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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?

#51
Don't drop out. I "finished early" but in all practicality it was the same thing. It seems like a good idea but I promise that my GED isn't worth anything.

I have been able to get good programming jobs based on my ability to get projects done. I wish I would have finished high school because now I'm taking online classes to figure out things I should have already learned. Google answers a lot of my questions but that isn't the same as learning it correctly the first time.

Who cares how bad school is, Don't drop out.

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

#52
post #44

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 ho…

I've had the blessing of both at the same time. I've learned different things from school and work -- it all ends up shaping who you are. In a work environment, people are forced to cooperate with you. In a school environment, you are forced to cooperate with people and take initiative. Communication in a workplace is easier but you'll learn to be all-businessness. It's in school that you learn to make friendships and the art of small-talk.

I'm in 12th grade by the way, and 11th and 12th have been my biggest growth years in terms of interpersonal ability.

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

#53
Go back to the teachers who inspired you earlier and ask their advice on how to "work within the system" to make high school less of a pointless burden for you. You might be able to get an "independent study" credit to replace some of your classes, for example. The teachers would know more than anyone else how to pull the appropriate bureaucratic levers and what officially-forbidden arrangements will be overlooked in practice.

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

#54
Chances are that you just very intelligent, and public education such as high schools are designed to intentionally destroy your creativity, no exaggeration, you can look into this -- the goal is to make you a good worker, and if you make it through , maybe white collar (university) with real education being something going on somewhere on the side at institutions of exception. As others noted it could be used to develop your social skills, but so could many other things. There's a chance a lot of people at your school aren't worth socializing with. This is fine as long as you understand that interacting with people is important, and fill it in somehow (clubs, outside of school activities). What happens at school will affect your options with universities, so the way to see it as perhaps as something junky you need to do well at, so that you can keep on moving on in your life.

Considering that you are reading this site, that you are switching schools and looking for solutions, I would guess that you've already accomplished the primary gain from public education - to understand the value of knowledge, and you went further and are self directed in its acquisition, so you've already accomplished most of what undergraduate school is trying to do (you may be bored for some time now....I made it through high school thinking university was going to be this awesome mystical place where I exchange with enlightened minds, but I learned later that that is only MIT, I shouldn't have grown up reading all about MIT, maybe read about other schools, because I didn't make the final cut).

You're going to be fine, and I believe this because your already alive. No need to find the appropriate group, high school or whatever, to 'lead' you, lead yourself to where you think your going to learn more, of what to learn - use the system's like schools available to you, don't wait for them to magically get wonderful - not going to happen. Unless you get into MIT....in which case, awesome, and enjoy.

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

#55
Ok, this is not a good choice.

Me my self studying in a third world school I had never thought of dropping and continued my study and will graduate in 25 days!!

In fact you are lucky, what about if you was here? You don't know the schools here, private or public, teacher are sometimes more stupid that pupils. I can't say more than, my english professor can't spell correctly the "wednesday". I have some good professor also, my math teacher is a SUPER PROF, just because his an old one.

Brief, here most of schools are public, but you need to study outside school, in what we call "additional hours" in some professors houses, which is non-legall and is costing me more than $100 a month.

So I study from 6 to 8 hours in school, 80% of hours are pure waste of time, simply because professor are not competent and students are indifferent. In fact, if you are a professor here, and you just give your students 20/20 and don't teach them anything, they'll be VERY excited, they'll love you and consider you as an intelligent prof.

Why are you considering school a waste of time?

Here's the response:

you want to start productivity from NOW, you don't want to wait few other years to learn programming, you want to start now.

Is it good or bad?

No, that's VERY bad, in school you expand your knowledge, even if it's not programming related, you know new phenomenas of everyday life that you don't know.

Don't be in hurry, you'll start working as soon as you have learned programming. Developing software isn't a simple job.

My own advice, is to carry on your study and then compelete study in university, you can then choose which section fit for you better and carry on your programming carrer.

Don't try to burn steps and jump over them, step by step and you'll get there, be sure.

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

#56
My comment will get lost in the noise, but I'll give you an insight here that you will likely hardly hear again: You want a thrill of success. At the age you are in, your brain is hardwired to search for success. Programming gives you success, because when a piece of code compiles, you get that feeling of success. School is not doing so. So you will compulsively chase programming, trying to get your success fix.

Turn this around and get your success from school. See if you can become the very best at school, and become the most popular kid at the same time. If you can switch your priorities to that, you'll discover that the dopamine rush will keep you coming back for more.

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

#57
post #22

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…

figure out a way to get 100 of your peers working on something -- anything -- together.

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.

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

#58
When I was in High School I used to pass the time by programming on my graphing calculator. I'm sure these days you can get by with reading a book in class or maybe even a small netbook. If none of those things are possible, just start a project and doodle your algorithms while you're in class and code them up at night.

There are a lot of ways to circumvent the system and do something you like to do, don't just give in to your immediate urges to shut it out. At the very least, you should graduate High School.

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

#59

I'm a high school student myself (senior). I skipped massively (like 50% of the time I wasn't in class) in 10th grade, and after 10th just went to do Running Start. It's a form of dual enrollment and I'm going to community college now; I haven't set foot in HS (except to get authorization forms) in two years. College is different from high school. Try something similar. High school is a massive, pointless waste of ti…

Having worked in a number of research labs, I would add to this that you should also try contacting professors at the nearest college. Very rarely is there something structured put in place for high school students to work at universities, but that said, many professors will work around/through/over the bureaucracy so that you can work with them. Often times all that is needed is a bit of initiative and some personal…

Very rarely is there something structured put in place for high school students to work at universities...

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.

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

#60

It would be helpful if you could provide more information: 1. how are your grades? define 'decent'... 2. do you have friends at school?

1. My grades are A's and B's. They've gone down recently out of apathy but they're still not bad. I know they're important to college, but grades are something I just abhor because I feel they really diminish the value of learning the subject. Like I said though, they're "decent": I've had no C's, and the lowest GPA I've had is a 3.17, which is mediocre, but it's tough to make myself care. Really it's just a matter of extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation for me; I try to motivate myself to do better with grades because there's supposed to some benefit later on of getting into a better college and all that, but I'm just more motivated to do other things like learn programming languages or typography or how to play the drums, or just read. Probably a typical teenager thing to say, sorry.

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...

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