And such a sad sentiment too. I think about high school days... almost never?
And I enjoyed them at the time. What's the saying, "If high school was the best time of your life, you've wasted your life?"
What an article of pointless sentiments. I would have probably gone to parties with cute popular kids in high school, but I hardly care about such things now. I throw far better parties, and know far cuter people now...
How lovely for you. Now: the thrust of the piece is that for many, the status you assign yourself (and have assigned for you) in adolescence persists through adulthood.
There's a useful idea toward the end: How a "box of strangers" tends to have cause the same social stress as a typical high school. Think of large companies, legislative bodies, or any other place where you're forced to deal with a large group of strangers.
I'm glad to see this article, because it questions what has become an unquestioned building block of American society. Attempts to trivialize it come, as I see it, from two sources: repression ("Who cares about high school? They're all in jail or barefoot and pregnant now." I care. Wow do I care) or ignorance ("What? High school was a great time! I miss those days!" Well, I might have been part of the 1%...)
The reason we can't ignore high school is simple: sexual maturity. We cannot transcend our origins. Delay of the responsibility of having/caring for children into late (or even early) 20's is a leaky abstraction. Pretending kids are kids until they graduate does not make it so.
And with sexual maturity comes...aggression. Especially because high school is like Silicon Valley on steroids: there's so much change going on that everyone's at risk of becoming "disrupted" when one girl hits puberty the right way or one dude makes varsity in $SPORT to everyone's surprise. With the presence of adults whose roles are less in flux (like the environments the home-schooling families in the article implied), things are less turbulent and reward aggression less. But there are none; the teachers exist for (and get fulfilled by and paid for and punished for doing other than) teaching, not enforcing discipline.
"Your "'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" ~ Jamie Zawinski, Groupware Bad
Also, props to PG for independently coming to the conclusion that it's the "middle classes" of high school that have the most reason to be nervous[1].
Tangent: that JWZ quote always seemed like obvious inspiration for Facebook. I'm surprised to find out that the rant it's from postdates FB's creation... feels like it was a different era when I first read that.
In reading pg's essay, I find it curious that he doesn't mention Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punnish[1], which describes how schools and prisons did in fact have common historical origins.
As somebody who interacts with high schoolers on a regular basis, I attribute their nastiness to the snowball effect.
They can't read long form information because they didn't want to before high school. Now they can't without a great exertion of effort.
They can't write because they don't read, which is where it is easiest to learn new words.
They think social studies is boring because it's a lot of reading and writing. That the class usually focuses on stuff that happened too long ago to be visible in their lives doesn't help.
They don't understand mathematics because their earlier instructors taught it as algorithms without context, the beautiful axiomatic nature of mathematics is never revealed.
By contrast, everyone can do PE. Even kids who stay indoors a little too long, slowly giving themselves radon induced lung cancer. If you're good enough, you can even get a scholarship to play on a college team.
It's no wonder in most schools so much emphasis is put on sports games.
So what do you get when you have a bunch of illiterate teenage prisoners in a room trying to read Shakespeare?
About the same thing you get when you have a thousand monkeys try to write it.
Speaking as one of "they", I'd just like to point out that these are all generalizations. Not every highschool is full of students like those described above.
Every one of these things applies about as well to adults, in my experience, at whatever age cutoff you use to define the word 'adult'.
Especially this one:
> They don't understand mathematics because their earlier instructors taught it as algorithms without context, the beautiful axiomatic nature of mathematics is never revealed.
And, in my experience, this is incomplete at best:
> They can't write because they don't read, which is where it is easiest to learn new words.
Learning new words is a small part of why reading is essential to writing. Most of it is learning new sentence and paragraph structures, which mirrors the new structures of thought required to compose those kinds of linguistic structures in the first place. Hemingway is an extreme example: You won't learn a lot of interesting new words reading his works, but you'll learn a lot about how to structure ideas.
Conveying that amount of nuance in your second point would have destroyed my flow.
