams about peak anxiety events that I will not be sharing here.
I usually learned the most out of take-home exams. You’d usually need to study and brush up on things, but then having a week to thoroughly work out everything was always a great learning experience. It is a way of the professor saying “you should know this and if not, know how to figure it out”. It was an actually good test of your knowledge and skill and didn’t rely on being able to spit something out in one or two hours in a stressful environment.
I think you’re right that no adult experiences moments like you get in school exams. Almost never are you required to know some relatively arbitrary thing or solve some problem within an hour or teo. There are crunches and moments of needing to fix something quickly and important presentations, but in every case you are presented with something you already know about or have day to day experience with. And failure is usually not some drastic adjustment of your future. If the professor is not good, which is the norm, then exams are a bit of a toss up.
At my current company, the security positions are focuses like that and actually test people, the Dev interviews are two leetcode questions and a conversation to make sure you arn't a complete dunce. I havn't met a single dumb person on the other side of the fence, but I have met alot of dumb devs here.
Project-based learning can't be managed with 40:1 student teacher ratios. The best learning has always come from projects and apprenticeship/mentorship style systems, but even managing that with 3 classes with a 10:1 student teacher ratio becomes hard. This should make sense, almost all the economic evidence is that parent characteristics are hands down the largest factors in what a kid's future income will be (mentorship).
Cheating is rampant which is why take-home exams rarely exist.
The reality is the world would be far better off with 3 times as many teacher, but you can't keep teachers wages as high as they are with 3 times the supply.
Now I'm older I understand what stress is and I do feel like my actions (or inaction) could ruin the rest of my life. There have been several key moments in my adult life that I can pinpoint as high stakes and peak anxiety. Yet I still have the school dreams. I had one just last night, in fact.
Comparatively most adults have incredible comfortable lives. Besides going to work they can basically do whatever they want. There is no pressure to strive for anything. It's baffling to me how people can lay such high pressure on their children but let themselves go in their own life.
> My kids however are leisurely creatures
How so? They are forced every weekday under duress of the law to go to a place they didn't choose to be. If they don't perform in their forced labor they are put into more forced labor. They have to listen to you and you probably very often take away their agency to do what they desire. Kids do have more "free" time, but that time is not actually free. But the way the can spend is very narrow. But more time does not equal better.
You grew up middle or upper class and the person you’re responding to didn’t, or had no or very bad relations with their family such that they didn’t or couldn’t help.
Don’t forget that school is the most orderly environment lots of children experience, the one where they’re most likely to be around educated people, intellectual stimulation, the least violent, the one where they’re reliably fed. Without the pretense that it’s about education that would be hard to keep up.
The reason why most adults are not very motivated when it comes to learning is because school has killed their learn drive. The recurring dreams may very well be a sign of a traumatic experience.
You can read more here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Learn_drive
Instead of putting pressure, parents should take away this very crippling aspect of today's schools by telling their children that grades are not so important and that the often required cramming does more harm than good.
If a child's learn drive survives school it will surpass many of its peers futher down the road.
Work is much more stressful and high stakes. There's no real structure, no contract or performance guide (like a syllabus), and I need this job to support my family. Getting another job would be very difficult.
To me that seems like a very fortunate life experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvDFJVUaXUI