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Why adults still dream about school

theatlantic.com

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Re: Why adults still dream about school

#321

Post by Vedor »

sharadov wrote: post #320
Vedor wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it. Depends on the perspective, I guess. I was working in several different places, and sometimes I had hard time. Even working in the worst places, I felt better than in school. I hated elementary school, because kids were cruel (some time I came back to home with chocking marks) and teachers decided to just not see bullying. Or decided to give me…

I don't think it's a perspective - I believe I was fortunate to have the support system that I had. As a child you are supposed to be protected and cared for. And I hope that I can do the same for my children. Maybe you mistook my perspective for hubris - but it is what childhood should be - innocent and pure and if it's not, then society is failing.

I am sorry if I misunderstand something here – to be honest, English never was my forte, so I may miss some subtlety.

I did not take your post as a form of hubris. What I meant when I wrote about perspective is that personal experiences shape our assessment of reality. I agree that childhood should be innocent and pure. But sometimes, it is not.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#322

Post by faeriechangling »

sharadov wrote: post #80
ryandrake wrote: post #61

I feel like this is because school, especially college, and particularly exams, is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get, so they look back at that time as peak-anxiety. Think about it: you're being evaluated and the result of that evaluation shapes the next step in the pipeline, and ultimately the trajectory of the rest of your life! Well, at least that's what the university officials, professors, you…

When am sufficiently stressed at work - a recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject. But overall school and college was a great experience - the tests and assignments sucked, but what I remember is the great friends that I made, the interesting people that I met and all the personal exploration that…

I honestly have recurring PTSD from some of the violence I was forced to walk into day after day to graduate, where all school authorities were more interested in a coverup than helping. My grades were shockingly not that good in this environment and I was just told I was too stupid to learn any topic about computers I wanted and had to learn some less prestigious topics after graduation. In this environment I could hardly enjoy good times with friends, there was just too much of a shadow lurking over the whole thing.

I had to leave school to learn, and now that I’m a computer programmer, I feel apprehension that I might have to go back to school to four years to pretend to learn topics I learned independently just to assuage the school systems ego enough that they will give me an accreditation. The idea of going back to school makes me tense up at this point. Adulthood is so much less traumatizing because it feels like you have so much more choice to avoid abuse, and you can choose to confront abusive situations on your own schedule. You’re valued for so many more reasons than your ability to tolerate abuse and produce good test scores.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#323

Post by jaqalopes »

lupire wrote: post #121
jaqalopes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may amuse you to know that, as a sociology major myself, I always envied my engineering school friends because they didn’t have to do nearly as much reading as me and it was possible for them to help one another on problem sets in a way that doesn’t make sense in writing-based liberal arts courses. The grass is always greener, I suppose!

Why can't you help your classmates with writing? You may have been doing it wrong.

You can help with writing skills-wise, but the thing with essays is that they are subjective and do not have a single correct answer. I took a few STEM courses and found that it was common for STEM students to work together on problem sets because they could compare answers to figure out if and how they had gone wrong. There is no equivalent to this in liberal arts.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#324

Post by exolymph »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #206
exolymph wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I left high school in junior year (intending to go straight to college — didn't work out, long story). I took the GED test, and I was SO MAD because I realized I could have aced that test straight out of 8th grade. Has anyone ever asked about my GED? No. Lol. Has lacking a college degree held me back? No (though there are definitely fields where it would have). One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting o…

In California you can't take the test until you're 18 (or perhaps a year or two earlier if you can convince your local school district to give you permission).

Huh, didn't realize that. I was on the older side for my grade — turned 18 at the end of junior year – so I guess it didn't come up.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#325

Post by rvba »

chasil wrote: post #162
CydeWeys wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hell, I have dreams that I've forgotten to attend class all semester long in grad school and the final exam is tomorrow, and I never even went to grad school! It's like my brain subconsciously realized the undergrad panic dreams no longer make sense as that's too long ago, so now they've evolved to something more suitable for later in life, even though I never did that thing.