The sports thing was a wrong statement caused by the process of writing a comment as opposed to a blog post. (Ex: Fire and forget)
I may or may not have written that while on Valium, can't remember. I saw the flaws when I copy pasted but felt it would be somehow improper to rewrite the post.
The emphasis on sports in US high schools has nothing to do with the fact that everyone can do it and everything to do with the entertainment industry built around sports in the US. The fact that you can get a scholarship to college just for playing sports well is a symptom of that.
I live in a country where sports aren't as watched or cared about as in the US. And if they are it's other countries playing it(like the world cup/champions league/eurocup in soccer). But the whole not being able to read/write well and not liking mathematics thing holds just the same here as it does in the states. However, people don't turn to sports to derive social status(we do have your equivalent of "the popular kids" but they aren't "jocks"). Furthermore, I know of no school that puts almost any kind of real emphasis on sports.
I think by far the biggest reason so much emphasis is put on sports in US high schools is precisely because of the importance sports holds in overall American culture due to the entire entertainment industry built around it. Not the other way around.
Please tell me this magical place where people aren't obsessed with watching sports (playing themselves is fine). My passort is in hand :)
I completely agree. Athletics should be decoupled from public schools - K-12 and public universities. As someone who attended public school in the US, and who's wife currently teaches at a public school, I can say with certainty that these places are just training camps for the best athletes. In the place I currently live, the adults speak of their children always in the context of how good they are at a particular sport - never about academics or other achievements. For the parents, a child who's a good athlete is the same as winning the lottery.
Where I am, in Scandinavia, and I think also in most of continental Europe, sports are decoupled from the schools. You don't have school teams or schools competing against each other, instead various junior sports teams are simply local and geographical, drawing kids from surrounding schools.
And junior sports activites are completely extra-curricular. A local team might have its activities at a single school, so as a student you might have your after-school basketball at your school, or another school, it all depends. You still have a lot of people watching professional sports, and working their way up through junior sports, but the "high-school jock" cliché simply does not exist.
And, consequently, athletic proficiency isn't mixed with academic proficiency, the school doesn't care about how good a student is at basketball or football or whatever, that's completely outside its interests. And academic scholarships based on athletic skill is unheard of. (Then again, scholarships are pretty unheard of, university education is free... :) )
It's a subjective popularity contest, much like high-schools everywhere. Dress "right", talk "right", listen to the "right" music, be attractive, and pretend to be confident.
Well, I live in Lebanon. Very far from being a magical place. Instead of being obsessed with sports, people are obsessed with politics. And not in a good way. It's all sectarian, religiously racist bullshit.
But if you do decide to visit, let me know and I'll show you around :-p
Hey, sounds good. I'd like to visit that region - especially love the food.
On other other hand - I guess sports is a distraction from politics and disagreement - a proxy war if you will. But watching others play is entirely different than getting out on the field.
Well, if you are interested in visiting the area then I would definitely recommend Lebanon(I'm obviously biased, but still). Most people speak English or at least understand it, though fluency does vary quite a bit. So you shouldn't have too much trouble talking to people even if you don't speak Arabic. And we have really good weather for most of the year though it can get very hot and humid in the summer.
If all you know about this place is gleaned from the news it sounds like a warzone but it really isn't, and there's usually quite a bit of warning before anything security-compromising happens -- With the exception of the 2006 war with Israel, that was quite sudden. But relatively few areas were affected.
As long as you stay away from Hezbollah-controlled territory(The deep south, the bekaa valley and the souther suburbs/ghetto of Beirut) you won't get kidnapped or anything like that :P
If you do take a leap, shoot me an email(in profile) and I'd be more than happy to assist :-)
I think sports are the principal reasons classes start so early in high school in the u.s. i recall shuddering under heavy rainfall in the early a.m. hours waiting for a bus to pick me up, barely conscious, staggering into a "homeroom". By the time I woke up, it was time to go home. Most kids stayed after for 6 or 7 hours practicing sports they'd never have the slightest chance of competing in beyond high school.
