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Escaping High School

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Re: Escaping High School

#251

Post by thrixton »

balaji1 wrote: post #225
jjav wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.

Maybe that's the definition of hubris. But the tone of the above comment was too abrasive. > genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.

Or maybe they actually do have the experience and are sick and tired of people trotting out trite advice which is at best ignored and at worst draws attention away from the real issues by focusing people on useless advice which can be used as another stick to bash those less fortunate with.

Sometimes abrasiveness is warranted.

Re: Escaping High School

#252

Post by femiagbabiaka »

WalterBright wrote: post #207
femiagbabiaka wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you played sports? Most sports fans and players know that determining which players are better than others in their domain is an endless debate that is in the end, still completely subjective. The only thing approaching objectivity are events like the Olympics, parts of which are still subjectively scored.. on top of that, for the ones that aren’t, better performance on a particular day in a particular event doesn’t mean one is a better athlete. To summarize: better performance at a combine 40 yard dash means nothing when it comes to performance in a game.

Re: Escaping High School

#253

Post by maximus-decimus »

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…

IQ studies show IQ caps at 25, so... yeah no remotely close.

Re: Escaping High School

#254

Post by tristor »

rovolo wrote: post #242
tristor wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sounds like quite a privilege. Cool. And? Yep, I was privileged to have a computer at home and family members who worked at a university so I could get a dial-up SLIP Internet connection and access to Usenet and IRC. So what. How is that even a remotely useful response to my comment?

The article is explicitly advice for students. It matches the path your life took, but would your advice to drop out and get a GED be good advice for someone without your privilege?

Point out where /I/ provided advice for anyone? I described what I did and my observations, I didn’t provide advise for anyone else.

There’s way too many people who reply to every personal anecdote shared online by “calling out” the sharer’s “privilege”, which adds absolutely nothing of value to the conversation and implies that nothing about the sharer is relevant or important except their demographics.

It’s not the efforts I put in seeking out mentors, contributing docs and code and my time volunteering in open source, studying and passing certifications, or any of my long hours and excellence in the workplace. Oh no, no, not any of that. It’s my “privilege”, that’s all that matters.

Oh fuck off, both of you, seriously. You don’t know anything about me and your responses to what I shared are a net reduction in value to this entire conversation. Be better.

Re: Escaping High School

#255

Post by dmvdoug »

balaji1 wrote: post #225
jjav wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.

Maybe that's the definition of hubris. But the tone of the above comment was too abrasive. > genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.

Perhaps it was too abrasive.

Hubris? No, I don't have any amount of confidence to drive me to offer big, system-wide solutions. Because schooling and its issues are incredibly complicated and bring into play much, much more than just what happens inside the walls of a school building. One trivial example: students in Title I schools (read: poverty) have much higher rates of chronic health conditions. That's not really an issue in our wheelhouse, as a school, and yet we very much have to deal with it continuously. Pretty much everything in a student's environment, including their past, affects school, since school is where they spend most of their day. Yet people think you can just ignore all that and focus on teaching specific content or skills. Like kids are, academically, brains in vats, untouched by environment or circumstance.

Re: Escaping High School

#256

Post by dmvdoug »

solarmist wrote: post #240
costanzaDynasty wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My life only got better after I quit school at 15. At the end, I had so much outside distraction, that I couldn't put up the front at school anymore. I just needed sometime free from chaos.

Quitting school wouldn’t have helped me. It would’ve locked my into that life for myself. The chaos I had was mostly at home. School was my calm place.

This is something I hear startlingly often. It's not the majority of kids, by any means, but I've had a number of students who fail classes so they have to go to summer school, just to escape from home.

Re: Escaping High School

#257

Post by dmvdoug »

pandorable wrote: post #190
light_hue_1 wrote: post #32

Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged. > 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. Oh if only not being extremely p…

Hi, author of the post here - thanks for chiming in! Was hoping to hear from someone who had worked in or gone to a school like this. This part of the essay was admittedly the most guesswork-heavy; I included it because that seemed better than the alternative of not mentioning economic disparities at all, or of telling kids at poor schools they're resigned to doom. I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious…

Notwithstanding my asshole-ishness in my original comment, I actually appreciate you asking these questions. I don't have all the answers. I can gesture at some of them, which I will do later tomorrow (today? Hi, it's 2:00 am). I started to write out an answer and just got sad thinking about it, but I didn't want you to think I was just going to ignore you.

Re: Escaping High School

#258

Post by jb1991 »

guy98238710 wrote: post #173
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…

Fluid intelligence drops with age: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/ You weren't an idiot as a teenager. You were just uneducated and inexperienced. Personally, my decaying mental performance over the years is almost palpable. I feel like I am half-dead now compared to who I was 20 years ago. Sure I was nuts due to the powerful emotions, but that just means I was alive, not a talking corpse that I…

Yes but when does it start dropping? Not likely in the teens. As I'd always heard and other commenters also suggest, peak brain power is usually ten years later than this article proposes. Brains are still developing in our teens, and are not at their peak yet.

Re: Escaping High School

#259

Post by xg15 »

somsak2 wrote: post #185
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…

whenever you see the word "systemic," you can be sure that what follows is going to be painting in broad strokes at a population level and not something that is actually relevant to decisions an individual can make.

I mean, the very point of the GP was that a lot of factors cannot be influenced by individual decisions - because they are systemic.

Re: Escaping High School

#260

Post by Scubabear68 »

ModernMech wrote: post #230
Scubabear68 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, I don't presume to know your children. But I am more qualified than you to compare them to other children, because that's part of my job (unless it's your job too, I dunno). Based on what you've told me, and that's all I have to go off of, your kids are above average. It's kind of wild to me that you're on here arguing with me that they're not. Kids who get A's, B's (even some C's); and do sports or music are wel…

You need a reality check, dude. The fact that you think you can judge people’s children better than their parents based on a few sentences on HN lays bare your poor assumptions.
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