Escaping High School • Hacker News Board

Re: Escaping High School

#201

Post by zls » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:45 PM UTC

balaji1 wrote: post #178

dmvdoug wrote: post #144

> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the…

99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.

I’m gonna try to not write like a jerk here, but OP is pretty grating, so I’m sorry if I fail.

Parent didn’t say so explicitly, but there’s really no blog post you can write that is “how to escape from poverty as a teen in high school.” Thus, the problems with this one are not fixable. Off top:

* what’s the opening line of Anna Karenina, again? There are so many disparate challenges that poor kids can face that are more urgent than “get good exercise and send cold emails for jobs” that you couldn’t even fit them in their own book.

* even writing the blog post at all assumes these kids are reading hacker news which is, uh, cavalier. there are zillions of people hawking advice that these kids would need to sift through to even decide to follow this blog. Parents, friends, teachers, influencers, Andrew fucking Tate are all prescribing life strategies, why would they listen to your blog? Moreover, if you’re an impoverished kid who has somehow found HN and for some reason values its advice, you’re already on a better track than your peers, and you likely don’t need the advice!

* in fact, this blog is anti-advice for these people. Probably the single most valuable decision I made in my youth was to always refuse all peer pressure no matter what until I was out of my hometown. Peer pressure is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS for these kids. They’re not Brock Turner, they’re not getting off easy and free because of daddy. one mistake can derail their whole lives. To read this guy say “don’t worry about peer pressure, it’s the spice of life” frankly pisses me off.

The real answer for these kids, again, is to get lucky until we get our shit to get as a country to make life less treacherous and unforgiving for those with less means. Unpopular here on HN, I guess, but the US is not a meritocratic libertarian tech utopia, some situations don’t have a reliable self-directed escape strategy, and not everything can be fixed by the perfect blog post.

edit: also the audacity to be like “here are some advantages of being underprivileged that you can leverage” is its own headache entire… “you won’t have to unlearn as many wrong ideas about the world”? Absolute nonsense

Re: Escaping High School

#202

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:47 PM UTC

ModernMech wrote: post #121

istjohn wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The example of phonics vs. sight reading shows that professional educators are just the blind leading the blind. Parents have known for years that phonics work, but institutionalists dismissed their complaints as spouting off from the sidelines. Challenging established authority is the engine of progress in science and society. Appeal to authority is the last resort of those who have no other ground to stand on. If y…

> Appeal to authority is the last resort of those who have no other ground to stand on. If you want to elevate the discourse, engage with what people are actually saying, with their ideas, instead of dismissing them as idiot outsiders. I'm not appealing to authority, I'm appealing to evidence/experience versus ignorance and Big Important Feelings. As a scholar and an educator, I'm the first person to say how importan…

But but but but there's a single instance of teachers being pushed to do things the wrong way and doing it (because all "educators" are the exact same rank right) for quite some time even though it was wrong so that means we have carte blanche to call the whole system broken.

Re: Escaping High School

#203

Post by dragonwriter » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:48 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #200

Scubabear68 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My kids aren’t top students at all. They both have learning disabilities. My son is highly sports oriented, my daughter is very musical. They both have trouble with traditional subjects. They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile. They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school. They are doing very well now. Not s…

15-20% == 80-85% What is a B average? "B" = 80-89% So, their standardized scores more or less lines up with their grades.

> 15-20% == 80-85%

That's not how percentiles work. (The upthread 15-20 was %ile not %.)

I mean, I can imagine a test where the 15th-20th %ile range happened to be a score of 80-85%, but that would be coincidence or design of the specific test, not a natural equivalence.

Re: Escaping High School

#204

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:50 PM UTC

wudangmonk wrote: post #150

ModernMech wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, there are a couple things going on here. First is the blog post, which I can't really make sense of. It's 12,000 words on how to navigate high school without a single reference or citation. No evidence is presented whatsoever to support any of the assertions made. It purports to be a guide for 14 year olds but is written in a manner and published in a medium that is not accessible for 14 year olds; not many 14…

The number of processes in a system will only give you the potential points of failure. If we measure computer resources we come a completely different conclusion. would you use an OS that uses up more ram and cpu resources than all the programs you run inside of it combined?. How about a restaurant with more managers than cooks and waiters?. Schools with more administrators than teachers seems like the perfect examp…

How many times THIS WEEK has this very forum cried that it's more important to care about the pooooooor devs having to work hard than not use an entire web browser as their toolkit of choice for modern applications?