I did nothing in highschool except get wasted with my friends and play cards in the cafeteria pretending we had spare blocks when in reality we just skipped every single class. Eventually we would check into homeroom for attendence then just walk out the door to go skateboard or drink tall cans of pure swill on the beach. We gave the school voicemail lines and had my older sister leave the message pretending to be my mother, so if they ever called wondering why I was never in class I just deleted the msg and nobody followed up.
Somehow we kept passing with low Cs for showing up for the odd test and the finals. It was almost an automatic pass I guess our teachers just wanted to get rid of us to the next grade and never see us again. My English Lit 10 final was just to write an essay on anything, so I did and got a P. Good enough.
I eventually dropped out in Grade 11, did the GED test, and 2yrs later after I was off probation for some hacking charge only had to do a semester of precalc at community college before being admitted into university, and eventually a compsci major. Piece of cake, this highschool is.
The author of this nymag post seems traumatized by it. I treated highschool as the joke that it was, had epic good times and as a result have no problems talking to a room full of strangers. I can't even remember being stressed one day in highschool all the fights and problems I ran into were outside in the streets school was just party time all the time.
Sounds very similar to my own high school experience actually..never really cared, never stressed, smoked a lot of weed, had a lot of different friends, partied, had fun. Could have gotten more girls I suppose, but I'm making up for it now. Girls just love software engineers don't they?
Funnily enough, the Wikipedia article states "The concept is used in schools around the world", and then continues "Homeroom is a concept that does not exist in Argentinian schools" (nor in Uruguayan schools, which is where I come from).
30 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadAnd I enjoyed them at the time. What's the saying, "If high school was the best time of your life, you've wasted your life?"
What an article of pointless sentiments. I would have probably gone to parties with cute popular kids in high school, but I hardly care about such things now. I throw far better parties, and know far cuter people now...
The reason we can't ignore high school is simple: sexual maturity. We cannot transcend our origins. Delay of the responsibility of having/caring for children into late (or even early) 20's is a leaky abstraction. Pretending kids are kids until they graduate does not make it so.
And with sexual maturity comes...aggression. Especially because high school is like Silicon Valley on steroids: there's so much change going on that everyone's at risk of becoming "disrupted" when one girl hits puberty the right way or one dude makes varsity in $SPORT to everyone's surprise. With the presence of adults whose roles are less in flux (like the environments the home-schooling families in the article implied), things are less turbulent and reward aggression less. But there are none; the teachers exist for (and get fulfilled by and paid for and punished for doing other than) teaching, not enforcing discipline.
"Your "'use case' should be, there's a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid?" ~ Jamie Zawinski, Groupware Bad
Also, props to PG for independently coming to the conclusion that it's the "middle classes" of high school that have the most reason to be nervous[1].
[1]http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html, 15 Feb 2005.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
As somebody who interacts with high schoolers on a regular basis, I attribute their nastiness to the snowball effect.
They can't read long form information because they didn't want to before high school. Now they can't without a great exertion of effort.
They can't write because they don't read, which is where it is easiest to learn new words.
They think social studies is boring because it's a lot of reading and writing. That the class usually focuses on stuff that happened too long ago to be visible in their lives doesn't help.
They don't understand mathematics because their earlier instructors taught it as algorithms without context, the beautiful axiomatic nature of mathematics is never revealed.
By contrast, everyone can do PE. Even kids who stay indoors a little too long, slowly giving themselves radon induced lung cancer. If you're good enough, you can even get a scholarship to play on a college team.
It's no wonder in most schools so much emphasis is put on sports games.
So what do you get when you have a bunch of illiterate teenage prisoners in a room trying to read Shakespeare?
About the same thing you get when you have a thousand monkeys try to write it.
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5125650
The truth of the matter is, you're in good company. [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4327297
Especially this one:
> They don't understand mathematics because their earlier instructors taught it as algorithms without context, the beautiful axiomatic nature of mathematics is never revealed.
