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Escaping High School

skunkledger.substack.com

71–80 of 276 posts

Re: Escaping High School

#71
post #39

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority. High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of tha…

I’m going to disagree with you here. For most kids in high school regulars courses it is absolutely day care. And that’s the majority of students.

Honors, AP, IB are not daycare.

Re: Escaping High School

#72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you cite doesn't actually provide any data for their claims, and only links to another article on the same site which, again, doesn't actually provide any data. In fact, even checking the articles in their "Research" section, there is no information about the actual data provided, and all links I've seen were only to other articles on the same site. It leads me to believe that the people behind the site h…

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/249039450_The_Myth_...

did you at least do some vetting on this one instead of just grabbing the first google search result or are you going to rely on others to point out it's flaws and then just post another link to another bad article in response with no comment on what vetting you did since you didn't?

Re: Escaping High School

#73
post #64
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Somewhat surprisingly, the impact on lifetime earnings of attending an elite college is nil for men but strong for women. https://www.nber.org/papers/w25315

Women use their credentials more than men because they say a subset of men don't respect them without their credentials being aired. If that's true then it makes sense that the benefit to men is nil because they're viewed competent by default whereas women have to prove competency. Somewhat anecdotally people regularly confuse me for a mathematician although I lack any degree. I just like math and using it to prove m…

Curious that you say that, because I remember recently reading that women on average are unwilling to "date down" in terms of higher education levels, while it's not really a factor for men.

Re: Escaping High School

#74
post #39

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority. High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of tha…

I’m going to disagree with you here. For most kids in high school regulars courses it is absolutely day care. And that’s the majority of students. Honors, AP, IB are not daycare.

Even top public test high schools like Stuyvesant in NYC have an attitude towards their students as if it is daycare. Just look how they acted when teachers were calling out sick en masse during Omicron. They cancelled many classes but forced all students to come in anyway and sit in a cramped gymnasium "study hall".

I'd agree that for these students HS shouldn't be a daycare, but that doesn't mean it isn't the prevailing attitude amongst current administrators. Piling on a bunch of extra memorization work doesn't mean they're treating students as independent thinkers.

Re: Escaping High School

#75
post #9

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no b…

Would that not utterly stratify social classes? Upward social mobility would be near impossible if not for general education? Children would have no approaches other than what their family already has access to. The son of a smith becomes a smith, the son of a carpenter becomes a carpenter, the son of a lawyer becomes a lawyer and so on. And schools also function in part as day care. Parents can devote hours of the d…

> Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him?

Yes, of course. This doesn't mean a 4 year old is coming along on a traditional 8 hour US electrician's shift. It doesn't mean the 10 year old is coming along to the dangerous industrial jobs. When kids get put into reasonable contexts they adapt, it's kind of what we excel at as a species.

However, I was absolutely learning how to do basic home wiring (at a semi-useful level for some tasks) and electrical theory before I was in my double digits in years. By the time I was 10 or 11 (hard to recall precisely) I was wiring up my own circuits (alarm on my door to not be caught reading at night) at home and doing dangerous things with line current. I certainly knew enough to be dangerous, but also did understand the basics of how AC and DC circuits worked.

To this day I can still do basic electrical work such as bending conduit, wiring in work boxes - essentially everything past the demarc. These were all skills I learned before I was a teenager by helping out on job sites.

> How can he teach the child the theory of electrophysics that is necessary to understand if one is to become an electrician? Do others at the site watch the children and explain the theory? Would you then not end up with teachers again?

How many working electricians understand things to such a deep level? While I certainly understand more these days than I did at age 12, I can't really say any of it would be useful on a typical residential job site. The safety aspect is pretty well handled by a few standard rules of thumb that don't require much deep theory-level knowledge.

I'm very much not anti-school, but anyone who thinks our current system remotely challenges most individuals seems to have an incredible lack of imagination to me. Yes, this requires far more effort from far more adults across the entire spectrum of society.

