save two years off your life by taking the GED and attending community college for credit if your parents will let you. when your friends are graduating high school and becoming freshmen at universities, you'll be a transferring junior.
the lower division stuff at college is what high school courses should be.
11th grade
91–100 of 145 posts
Re: 11th grade
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabul…
In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond: 1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting). 2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too. There are times to recognize busywork…
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Re: 11th grade
#93Thinking back over my entire secondary education this is what I learned:
History: Very little stuck.
English: I guess I got a lot of practice writing. But at no point did we ever discuss useful things like how to write clearly and effectively. Instead we spent 5 years deconstructing literature, a process which consists of skimming over half the text and then making up flowery rubbish.
Geography: Simple physical geography. Weather, volcanoes etc
Science: Actually quite a lot. My science teachers seem to have done a fairly good job.
Maths: Nothing. Whilst I passed all my exams I didn't really understand anything and left school incapable of constructing simple proofs. I now have a masters in maths so its not like I didn't have the ability either, but most of my first year at university was spent correcting misconceptions I had gained at school.
Computing: After 7 years of school I knew roughly how a computer worked but still couldn't write a simple program.
Now that doesn't strike me as 7 years worth of education. Most of the counter-arguments on this page seem to come down to the necessity of learning things you don't want to learn. The problem is that I didn't. I, like most people, cannot be made to learn something by fear of examination. It has to be made interesting or useful otherwise I will memorise it, write it down in an exam and promptly forget it.
The problem with school education is that it's just not very efficient. I don't think that there's some grand conspiracy to keep the downtrodden masses in their place. It's just that our theories and methods of education are out of date and ineffective. Schools have worked more or less the same way since the 17th century.
Even in university I went to lectures where I spent 4 hours every morning for 6 days a week imitating a human photocopier. Mass lectures don't make sense in the modern age. It would be far more effective to just video the top lecturers and let the rest spend their time actually talking to the students, rather than at them.
I could rant as well about education being taken over by exams. How often at school did you practice working in groups, collaborating on joint essays, learning to function in a team? I would guess almost never. Because it makes it too difficult to grade an individuals contribution. Did you ever do original research or experiments? Were you given free rein to choose projects? Did you ever see an exam question that made you stop and think? It sometimes seems like the entire education system is built around the fear of cheating.
I know its easy to sit around and complain. Its certainly a popular thing to do in geek circles. But we have to recognise that there is a problem in order to fix it.
Progress is being made, slowly. The rise of open courseware means that educational materials are no longer being treated as commodities that universities have to protect and keep secret. Once its out in the open artificial selection will take hold and material will begin to improve. The best lecturers now have audiences of tens of thousands rather than just a single room.
Re: 11th grade
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond: 1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting). 2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too. There are times to recognize busywork…
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Re: 11th grade
#95before we all argue this with our own experiences, we need to first put the "human variability" into account...
Re: 11th grade
#96Wow. I'm in the UK, and the main reaction I'm getting from reading all these comments is "Wow, is US education really that bad?" Seriously, High School is 1300 hours of 'busy work'? Or just memorising lists of facts? The equivalent period of my education in the UK could in no way be described in this way. It's not really this bad, is it? It's just people dissing studying things they don't want to study, right?
The pre-college education in the US really is that bad (pg references it in one of his essays). I took a typing class in 9th grade (closest thing we had to computers in my "backwoods" school). I was typing up to around 115 wpm or so, maybe faster, but the teacher was so awful I didn't take any of her classes again until 12th grade. By then, for some reason my speed had lowered and after years of touch typing I've never got the speed back to what it was.
Lots of people remember some specific quote a teacher said that effected their life in some way. The quote I remember from this teacher was "I don't know and I don't care, I'm just here to get a paycheck".
Re: 11th grade
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabul…
In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond: 1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting). 2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too. There are times to recognize busywork…
Don't forget the most important and IMO best option:
3) Do just enough busy work to get a decent grade, and don't whine about it too much.
That's my method. If I have a 100% in CS, what's the point of doing all the pointless busywork? Just relax for a month until your grade drops to a 92%, then you have to start working a bit.
Re: 11th grade
#98Ugh. Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-intellectual? It's such short-sighted nonsense; nothing but pandering to the immaturity of every 16-year-old throughout history who day-dreamed his way through the classes that he didn't like, and justified it by whining: "when am I gonna have to use this?" You know what? Sometimes you have to learn things that you don't think you'll "use in real…
Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those things obliquely as an accidental side effect. High School is mostly about babysitting and obedience -- your success is measured by your willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops specified by authority figures. Sure, the ones who take an interest in the material will le…
11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.
Re: 11th grade
#99Ah, 11th grade. That's the year I both failed English (with an A average in classwork and a B on exams, because of an F in homework) and taught myself enough Perl to create a sample-based text-to-speech system inspired by Evolution Control Committee's "Rocked by Rape". Call me crazy, but I still think being able to make Dan Rather say "wild and wooly Nazi war criminals hooked on drugs and drinking binges bug out on f…
> Call me crazy
Ok, you're crazy.
The problem is, learning Perl allowed you to essentially get a fish for a day. Perl is not going to last. What you learned was essentially how to get a Rube Goldberg contraption to do what you wanted.
The symbolism in Huck Finn, however, is eternal. You can then read any great book, or look at any work of art, and understand it at a better level. What you've done is learned how to fish for yourself.
Re: 11th grade
#100Ah, 11th grade. That's the year I both failed English (with an A average in classwork and a B on exams, because of an F in homework) and taught myself enough Perl to create a sample-based text-to-speech system inspired by Evolution Control Committee's "Rocked by Rape". Call me crazy, but I still think being able to make Dan Rather say "wild and wooly Nazi war criminals hooked on drugs and drinking binges bug out on f…
Of course, Huck and Tom are the ultimate in mischief and going against establishment, so it's ironic that it has become the study material of forced assignments.