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Why adults still dream about school

theatlantic.com

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Re: Why adults still dream about school

#111

Post by lupire »

xeromal wrote: post #109
sosodev wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'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.

It depends on the school. Public schools are pretty cheap at the "worries about failing" level where you can start at an AA/AS school.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#112

Post by lupire »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #98
ThrowawayTestr wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Passing off your anxieties to your kid sounds like a great plan. Kinda glad now my parents left me to my own devices regarding school after like, 6th grade.

Except legally you can’t simply not take tour kids to school. Doing it in a “non anxious” way is a challenge

I most areas you can homeschool, which is whatever you and your kid want as long as they pass some tests and file some paperwork.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#113

Post by Ishmaeli »

I have the college dreams fairly regularly. Usually they are about forgetting to attend class for a whole semester.

But my other recurring dream is about being an LDS missionary again. I think that experience in real life was even more stressful than college—definitely more guilt-inducing. In the dream I'm my current self—mid-40s, married, kids, career, atheist—and yet somehow the church has managed to coerce me back into the mission field alongside the 19-year-old true believers.

Almost every other former Mormon missionary I've asked about it reports having similar recurring dreams.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#114

Post by xeromal »

lupire wrote: post #111
xeromal wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It depends on the school. Public schools are pretty cheap at the "worries about failing" level where you can start at an AA/AS school.

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

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#115

Post by lupire »

TheTon wrote: post #92
CalChris wrote: post #7

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 remembe…

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 s…

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.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#116

Post by pseudoramble »

Bakary wrote: post #75
progman32 wrote: post #55

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. Th…

Isn't there a contradiction between wanting that freedom but then taking a decade to redevelop agency?

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.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#117

Post by q7xvh97o2pDhNrh »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #78

There isn't a week when I don't have a day where I feel like a total monster at 7:15am trying like crazy to motivate my frustrated and anxious teenager off to high school and asking her about her homework and the like... And then promptly waltz upstairs with my coffee, sit in front my computer, read the news and (mostly) happily write program on computers all day, while playing with my border collies and walking thro…

Naive question here: I've wondered about this. Non-parent here (so far), so I'm about to arrogantly over-simplify a lot of things...

The science around teenagers needing more sleep, and doing better in life/school/everything if they start their day later, seems well-established at this point.

Additionally, there's plenty of known-better ways to learn beyond the rote-memorization-and-standardized-test system that's still de rigueur.

Are there no schools out there that put these things together and make an attempt at something better, especially for high-performing kids? What if school started at (say) 10-ish, and it gradually became more and more self-directed as kids headed towards graduation? What if it also mixed in all the latest cutting-edge research about how kids learn math/science/languages/etc? What if it also got creative with the curriculum and mixed in all the topics that people always say should be in schools, like "how to do your taxes" and whatnot?

I remember getting to college and being wildly unprepared for everything. School before then was devastatingly boring and fostered very little independence. Then college came along, and it was both brutally difficult and had almost no guardrails of any kind.

It was quite a transition, and it makes me wonder why there aren't more varieties/experiments around radically different approaches to schooling. At minimum, for high-performing kids, you'd think the modern world would have something.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#118

Post by lupire »

Bakary wrote: post #79
ardit33 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What made Albanian education so harsh?

Academically more intensive, but that's not really what upsets people in USA about school.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#119

Post by lupire »

jacooper wrote: post #51
jdougan wrote: post #13

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. Could be an interesting research topic.

I think its because its something they faced, and dealt with, it didn't destroy their life, the way your parents told you it would.

There are lots of ways your life hasn't been ruined, but you don't dream about them.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#120

Post by wrp »

ryandrake wrote: post #61

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, you…

Similar here. Still have occasional nightmares about missed requirements 40 years on.
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