Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?
I was reading one of Paul Graham's essays the other day (http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html), and came across one of those "dwarping" moments, as one of those passionate teachers I had used to say, in that almost every other paragraph were ideas I had thought about endlessly about before summed up concisely by someone more articulate than me. One of the ideas addressed, though, has been really tormenting me lately, because it's an idea I've had myself that I've been trying this past year to do but has not been working for me.
"If I had to go through high school again, I'd treat it like a day job. I don't mean that I'd slack in school. Working at something as a day job doesn't mean doing it badly. It means not being defined by it. I mean I wouldn't think of myself as a high school student, just as a musician with a day job as a waiter doesn't think of himself as a waiter. And when I wasn't working at my day job I'd start trying to do real work."
This sounds great in theory and helps me to some degree, but in some ways makes things even worse. I try and get through every school day and have decent grades and all, but each day is so monotonous and so many of the things we do are such wastes of time that it just drives me insane. Going home to work on something more I feel is more important that I actually enjoy and am challenged with, while obviously provides enjoyment, in another sense make this feeling even worse because it diminishes school even more. I do 'real work', but I want to real work at school too.
I'd like to think that I'm just the problem. Maybe I'm just taking my education for granted and this is just a "self-fulfilling prophecy" sort of thing. But, I spend nearly every moment outside of school learning, just because I love to do it. I want to love school. I love learning. Why don't I love school? I can't express in words how frustrated this question makes me.
I was just wondering if you guys had any experiences or suggestions to share about school. If anyone else has gone through this could or could give me some advice or just show how I'm wrong I would really appreciate it. I know it doesn't sound like much in the grand scheme of things, but I really don't want to waste the next two years of high school.
144 comments
[ 82.9 ms ] story [ 570 ms ] threaddrop out? startup? sucker up and go to college? do as your parents say?
just do whatever makes you happy, and fuck the rest.
"do what makes you truly happy for the longest amount of time".
That implies some thinking about the future instead of blindly following something that may lead to short-term but not long-term happiness. Also, it requires that you figure out what makes you truly happy, not just surface-level happy.
It's a lot more difficult to accomplish, but so very much more rewarding.
Go to a computer room when you can and build something great. Even though something is boring in your life and its mandatory for our society, do it. If people describe it as mandatory, do it.
A little story: I knew a guy in my school that made his first million in 10th grade. He dropped out and never looked back. You sir, don't have that luxury unless you decide to start now and make your first million. If you want out, strive to achieve what you think will actually get you out and keep you from working for "the man" in any other job....
Also, if your a child prodigy, think about going to the NSA website and crack a few of their codes... They are always hiring....
I also suggest you watch a movie called "Good Will Hunting". It struck home for me. Maybe it will for you.
Try something similar. High school is a massive, pointless waste of time. It's like prison. Get out of it by any means but be smart. Meaning: don't go apeshit and kill your classmates. If you do drop out, have a plan on how you can give people what they want so they can feed you and clothe you. May be you want to spend the rest of your days working in a Walmart, but probably not.
Anyway, don't stress over it. You're in a fucking America, you won't die of hunger :) And you'll die regardless of whether you went to high school or not, so don't worry. It doesn't really matter in the long run so enjoy the fact that you were born in this perverted (but fun) world.
Awesome rule to live by!
Maybe parts of it. In that it's extremely unlikely in ten years you'll talk to more than one person from your high school, but you'll still talk to many of your friends from college.
The problem with high school is you are stuck socializing with the people who happen to be geographically close to you. You don't get to choose who they are, so they could be a bunch of jerks and you can't do much about it. At college, that is WAY less likely to happen.
But you still can learn interesting stuff in high school, AND socially it's still an important step to go through all that dating/hanging out/partying stuff. You could wait until college to do that, but it would be awkward.
In other words, if there's one thing I've learned so far in life, it's not to underestimate the power of simple human contact. Go knock on a random professor's door, and I think you'd be surprised how many times the door opens!
Really? I went to three different summer programs at Ohio State University when I was in high school. Great fun.
My last summer program ran nine or ten weeks and had me playing RA in a biochemistry lab. One of the most generous masters' students in the whole world (I think the poor guy was in his 3rd or 4th year... he was kind of a long-term masters student ;) spent most of the summer teaching me stuff -- growing bacteria, lysing them, running chromatography columns, gels, enzyme activity assays, the works.
He was crazy, actually, to spend that much time teaching a high school junior who would never come back to the lab, but I hope he's having a happy career somewhere because he sure was generous.
