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

It's not your fault you find school boring. It is boring. School is compulsory and so many of the children there don't want to learn and teachers don;t have much economic incentive to be inspiring because they have a captive audience. School isn't tailored to be responsive to pupils' interests to any significant degree, see http://www.takingchildrenseriously.com and John Holt's book "How Children Fail". My advice would be to look for other options and try to pick the one that seems best. You might be able to learn at home and possibly do some exams in places other than school if you think it will help. Try to get freelance programming work and see if you can get into programming without qualifications just by being good at it. If there are people writing interesting programmes or interesting material about programming and you would like to ask them questions or discuss some issue with them then you could e-mail them. The worst that can happen is they say they haven't got time. You might find college significantly better than school depending on your interests, how you use it and who the lecturers are. If you plan to go to college then shop around and look at lots of different places.

I've been thinking a lot about this as around senior year of collage, I have felt that I've been wasting my time with every moment spent in class. What I don't understand is why people feel it is acceptable to say "If you don't finish X task, then you are not as good."

  The trick was that when I started working in a lab or on startup ideas, I get the same dopamine rush that was spoken of in a previous. Working on classes that I could learn on my own time, destroying my happiness and health, when there is real good I could do in the world doesn't make sense from a utilitarian point of view; yet society functions on a credentialing system (as pg spoke of in one of his essays).

Many people give the same advice: work from within the system, if you pay your dues, more doors will be open. It is insanely frustrating, and pointlessly wasteful. What would make more sense is saying that if you want to work in a given area, you need to have X experience or a certification.

After a certain point, college (undergrad anyway) is just a grind that produces nothing useful. Lip service is paid to learning and then they grade you. Sometimes this makes sense and they are a fair representation of your knowledge, other times they are a random disconnected sampling. In certain classes, grading may make sense, but it reduces learning by encouraging certain kinds of depth first thinking.

What we need to do is break out of this acceptance of how things are done. For instance, if college is a credentialing process, then why are you required to take a class in order to gain a credential? If you get a C in a class, why should you be required to take it again (with all the work that entails) rather than just retesting? Some classes require attendance. Should not all the materials be provided so that you can learn on your own? This is not always the case.

If college is a holistic learning program, we should not be grading students or grade them in a way that does not expose them to hardship later ( e.g. by never revealing them to the outside world ). In my case, I know I would more thoroughly if I wasn't facing constant deadline pressure. Perhaps we could have a situation that is more you either present some results of your research or are given an oral examination that requires quick thinking.

College could be far more fun than it is, and far more educational. As it exists, it is a tedious compromise between an education and a certification. As a society, we need to figure out what we really want, because we are most certainly doing it wrong (whether my solutions are correct or not) at every level (I could recite what I learned about graduate school, but I have gone on long enough).

Definitely. Coming to Simon's Rock (although I am transferring for the fall semester) was easily the best decision I ever made.

what the hell is wrong with the word wrap on this thread?

Look into online self-paced learning that your school will accept for credit. EPGY has individual classes as well as a degree-granting online high school.

Learn how to attract girls (or boys as you prefer). Read about building self-confidence without becoming self-absorbed. Watch and learn from people who get dates without seeming like jerks. Learn how to make strangers laugh and soon you'll be making everyone laugh. Also learn why you should care about physical fitness: not only will it automatically make you more attractive, but the chemical process it gets going is like marijuana and cocaine and xanax combined, without any of the side effects. It'll make you more energetic and positive, and more able to focus creatively on intellectual things for longer periods of time.

Stay engaged with smart people from other places and times (e.g. your Graham reading, online forums etc.)

Bypass your teachers by reading the material in your own way, and doing your own thing in class rather than paying attention. Go beyond the textbooks to original sources or other books on the matter -- that alone will make things 10 times as interesting.