I have had a few dreams about forgetting that I have registered for a class, and realizing late that I have an exam. A more recurrent dream for me is finding myself in the backseat of an empty, moving car, able to reach the steering wheel, but unable to control the brakes. I wonder what this means. It is unnerving.

I am not a psychologist nor a mind reader.. but

(1) do you have a feeling that you have control of your own life? Maybe it feels that you are in a prison where "your hand is forced" and you cannot take own decisions, have to play the bad hand you received

(2) are you doing something risky, like working in a failing start up? Or a company thay is going towards bankruptcy?

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#326

Post by nuancebydefault »

granshaw wrote: post #211
chasil wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have had a few dreams about forgetting that I have registered for a class, and realizing late that I have an exam. A more recurrent dream for me is finding myself in the backseat of an empty, moving car, able to reach the steering wheel, but unable to control the brakes. I wonder what this means. It is unnerving.

I have one a lot where I’m driving on a narrow curvy overpass with no guardrails and I fall off, what’s worse my loved ones are with me

Wow I have had a dream very similar quite a few times. I'm driving on some very unstable road, often made of sand and the car falls into the lower levels of that road, getting stuck... Sometimes it's a curvy bridge the car needs to climb and it constantly tends to fall off. I thought the school exams were the only common dreams that I had, but at appears that similar ones to this one is dreamt by others too!

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#327

Post by granshaw »

nuancebydefault wrote: post #326
granshaw wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have one a lot where I’m driving on a narrow curvy overpass with no guardrails and I fall off, what’s worse my loved ones are with me

Wow I have had a dream very similar quite a few times. I'm driving on some very unstable road, often made of sand and the car falls into the lower levels of that road, getting stuck... Sometimes it's a curvy bridge the car needs to climb and it constantly tends to fall off. I thought the school exams were the only common dreams that I had, but at appears that similar ones to this one is dreamt by others too!

Yeah it’s very surreal, during the dream I realize that hmm, this is pretty dangerous, but am still somehow casual about it, and then I don’t complete the turn and the car starts plummeting down and I start saying I love yous and I wake up

It really sucks lol

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#328

Post by maxerickson »

lambertsimnel wrote: post #257
maxerickson wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The high performing kids need less help. As to the why things are the way they are, people don't wanna do better because it's inconvenient.

Doesn't that depend on what school is for? If the importance of school is overwhelmingly the subject matter or the grades, then I'd agree that high-performing children need less help. To the extent that children need something else from school, high-performing children might need more help than average-performing children. Maybe the average-performing children are more dependent on effective study techniques, while t…

Sure, in the ideal world school would be a productive experience for everyone.

In the current US system, it's hard to justify focusing additional resources on students that are already performing well.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#329

Post by sharadov »

Vedor wrote: post #321
sharadov wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's a perspective - I believe I was fortunate to have the support system that I had. As a child you are supposed to be protected and cared for. And I hope that I can do the same for my children. Maybe you mistook my perspective for hubris - but it is what childhood should be - innocent and pure and if it's not, then society is failing.

I am sorry if I misunderstand something here – to be honest, English never was my forte, so I may miss some subtlety. I did not take your post as a form of hubris. What I meant when I wrote about perspective is that personal experiences shape our assessment of reality. I agree that childhood should be innocent and pure. But sometimes, it is not.

No offense taken at all - I agree those formative years of childhood shape our view of the world. Hope we don't let the bad experiences color the future.

Re: Why adults still dream about school

#330

Post by wnolens »

Viliam1234 wrote: post #317
wnolens wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have pretty much these same dreams, about once a year. My undergraduate was traumatizing. Yet I look back on it fondly 15y later. Kinda messed up

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome School is supposedly the best experience in life, and simultaneously the most frequent source of nightmares decades later. What a curious coincidence!

Haha.. jeez. Never thought about it like that. Too real.
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