Ask HN: Did Anyone Else Here Simply Not Do Well at School?

I did horrible in school. I aced almost every single test, midterm, and final. I remember my AP teachers being surprised I got 5s across the board from calc BC to chemistry to US history. Literally had 92-100% on exams (what actually matters) and failed homework and attendance. On paper I was a B/C student overall because homework and busywork would be anywhere from 10-30% of the grade..

I just never found those other parts of “schooling” that enticing.

I feel that homework should be optional, made for people who don’t understand the material to hopefully have it make sense. It’s like people who need to grind 500 LC to feel good because they don’t actually understand arrays.

Attendance should be optional. I’m paying the college to go to school. I’m there to learn, and if I am getting 90-100% on tests (A grade basically) I should not be penalized for not showing up on time or skipping altogether. Doesn’t matter now, I’m over it.

I studied business in school. I’m a self taught swe.

Now that I’m a staff engineer and started my own company I can’t believe how much school just tries to make you an average person and punishes people who are creative and ambitious. Homework is an opportunity cost and waste of time. Mandatory attendance is basically bullshit meetings people set up and have to be told they’re wasting people’s time.

Most people who did well in school were early game advantaged. Maybe they did well in mid game. Most fell off end game.

Now that I’m in my end game I see that the people who always ended up at the top (valedictorian or too 5%) are mostly doing average things. They fell off. I would beat them on tests 1v1 or group, so they would gank other lanes (homework and other busywork BS) leaving me open to farm knowledge and capabilities, push farther. Eventually you will show up in team fights beefy and turn the tide completely.

Almost everyone who I meet now that’s successful and forward thinking either dropped out of college or found it just beneficial just for the people they met. They are all fast learners and adapt quickly. School should be about building capabilities and knowledge.

I’m planning on sending my children to private schools where they will be tested and pushed on knowledge and capability. Not the ability to be a drone.

I did not do well at school. I think I have some mild dyslexia that puts a cap on my reading speeds, and being in a lecture class of size 30 didn't work well for me. I recall getting bogged down by the slower people in class, so I'd start daydreaming about programming, and then be out of context when class started progressing again. Here I'm talking Jr High and High Schools.

My kids are in an Expeditionary Learning school (based off Outward Bound), and I think that would have worked really well for me. Much more hands on, and a much smaller class size. They have K-12 in a school the size of my Jr HS. My daughter's graduating class size was less than twice the size of my HS Social Studies classrooms.

But, I'm watching my son struggle in a lot of the same ways that I struggled. School is just something he does until he can get home and do programming. But in retrospect, I understand the value of figuring out how to do the boring things. I call it "making license plates". It's boring, you just pull the handle and crank one out, but it needs to be done. So I'm trying to both foster his love of the programming and computer stuff, while also trying to get him to have strategies for dealing with the boring stuff.

I was quite lucky after HS. I thought I needed to go to college, so I tried to go down that path, but it just was totally the wrong path for me. Meanwhile, I had some connections that led to getting hired by Hewlett-Packard while I was still in HS. So, after trying a semester of Community College, which I totally failed at (in some ways it failed me, but let's be honest: I wasn't engaged with it at all).

Through luck and connections, I was able to always be employed at something I love. For me, the work was engaging and educational. I always loved learning on my own, it was just the learning in school that was a problem. Today, in my 50s, I feel fairly well educated, still have a passion for learning, and have a good job and family.

It's a different world now, in many ways. But, CS people are in high demand. In some ways, the traditional CS education is going to struggle with the new world. People need the foundations, in order to be able to leverage LLMs, but CS teaches through a lot of rote work that LLMs can do. It's a lot like embracing calculators in mathematics, which I remember there being two minds about back in my Jr HS era.

Unfortunately, I think you're going to have to pick a path that suits you.

Failed my last course in University, which meant I had to complete another semester on an already 5 year degree. Graduated with a GPA that people didn't believe it was possible to graduate with.

Guess what, it never mattered. I worked my way from a 5 person consulting gig to FANG now over a 10+ year period. My grades, the school I went to, and the amount of time I took to complete my degree has never mattered.

My advice for everyone is, work hard and be curious. Take each failure with a grain of salt and keep trying.

I teach part time at the university level (I am not going to say where).

I would love to give you my perspective on this as I see a lot of non-neurotypical students. Some of these students do well in an academic environment; some don't - and to generalize this across schools; some schools have a more regularized population and select for this. Similarly, others accommodate more for these types of things versus schools that do less.

Additionally, it is well recognized that academic success is not necessarily an indicator of how well people "do in life". What academic success is, however, is a door opener for other opportunities. There are other door openers, like being a really good coder.

What you need to do is to figure out what your "superpower" is. It might be coding; it might be math, or something like being able to relate longitudinally to a task over a long period.

Everyone has a superpower, it's just some people are not aware of what it is. Go at figuring that out, and don't let people tell you something about yourself that you do not believe. My sister puts this another, simpler, way "Don't let the turkeys get you down".

Good luck!