Re: Escaping High School

#205

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:51 PM UTC

Scubabear68 wrote: post #117

ModernMech wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching is not nearly as hard as you lay it out to be. > Our kids are in private school now because our public school is a dumpster fire of bad teachers and admins. The private school teachers don’t get paid a lot but they are valued and highly motivated to actually reach kids. The difference is astounding. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have N=1 child, and you extrapolate everything from that one chi…

My kids aren’t top students at all. They both have learning disabilities. My son is highly sports oriented, my daughter is very musical. They both have trouble with traditional subjects. They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile. They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school. They are doing very well now. Not s…

>They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.

What do you think a "B" grade means?

Re: Escaping High School

#206

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:52 PM UTC

Scubabear68 wrote: post #165

ModernMech wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"B" students are in fact top students. That you think they aren't is one of the things I've been pushing back on in my career. I have several learning disabilities including dyslexia and ADHD and was also a top student, so those aren't exactly determinative. Many of my top students are neurodivergent. I get a dozen letters every semester from my top students regarding their learning disabilities. Excelling in sports…

I’m sorry, are you indicating you know my kids better than I do? The kids got “B”s because everyone who showed up got Bs. It was social promotion. This became painfully obvious when the first marking period scores in many classes was F and D in the private school. And was backed up by equally bad standardized testing scores.

Wait so the standardized test scores of your kids went significantly down when they went to a private school?

Re: Escaping High School

#207

Post by WalterBright » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:53 PM UTC

femiagbabiaka wrote: post #187

jb1991 wrote: post #120

> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be du…

There's no sense in rationalizing with folks who want to quantify intelligence in the first place. They're chasing statistical phantoms. Even if we take a generous view of what they said and interpret it to mean that brain development finalizes in the mid-teens, it's still a completely myopic view of what it means to be "smart."

People quantify sports abilities down to the ten-thousandth of a second.

Re: Escaping High School

#208

Post by Tade0 » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:53 PM UTC

Pigalowda wrote: post #180

Tade0 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the sort of approach that's utterly foreign to me. When people in my class started turning 18 teachers reminded us that compulsory education doesn't apply to them any more, so they're free to leave at any time - with appropriate consequences regarding their chances of passing, but nothing else.

They still almost certainly live at home and I imagine there’s an expectation from their parents to finish high school. There’s definitely a big line between being a crappy student doing the bare minimum vs dropping out.

Does that make high school a daycare?

I don't get it. At age 15 I had curfew, but could generally come and go as I pleased. At age 17 I was at times left alone at home for a few nights. This was all normal in my teenage years in my corner of the world.

Why would high school need to function as a daycare? The teachers would definitely rather not have to deal with this on top of the usual responsibilities.

Re: Escaping High School

#209

Post by mrguyorama » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:54 PM UTC

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #101

ModernMech wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it? Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. Compounding that, most people went through the education system as students, so they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works. Usually their advice on how to fix the system is geared toward…

>Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. They don't care about how to educate children writ large. They care to the extent that they think you are failing their child, specifically. You would do well to remember that as an educator, you have a responsibility to the public. If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your digni…

>If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your dignity, perhaps you shouldn't be a teacher.

As a person who does tech work, you are now sentenced to be forced to listen to every single asshole who wants to tell you their "super awesome app" idea that "should take like a weekend right" to make and "will get us rich", and you aren't allowed to complain or point out how they have no idea what they are talking about

Re: Escaping High School

#210

Post by moravak1984 » Fri, Jul 07, 2023, 8:55 PM UTC

somsak2 wrote: post #186

balaji1 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.

i think parent prefers to simply be angry than contribute to the conversation

When the author writes:

> I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.

doesn't that somewhat justify the anger of the parent comment (who presumably "knows enough")?

If the author doesn't know enough about the topic, why the need to pontify? They could just stfu and have an opinion in topics on which they do have meaningful contributions. Not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything.