
11th grade - mapleoin
http://xkcd.org/519/
======
timr
Ugh. Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-
intellectual? It's such short-sighted nonsense; nothing but pandering to the
immaturity of every 16-year-old throughout history who day-dreamed his way
through the classes that he didn't like, and justified it by whining: _"when
am I gonna have to use this?"_

You know what? Sometimes you have to learn things that you don't think you'll
"use in real life". Sometimes you have to learn how to read and write, and
make persuasive arguments to something other than a machine. Sometimes you
have to eat your vegetables. Sometimes you have to go to bed early, brush your
teeth, and pay your bills. Life is full of hardships. Deal with it.

To all the high school kids who are reading this and thinking about dropping
out, with visions of startups dancing in your heads: don't. Just don't. If
you're truly the brilliant, self-guided whiz-kid that you imagine yourself to
be, you'll dispatch with the homework quickly (it's easy, right?), and use the
rest of your prodigious free time for more enjoyable tasks. If I could do it,
so can you.

~~~
jey
Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully
support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those
things obliquely as an accidental side effect. High School is mostly about
babysitting and obedience -- your success is measured by your willingness to
jump through arbitrary hoops specified by authority figures. Sure, the ones
who take an interest in the material will learn something, but that has a lot
more to do with the individual than the school system.

I still think going to school and college is the right decision for well over
99% of students, but I think it's a big mistake to treat formal education as a
one-size-fits-all panacea.

~~~
timr
_"Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work?"_

I don't grant your premise. There's busywork in _everything_ , and I never
found high school to be worse than anything that has come later in life. We've
all got to wait in the same line at the supermarket.

When I read nerd complaints about formal education, I get the feeling that the
prevailing sentiment is one of entitlement: _"if I have to do anything I don't
like to do, then the system is broken."_ Smart kids seem to have this sense of
entitlement worse than many people -- probably because they're so easily
bored.

Trouble is, you're always going to have to live and work with people who are
slower than you are. You can skip out on high school in an attempt to avoid
it, take college classes early, rush into graduate school, whatever.
Eventually, however, you run smack into the wall of society, and you've got to
work within its framework. The ability to persevere through busywork is an
extremely valuable skill in that context.

~~~
Retric
It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade
homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework
assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest
grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got
a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher
who constantly gave out stupid vocabulary assignments to help our SAT scores.
She saw my perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT's that year, but
she still gave me zero's on those vocab assignments.

So I learned how important busy work was without actually doing it. In life
looking for ways to avoid busy work has helped my advance. Teaching people
that they need to waste their time stops being useful when you start measuring
people on their performance not how they got there. The real reason teachers
grade easy assignments is to let people who work hard, but have no idea what
there doing pass.

PS: IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting
or meaningful with their lives. If doing well in high school correlated with
doing well in life people might start caring about their performance.

~~~
timr
In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond:

1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then
you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting).

2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the
idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too.

There are times to recognize busywork for what it is and eliminate it (i.e.
where you benefit other people by eliminating it), and times to just suck it
up and do it (i.e. where you can't change it and/or don't benefit enough other
people by trying). Part of the art of being successful is knowing how to
discriminate between the two scenarios, and how to respond accordingly (i.e.
_diplomatically_ ).

The problem with student complaints about high school curricula, is that they
clearly land in category two. Your bad experience with 9th grade geometry
doesn't mean that the learning 9th grade geometry is wrong -- it means that
you had a bad 9th grad geometry teacher, or that you brushed him the wrong
way, or some combination of the two. And in that situation, you can suck it
up, and do the work you need to do to get an A, or you can complain and get a
bad grade.

Life is full of these situations. Complaining about the unfairness of the
situation is not the correct response.

~~~
PieSquared
Don't forget the most important and IMO best option: 3) Do just enough busy
work to get a decent grade, and don't whine about it too much.

That's my method. If I have a 100% in CS, what's the point of doing all the
pointless busywork? Just relax for a month until your grade drops to a 92%,
then you have to start working a bit.

~~~
timr
That's the first option I listed: do the work quickly, then do something else.
I never said that the goal was to get _perfect_ grades in everything; the goal
is not to be a martyr in the name of improving the system.