Obviously, if an organized program exists, take it! My point was that the absence of such a program does not preclude you from taking an individual initiative to do something creative.
Even if you don't care about the competition, it's an easy pretense for getting in touch and working with a professor. Plus, you might be able to convince your school to give you time during the day to work on your research (when I was in HS, we got a period every other day).
http://www.simons-rock.edu/ http://www.earlycolleges.org/
As someone wiser than me once said, high school is probably the most structured experience you'll have unless you end up in prison. College is different (if you decide to go).
High school is a geographical coincidence. College is more your choice.
You only have two years left in your "term". If you drop out, your parents very well may decide to kick you out (as in, why should they support you if you're not supporting them [by not dropping out]).
Unfortunately, in this white-collar society, having a high school degree is almost a bare minimum requirement for being hireable (in some states, McDonald's will not hire non-HS/non-GED)
> I absolutely can't stand wasting time.
Please read this: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/13/stoicism-101...
> I'm introverted and spend most of my time reading or obsessively working on hobbies like programming
As someone who is much older than you and very much has considered the possibility of dropping out (e.g. quitting my job), please consider what you will do for income if you are not in school. Are you active in community/open source? If not, why? What kind of brand/reputation in the open source community have you built? Enough to do paid consulting?
> But, I spend nearly every moment outside of school learning, just because I love to do it.
You're like me. You're using absolutes. Contradicting yourself. I'm guilty of those self-lies too. No one spends every moment learning. Otherwise, you would be learning that which would have a greater relative impact on your navigation of this world (e.g. organizing introverts together, taking the lead, social and other-ness).
Very true. It is precisely the young people who thrive most as independent learners who feel most stifled by high school.
http://learninfreedom.org/
Some of the feeling of structure comes with adolescence. But happy is the adolescent who restructures his learning environment to increase his personal responsibility.
Most states have these now.
Look into it.
I also highly recommend AP courses.
Don't even worry if your school doesn't offer the class for it. A friend of mine and I did self-study for one AP test, and started about 3-4 weeks before the text. I didn't "ace" it, but I got a high enough score that it got me out of required classes in college.
Look up Hans Reiser [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Reiser] and Niniane Wang [http://niniane.org/] - they are early dropouts in the tech industry. It's not totally insane to fast-track your career.
2. You are naive. Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges. Nothing that goes on there is a waste of time.
3. Start acting like a Gr. 10 student.
> Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges. Nothing that goes on there is a waste of time.
Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life, and will become more so in the future as the world gets more crowded and less wealthy. There's an old aphorism: it's not what you know, it's who you know. It took me twenty years to learn the hard way that this aphorism contains more than a grain of truth. It is, in fact, the whole ballgame. If you're smart but no one can stand to work with you, you will lose. Contrariwise, if you're dim but people love you you will do fine.
So if you don't want to waste the next two years, here's a project for you: figure out a way to get 100 of your peers working on something -- anything -- together. It doesn't have to make a profit (though that would be good), it doesn't have to make the world a better place (though that would be good too), but it should not be actively destructive (that makes it too easy) and every one of those 100 people has to be doing it because they want to. They all have to be enthusiastic about it. Note that what I'm suggesting is different from becoming "popular", though becoming popular might be helpful (or it might not). You have to actually organize these people into doing some kind of productive activity. Just inviting 100 people to a beer bash doesn't count.
If you achieve that you will have just had the most useful two years of your life. Good luck.
Well said. I have started to meet many people who aren't super smart but they get things done because they don't paralyze themselves by analyzing why things won't work and just get things started. And by corollary, their confidence makes other people believe they can do it (even if they don't know how they will do it)
Recommended essay to ponder: "I ain't good but I got guts"
http://iggychaos.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-aint-good-but-i-got-...
Absolutely. High school is a great time to learn to get along with, and like, all sorts of people. You have your whole life to study and learn. But knowing how to get along with people is more important than any other skill you can learn.
Beware developing an "I'm smarter than everyone around me" attitude like most geeks have. It limits us, both in success and in happiness.
This suggestion caught my eye. My oldest son appears to be a bit older than the submitter of this thread, now in eleventh grade. For him, "eleventh grade" has been mostly dual-enrollment studies at our state flagship university, with a seventeen-credit course load there this semester, and an additional distance learning class from the EPGY Online High School at Stanford University.