Edit: All I do know is that sequestering kids away from 'real life' is damaging, and I'm unsure anything can convince me otherwise at this point in my life. We can never go back in time and give someone those experiences later in life (brains stop making neural connections as quickly) so I do often ponder what is truly being lost forever.

Re: Escaping High School

#76
Interestingly, the advice in this article pretty much aligns with what I did, although I can't claim I did what I did with any grand strategic vision. I mostly blew off high school doing the bare minimum necessary to graduate, while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects, and volunteering on open source. I went to college, but ultimately dropped out, with my most valuable time at community college where I was able to get tech certifications as part of my classwork.

It's been more than 20 years since I left high school and I've had a very good career and life despite having no degrees and a piss-poor high school GPA, because ultimately none of that actually matters in the real world. All that matters is who you know and whether you can do the job. If you know people who will give you a chance and you can actually succeed at the job, you'll do fine. Learning actual skills that other people care about and value is far more important than being able to regurgitate bullshit for a test to get a piece of paper that's meaningless. My only real regret is that I didn't just drop out of high school and get my GED so I could focus more time on my side-projects at the time.

Re: Escaping High School

#77
This is an interesting article, but I think it is heavily skewed toward the author’s goals in life and who they innately are. A guide for a more introverted person, or sports-oriented person, or highly social person would be vastly different.

In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK.

It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life.

The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.

Re: Escaping High School

#78

Pretty decent collection of reasonable advices Especially this: Make sure you aren’t just doing a glorified version of trying to earn good grades. So many people failed on this, mostly because of parents. Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. Just small nitpick to #1 Learning just in time =/= learning via practice Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredict…

"Never let schooling interfere with your education"? That's how I always approached it.

One of my middle school teachers observed with chagrin that I would rush my classwork, accepting a high B or low A when they were sure I could have gotten a 100% if I had "tried", so that I could go back to reading my book. Unfortunately, there was no reward for a 90 vs a 100 (beyond buffer to your overall grade being an A), so I just did as little as possible to get the maximum reward out of the system, and then went back to doing what I liked to do - learning.

It's also a bit funny to me that the program that was ostensibly supposed to support kids like me - "Future Problem Solvers" if I recall the name right - rejected me because they test they administered to determine if I should be invited was extremely weird to me - I mostly remember it asking me to, given a set of random lines, draw a picture using them. I think I mostly turned them into smiley faces because I was bored and confused by what they wanted. I'm sure, in retrospect, that they wanted me to show creativity in making interesting art out of the "constraints" of the lines. But alas, I just wanted to get back to reading what (given my age) was probably a book about space or a CS Lewis book or something. My best friend got in, and he ended up dropping out of college after 2 semesters of drinking, so I guess maybe it wasn't a very good program anyway.

Re: Escaping High School

#79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A family member just paid $500 for someone to come replace a $35 capacitor on their central AC compressor, after I explained how they could do it themselves in 5 minutes.

I think the vast majority of people go their entire lives without doing any kind of circuit level repair work. It's just not a skill most folks acquire. I can't think of anyone in my extended family who could replace a capacitor, half of them wouldn't even know what that means.

A central AC compressor capacitor is plug and play.

https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-du...

Turn off circuit breaker, unscrew ~4 screws on the cover of the compressor unit, take a picture of how old one is connected, unplug it, connect new one matching up the symbols or letters, confirm with the picture you took, screw the cover back on, and switch the circuit breaker back on.

Watch any of the available 5,000 YouTube videos if unsure.

Re: Escaping High School

#80

"Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories." This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education. How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but ed…

> educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles,

the rational adult in me want to to believe you and hoping the current crop of teachers really have started changing it up.

the part of me that still remembers what school was actually like would vehemently disagree. it took 8 years of deprogramming AFTER highschool before I really started to get my shit together and start to work on a path to success.

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