------
GHFigs
Ah, 11th grade. That's the year I both failed English (with an A average in
classwork and a B on exams, because of an F in homework) and taught myself
enough Perl to create a sample-based text-to-speech system inspired by
Evolution Control Committee's "Rocked by Rape".

Call me crazy, but I still think being able to make Dan Rather say "wild and
wooly Nazi war criminals hooked on drugs and drinking binges bug out on fire"
is more important and valuable than any essay I could have written about
symbolism in Huckleberry Finn.

~~~
david927
> Call me crazy Ok, you're crazy.

The problem is, learning Perl allowed you to essentially get a fish for a day.
Perl is not going to last. What you learned was essentially how to get a Rube
Goldberg contraption to do what you wanted.

The symbolism in Huck Finn, however, is eternal. You can then read any great
book, or look at any work of art, and understand it at a better level. What
you've done is learned how to fish for yourself.

~~~
Raphael
It's not inherently less enriching, just a different skill. Learning Perl can
allow him to understand code and algorithms at a deeper level.

Putting extra effort into high school English can be totally worth it, but it
is a personal preference that shouldn't be pushed on the unwilling.

~~~
david927
I disagree that it's a personal preference. Just as some tastes need to be
acquired, so does much of understanding (as with art). The first 10 times I
heard Bob Marley (& Tom Waits, Arcade Fire,...) I didn't get it. Then,
suddenly, I understood and now I love it. The first time I saw Van Gogh
sunflowers on the wall of a friend's house I was 16 and I said, WTF? It's not
a "personal preference" and I don't believe it's something you let kids decide
on their own. (Picasso is crap? Ok, Billy, if you say so!) Instead, you push
them a bit to essentially "listen to Bob Marley ten times". If they don't get
it after that, too bad, but at least they had a chance.

Learning Perl isn't value-less, but it doesn't compare on any scale to trying
"to acquire the understanding" of Huck Finn.

~~~
GHFigs
As my other comment perhaps makes clearer, I agree with you on the value of
the understanding of the work. I forget that there are people who don't see
the point in such things at all, so I forget to make clear that I am not one
of them. What I disagree with the orthodox methods of trying to teach that
understanding.

Would it be fair to ask you to prove your understanding and appreciation of
Bob Marley by asking you to write an essay on him and then judge that essay
based on whether it's contents matched up with what other people before you
have said? It doesn't seem like that would help you understand if you didn't.
It also takes away your own authority on whether your appreciation of the work
is valid, which isn't educational at all.

I think your comment highlights the fact that it's _normal_ to not "get"
everything, too. That's something that seems to be disregarded in the
curriculum, where everyone is supposed to get everything equally at the same
time. If someone were to tell you their favorite albums were _Kind of Blue_ ,
_A Love Supreme_ , _Legend_ , _Pet Sounds_ , _Thriller_ , _Dark Side of The
Moon_ , and _Revolver_ , you wouldn't consider them a paragon of refinement so
much as a liar. And yet, we're expecting something like that out of students
by testing them this way.

------
jackowayed
When I saw this, my first reaction was "Randall is stalking me." I'm in 11th
grade. It's Ruby, not Perl, and regular, not just a weekend, but it's
basically my life. All the school work I have leaves me not enough hacking
time. I wish I could get sucked into a startup so I'd have a reason to drop
out.

~~~
Oompa
I stopped doing homework to program. I'm not sure I'd advise the same to
others, but because of all the extra-curricular activities I did with
programming, I feel it was worth it.

~~~
jackowayed
yeah, I've contemplated that. doubt I'll do it though. I just do my homework
quickly and code some still.

~~~
PieSquared
I tend to do all the homework I have a as far in advance as I can, then have a
week or two of near-no-homework in which I can code, both for personal
projects and a part-time job. (10th grade).

------
vaksel
the problem is that our school system wastes WAAAAY too much time. Why?
Because they need to coddle to the slow and dimwitted, instead of hurting
their feelings and sending them to remedial classes.

They could probably teach the K12 material in half the time if they tried.

------
tptacek
Putting it in a poorly-drawn web cartoon doesn't automatically make a trivial
observation funny. Isn't this the topic of, like, 438973489 blog posts and
essays?