His peer collaboration project has been a website
http://impishidea.com/
about literary criticism of best-selling fantasy genre novels read by today's young people. He has gradually found a group of local and online friends who are appalled by the literary characteristics of today's best-sellers such as the Inheritance and Twilight series, and runs the website as webmaster and forum moderator, with help from a lot of his friends, to elevate the tastes of readers and to discuss better writing. Computer programming in the service of good literature is how he combines his interests.
I have utterly no idea how my son's activities will look to a college admission committee. (He should have his first admission result in about a half year's time as I type this.) And, no, he doesn't feel all day every day that he is doing just what he would like best. Part of the stress of being an adolescent is moving from dependence on the birth family to being able to independently support a family in the next generation. My son tries to keep his eye on the prize of getting to make more and more of his own decisions as he grows up.
That's what they kept telling me. I don't believe it. I for one acquired little social skills in high school and orders of magnitude more since I started working.
I think people just can't bring themselves to admit that high school is a net loss. It is not easy to admit you've wasted many years of your life. At the same time, most intellectually honest people can't really say it with straight face any more that high school has anything to do with education. So they cling to secondary made up reasons like the one about social skills.
I'm in 12th grade by the way, and 11th and 12th have been my biggest growth years in terms of interpersonal ability.
- You can't make something interesting when your time is controlled minute-by-minute. If you were stuck in India for the next four years, you could find some way to make it interesting because you have freedom. You simply can't make, say, prison interesting if it's not already, because everything is so rigidly controlled.
- High school is NOT there to socialize you; it's there to keep you in one place all day so that your parents don't have to babysit you (see http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html, http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/). High school society bears very little resemblance to adult societies in the real world. For one thing, you can't pack up and leave if you don't like it. For another, your friends are chosen by accidents of age and geography, and not by you. For yet another, adults (some adults, anyway) spend the day doing things; most of the work that high schoolers do is simply thrown in the garbage at the end of the year.
- High school can't possibly be a filter for anything, because everyone is forced to attend; the "filter" isn't a filter if it lets everyone (or nearly everyone) through. Prep schools are filters for colleges, but they filter based on how much money your parents make and not based on how smart you are.
- The vast, vast majority of adults, by the time they're 25, have forgotten 90% (or more) of the stuff they've supposedly "learned" in high school; it necessarily follows that most of the "learning" is a complete waste of time, as you can't possibly make use of information if you don't know what it is.
- Why in Cthulhu's name should anyone want to act like a high school student? Most high school students accomplish nothing of any importance. Most high school students will do incredibly dangerous and stupid stunts if their friends ask them to. Most high school students waste enormous amounts of time on stuff that is neither fun nor important. See http://bygpub.com/books/tg2rw/chap3excerpt.htm for more on this.
'For another, your friends are chosen by accidents of age and geography, and not by you.'
this seems patently false to me, you hang out with the people who energize and care about you whether you are 16 or 25...
I mean, yes it's true that high school is boring and has many flaws, but it really doesn't take up that much time, and you can get a lot out of it. Classes can be boring and stifling, but I would argue that going to college without at least calculus isn't the best idea if you plan to have a lot of time to learn all the cool math you want/need.
Also, as some previous posters mentioned, until you're kicking everyone's ass and winning math/programming competitions, I don't think it's fair to say that school is too easy
The sample of such people is MUCH smaller in high school than it is in the real world (easily five orders of magnitude smaller).
"but it really doesn't take up that much time,"
Four years full-time is a lot, especially when you're young. The average job lasts less than three years.
"but I would argue that going to college without at least calculus isn't the best idea if you plan to have a lot of time to learn all the cool math you want/need."
Agreed, but you don't need high school for calculus, and high schools usually do a terrible job of teaching it (how many people know what a derivative is five years later?)
All I'm saying is that though high school clearly isn't perfect, I have trouble agreeing with the apocalyptic pictures some people paint.
There's nothing wrong with being an introvert... but there are degrees of introversion. And self-study is the secret to learning, which you seem to understand, but you might be surprised to find that you self-study better when you've got a team, a goal, a project, or a group. If the groups at your school seem to suck, there are other ones around. You've even got the Internet, which I didn't have at your age.
Here's one regret from my high school days: At one point someone came up to me and said "You're a big guy and you're not already on the football team or any other team. Want to learn to play the tuba and march in the band? We need more tuba!" At that point I was a very shy freshman, easily embarrassed, with no musical experience, and that whole idea sounded preposterous, like some kind of practical joke. So I said no. I wish I hadn't done that. It turns out that they were probably serious. And playing the tuba is probably pretty easy! I might have faked it pretty well with just four notes and a basic sense of rhythm! And it might have been fun to march around with the band... a nice, structured group activity with a lot of depth. (There is always a more complicated piece of marching-band music out there...) And I'd be have been that much farther ahead on learning something about music.
