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Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

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Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#41

Post by DavidSJ »

I think you're too self-effacing. The problem is certainly not you.

I dropped out of school in 10th grade, and consider it the best decision I ever made. If you are going to do it, it's a decision you want to execute very carefully to avoid major confrontations with the people who still have a lot of power over you and think they're acting in your own good.

You might also consider Sudbury-style schools, where you would be completely free to spend your day however you like (I went to one after dropping out of high school, and now work at one).

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#42

Post by billybob »

lisper wrote: post #22
numbchuckskills wrote: post #14

1. You aren't interested in school because you're not making your time at school interesting. 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.

I think a very important point is in danger of being buried in glibness here: > 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…

"Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life..."

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.

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#43

Post by weaksauce »

runningskull wrote: post #36
pclark wrote: post #2

what do you want us to tell you? drop out? startup? sucker up and go to college? do as your parents say? just do whatever makes you happy, and fuck the rest.

Ugh. This is so misleading. What you really should say is "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…

I voted up your comment but the problem with dishing out that kind of advice to a teenager is that there is still a lot of living to do before you realize what it is that will make you happiest.

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#44

Post by pfedor »

numbchuckskills wrote: post #14

1. You aren't interested in school because you're not making your time at school interesting. 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.

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.

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#45

Post by tc7 »

I can't directly relate -- I was homeschooled from grade 1 up, started college classes (at community college) at 15, transferred at 17 and finished my bachelor's at 19.

But as far as I recall, once I started doing College classes, I didn't really do any more 'high school' classwork. I took the GED to be eligible for financial aid, but I believe I still took the year-end test for 12th grade, so I 'officially' finished as well..

I doubt I was as knowledgeable as you, though, if you're already reading hacker news. I didn't know it was 'really' possible to have a startup, though I did web sites for people.

Point being, you don't necessarily have to choose between two more years of boredom and not having a HS diploma. You can pretty much take the GED and start college, and I really doubt that would work against you.

Community college might feel like more of the same for you, but at least you can structure your classes to have more time to work.

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#47

Post by CatDancer »

I recommend taking a look at a book called The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education by Grace Llewellyn. (http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-Liberation-Handbook-School-Edu...)

The assumption of school is that you don't want to learn and so you need to be forced to. For all I know this may in fact be true for most kids, and so school is necessary for them. However if you are self-motivated to learn then school is massively inefficient.

There is no need for you to waste the next two years. You can, if you wish, undertake a self-learning program (home school yourself). While it is true that there are things that will get by staying in school, it does not mean that you cannot also get these things outside of school, especially with a little planning. You will still get into a good college, have friends, develop your social skills, keep your future options open, and so on. The book I mentioned explains how.

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#48

Post by naikrovek »

Why do teenagers think they have it all figured out? I certainly did, and I was certainly wrong.

Don't think of the monotony. Think of the things that differ from day to day. You find something that interests you that isn't related to monotony and you focus on that. For me, it was girls; not to get laid, but to practice my game before I went to college. If you focus on the monotony you're going to kill yourself.

Life is full people doing things they don't want to do. Everyone does lots of things they don't want to do. Even the best job has many bits of work that no one wants to do. That guy in school who is always happy and who makes everyone laugh all the time - that guy does tons of shit he doesn't want to do. That guy at work who always seems happy and comes up with good ideas on how to make things better, that guy does a ton of shit he doesn't want to do also.

To a degree, it's how you deal with those things you don't want to do that define your happiness. Do you complain? Do you work REALLY hard to try to get out of doing it? Or do you maybe accept those things as learning experiences, and find ways to get the things you don't want to do done more efficiently and more quickly?

Be a man. Finish school. Find a career that gives you happiness, do the shitty parts, and find things to be happy about, work related or not. Or, be a whiny kid who constantly complains about how everything sucks.

Re: Ask HN: I'm in 10th grade and I hate school. Any suggestions?

#50

Post by apsec112 »

numbchuckskills wrote: post #14

1. You aren't interested in school because you're not making your time at school interesting. 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.

This is, to be perfectly blunt, utter nonsense of the highest degree.

- 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.

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