~~~
mattdennewitz
sprinkle in a little "oh my god i had sex with a real girl look guys look at
me she was real and we had actual sex im a god" and you've summarized my
opinion of xkcd. thanks for the help.

~~~
ivank
xkcd was great back when it was <http://xkcd.com/144/> or
<http://xkcd.com/123/>

But no good things last forever.

~~~
PieSquared
It used to be funny when the things it said weren't applicable or related to
the real world? Huh.

~~~
ivank
I don't find those two especially funny, just memorable. I read tptacek's
comment as a general criticism of xkcd, without the implication that it must
be funny to be good.

------
nomoresecrets
Wow. I'm in the UK, and the main reaction I'm getting from reading all these
comments is "Wow, is US education really that bad?"

Seriously, High School is 1300 hours of 'busy work'? Or just memorising lists
of facts?

The equivalent period of my education in the UK could in no way be described
in this way.

It's not really this bad, is it? It's just people dissing studying things they
don't want to study, right?

~~~
jbjohns
The pre-college education in the US really is that bad (pg references it in
one of his essays). I took a typing class in 9th grade (closest thing we had
to computers in my "backwoods" school). I was typing up to around 115 wpm or
so, maybe faster, but the teacher was so awful I didn't take any of her
classes again until 12th grade. By then, for some reason my speed had lowered
and after years of touch typing I've never got the speed back to what it was.

Lots of people remember some specific quote a teacher said that effected their
life in some way. The quote I remember from this teacher was "I don't know and
I don't care, I'm just here to get a paycheck".

------
tokenadult
Obligatory Paul Graham essay link, which I think I added the last time this
same cartoon was submitted to HN:

<http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

------
nazgulnarsil
save two years off your life by taking the GED and attending community college
for credit if your parents will let you. when your friends are graduating high
school and becoming freshmen at universities, you'll be a transferring junior.
the lower division stuff at college is what high school courses should be.

~~~
Raphael
Ha. My mom told me to do exactly this, but I wasn't ready to abandon my
friends and safe, familiar school.

It seemed daunting faced with yet another 4 years of school, college, and I
had fantasies about dropping out in the middle when a business starts to take
off. But the first 1/12 went by in the blink of an eye, so this is looking
actually doable. Plus, many at this age would much rather be in college than
working a boring job, so it would be short-sighted to run away from such an
appealing community.

------
markbao
Currently in 11th grade. Can highly relate. I've been working on a few
startups for a couple years, exited a few things (not for a lot), working in
PHP and now Rails, and it's far more exciting than hs.

<http://markbao.com> (old, somewhat crappy stuff there, new stuff
<http://files.markbao.com/newstuff.jpg>)

I'm not thinking about dropping out, though. The risk _is_ too great to just
drop out and work on startups. I'm trying to make the most out of my little
time left as a teenager socially and educationally (albeit the subject matter
is relatively less useful than I'd like), go to college with a business focus
(if I can get in with my low-ball GPA), and see where it goes from there.

I'm mostly in the startup game now to make connections, understand a
foundation of startup business and entrepreneurship, and then move on in the
future with that knowledge as an advantage.

For any other high school people on HN: there are three laws to follow when
you're attending a strict-time institution like HS:

    
    
      - Bust your ass.
      - Manage your time correctly.
      - Being under 18 doesn't make you special if you don't do special things. i.e.,
        have credentials and work to back yourself up, and forget about age for a bit.
    

Learning how to manage my time and bust my ass (both of which are like hand in
glove) have helped me highly in managing schoolwork plus a few startups
(Avecora/Avecora OnDemand/AdSocial, Ramamia, TickrTalk, DebateWare,
Classleaf.)

In fact, school gives you an interesting time constraint and _advantage_.
37signals, who used to be a consultancy, had just 10 hours a week to work on
Basecamp. And you know what they did? They _busted their ass._ And what came
out of it was how to use time efficiently, embracing constraints. (Source
[http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/constraints_breed_bre...](http://www.37signals.com/svn/archives2/constraints_breed_breakthrough_creativity.php))

And with the last one, don't get arrogant because "ZOMG, I CODED AN APP,
@web2personality WRITE ABOUT ME BECAUSE IM UNDER 18." You're not special if
you're under 18. You've developed an application, and you've developed coding
skills a few years before people generally do. What separates you from the
general young entrepreneur press and YOU is a few years. Don't kid yourself
into thinking you're all special because you can code @app, because in the
long run, without actual skills and knowledge you're hurting yourself. There
are some people who put on the façade of "Wow, you're a high school
entrepreneur, that's so awesome. So what do you do?" but see through that and
it's not really genuine most of the time. It took me a bit of time to figure
out that _nobody really gives much of a shit_ , so learn that. That's what
I've noticed and stand by–your mileage may vary.

(I'm always glad to meet new high school entrepreneurs and people in general.
My contact details are in my profile.)