Hang in there. Don't drop out of high school if you can possibly help it -- it's good to have the degree, and believe me it will end. And college is a big improvement!
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[1] They pulled me and a few others out of freshman algebra class and just gave us the AHSME, one day. I had no idea what the AHSME was, but I took it, and I ended up in a three-way tie for first place in my high school with my best friend (another freshman) and a senior member of the math club. I learned about the math club the next day when its faculty adviser came stalking into the cafeteria during lunch, waving the AHSME results in one hand, with the wild-eyed look of a prophet on a mission. He approached me and my friend and more-or-less told us that we had to join the math club, it was vitally important, because we had the knack.
That guy was great. Teaching is a weird business. 99% of the time you are saying the same things that you always say, but the remaining 1% are tiny moments which change people's lives forever.
My mother _forced_ me to try out for drama. She said 'all you have to do is audition.. then I'll never bring it up again'. I can't tell you how much the thought of even going to the audition repulsed me, much less performing on stage.
At the audition, while waiting, I was hanging around the most friendly people I had ever encountered (ok, it was a bunch of girls that were actually talking to me). Suddenly the fear of being onstage was less than the fear of being lonely.
I went from being scared of walking down the hallway to being able to talk in front of large crowds. My Friday nights of soldering and programming turned into a different kind of fun.. a chance to socialize with others.
(btw I can't sing for the life of me.. the trick is to stand in front or next to people with a similar voice. If you have a decent director they'll do this automatically)
http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/index.php
Math club heaven. If only the Web had existed when I was a teenager.
Take something like econ 101 (not programming) or physics. Depending on the school you can take classes at, I think you'll find you'll be getting your a kicked by the information. What you used to find so easy in HS will now be much more difficult. You'll actually need to study :)
With that, push through. It is not that difficult to do well in high school and the reward of a good college is worth it.
If you really do love learning, good classes can really expand your understanding of - and interest in - the world.
Try to find things to keep you enthused while you still have to be there, like clubs/societies, especially if they're in fields that you're not too comfortable with at the moment. For example (I don't know if this will apply to you, since your post is quite articulate), I went into the debating society in high school with very little knowledge of public speaking and a lot of nerves about presenting in front of people. Two years later I was competing at the national level, and people still think I'm a good speaker when I just wing presentations without preparation. You have a lot of free time right now (maybe it doesn't feel that way, but it's a lot compared to what you'll have later!), so make use of it in a way that pushes your boundaries and expands your skills.
So my advice is if you really dislike the schoolwork, just ignore it and do the bare minimum to pass, and spend your free time on more interesting things. You can't really quite school because you are still too young and immature.
But don't feel guilty about skipping schoolwork as long as you are spending your time on something productive and worthwhile.
2. A few, I could 'network' more as some people above me said. I guess I've been aversive to that because it seems that's the only thing most of my peers want to do. If that'll make it more enjoyable though, I'll try...
I hated most of school up to college as well, because 95% of it was just a pure time waste.
What are your Ruby skills like?
Do you want a job? ;-)
(Only 50% joking...)
Also, try a sport or other extra-curricular. (tennis and track were good for skinny guys like me). Do more with your classmates than just go to class.
But you can't make your school not-school. It's always going to be boring, mostly pointless, mostly a waste of time. Accept this and deal with it.
Or you can stay frustrated and angry about it instead. This is totally normal, expected, and acceptable teenager behavior--it worked fine for me--but it won't actually change anything.
Good luck.
If I hadn't done the dual-enrollment program, I would have probably taken the proficiency exam and gone to a community college. Instead, I'm graduating with the rest of my class and going to an Ivy League university. I can't emphasize how great dual-enrollment is.
Failing that, I'd say stay in school and while you're still young use all that free time to network, meet people with similar interests, and make things. In short, "Get Excited and Make Things", as the poster says. You have tons of free time (or at least way more than I have now at 23), so run with it. Don't discount the value of highschool. You'll realize later in life how much it meant.
Some of the most influential and successful people I know, I met in highschool. Two of which are currently engaged in running their own business, which I helped bootstrap one summer whilst in college.
Don't drop out. Finish. Learn to finish things, even if you hate them. Accept them as challenges.