And, in my experience, this is incomplete at best:
> They can't write because they don't read, which is where it is easiest to learn new words.
Learning new words is a small part of why reading is essential to writing. Most of it is learning new sentence and paragraph structures, which mirrors the new structures of thought required to compose those kinds of linguistic structures in the first place. Hemingway is an extreme example: You won't learn a lot of interesting new words reading his works, but you'll learn a lot about how to structure ideas.
Conveying that amount of nuance in your second point would have destroyed my flow.
The sports thing was a wrong statement caused by the process of writing a comment as opposed to a blog post. (Ex: Fire and forget)
I may or may not have written that while on Valium, can't remember. I saw the flaws when I copy pasted but felt it would be somehow improper to rewrite the post.
I live in a country where sports aren't as watched or cared about as in the US. And if they are it's other countries playing it(like the world cup/champions league/eurocup in soccer). But the whole not being able to read/write well and not liking mathematics thing holds just the same here as it does in the states. However, people don't turn to sports to derive social status(we do have your equivalent of "the popular kids" but they aren't "jocks"). Furthermore, I know of no school that puts almost any kind of real emphasis on sports.
I think by far the biggest reason so much emphasis is put on sports in US high schools is precisely because of the importance sports holds in overall American culture due to the entire entertainment industry built around it. Not the other way around.
I completely agree. Athletics should be decoupled from public schools - K-12 and public universities. As someone who attended public school in the US, and who's wife currently teaches at a public school, I can say with certainty that these places are just training camps for the best athletes. In the place I currently live, the adults speak of their children always in the context of how good they are at a particular sport - never about academics or other achievements. For the parents, a child who's a good athlete is the same as winning the lottery.
And junior sports activites are completely extra-curricular. A local team might have its activities at a single school, so as a student you might have your after-school basketball at your school, or another school, it all depends. You still have a lot of people watching professional sports, and working their way up through junior sports, but the "high-school jock" cliché simply does not exist.
And, consequently, athletic proficiency isn't mixed with academic proficiency, the school doesn't care about how good a student is at basketball or football or whatever, that's completely outside its interests. And academic scholarships based on athletic skill is unheard of. (Then again, scholarships are pretty unheard of, university education is free... :) )
But if you do decide to visit, let me know and I'll show you around :-p
On other other hand - I guess sports is a distraction from politics and disagreement - a proxy war if you will. But watching others play is entirely different than getting out on the field.
If all you know about this place is gleaned from the news it sounds like a warzone but it really isn't, and there's usually quite a bit of warning before anything security-compromising happens -- With the exception of the 2006 war with Israel, that was quite sudden. But relatively few areas were affected.
As long as you stay away from Hezbollah-controlled territory(The deep south, the bekaa valley and the souther suburbs/ghetto of Beirut) you won't get kidnapped or anything like that :P
If you do take a leap, shoot me an email(in profile) and I'd be more than happy to assist :-)
Soccer is a religion in Europe (and most of the rest of the world) but no one gets into a university in Europe only thanks to their soccer skills.
Somehow we kept passing with low Cs for showing up for the odd test and the finals. It was almost an automatic pass I guess our teachers just wanted to get rid of us to the next grade and never see us again. My English Lit 10 final was just to write an essay on anything, so I did and got a P. Good enough.
I eventually dropped out in Grade 11, did the GED test, and 2yrs later after I was off probation for some hacking charge only had to do a semester of precalc at community college before being admitted into university, and eventually a compsci major. Piece of cake, this highschool is.
The author of this nymag post seems traumatized by it. I treated highschool as the joke that it was, had epic good times and as a result have no problems talking to a room full of strangers. I can't even remember being stressed one day in highschool all the fights and problems I ran into were outside in the streets school was just party time all the time.
what the fuck are you smoking and where can I get some
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeroom
Funnily enough, the Wikipedia article states "The concept is used in schools around the world", and then continues "Homeroom is a concept that does not exist in Argentinian schools" (nor in Uruguayan schools, which is where I come from).