~~~
thomasmallen
I'm looking over your stuff at <http://markbao.com/> ... it looks like you're
more concerned with appearing to be an entrepeneur than with the work itself
and product quality. These sites are simply fluff.

Also, I'm not sure how you can really create quality small business
collaboration tools without having been in the working world. Just an
observation.

Making $10B is not a very admirable life goal: <http://markbao.com/lifegoals>
. Not to mention that $10B will be today's $200M in fifteen years.

Good luck with what you're doing, and be sure to focus.

~~~
markbao
Thanks for the feedback.

> _These sites are simply fluff._

The sites on there are pretty old, which is why I linked a newer list (incl
<http://ramamia.com>) The third isn't an open site, fourth and fifth just
experiments.

> _Also, I'm not sure how you can really create quality small business
> collaboration tools without having been in the working world. Just an
> observation._

You're right, though I'm not really saying AOD is the best in the world while
there are many more. It was something I wanted to manage my work, and it
worked for me. Hopefully it helps others. If it doesn't, then so be it.

> _Making $10B is not a very admirable life
> goal:<http://markbao.com/lifegoals> . Not to mention that $10B will be
> today's $200M in fifteen years._

It's a goal and an aspiration, that I'd like to meet. Care to elaborate on why
it's not an admirable goal?

Again, thanks.

~~~
thomasmallen
> Care to elaborate on why it's not an admirable goal?

It smells like rank materialism when put in those terms.

~~~
markbao
Ah, okay. That's what I thought you were getting at. It's not a hard-set goal.
I'd like to make money, but it's not the only thing I'm concerned about. The
same page has other things not as materialistic.

~~~
woodsier
Forget about life goals, instead break them down into 1, 5, 10 and 15 year
goals, and then maybe tag "life goals" right at the end.

That way people can see something infinitely more important: you have a
detailed map of what you want to do and where you want to go within certain
timeframes. Though, it's important to know that they aren't stone-set, and
should be revised at least twice a year.

------
hooande
If it hadn't been for that weekend I spent messing with perl in 11th grade, I
wouldn't have gotten into ycombinator

------
jamii
Thinking back over my entire secondary education this is what I learned:

History: Very little stuck.

English: I guess I got a lot of practice writing. But at no point did we ever
discuss useful things like how to write clearly and effectively. Instead we
spent 5 years deconstructing literature, a process which consists of skimming
over half the text and then making up flowery rubbish.

Geography: Simple physical geography. Weather, volcanoes etc

Science: Actually quite a lot. My science teachers seem to have done a fairly
good job.

Maths: Nothing. Whilst I passed all my exams I didn't really understand
anything and left school incapable of constructing simple proofs. I now have a
masters in maths so its not like I didn't have the ability either, but most of
my first year at university was spent correcting misconceptions I had gained
at school.

Computing: After 7 years of school I knew roughly how a computer worked but
still couldn't write a simple program.

Now that doesn't strike me as 7 years worth of education. Most of the counter-
arguments on this page seem to come down to the necessity of learning things
you don't want to learn. The problem is that I didn't. I, like most people,
cannot be made to learn something by fear of examination. It has to be made
interesting or useful otherwise I will memorise it, write it down in an exam
and promptly forget it.

The problem with school education is that it's just not very efficient. I
don't think that there's some grand conspiracy to keep the downtrodden masses
in their place. It's just that our theories and methods of education are out
of date and ineffective. Schools have worked more or less the same way since
the 17th century.

Even in university I went to lectures where I spent 4 hours every morning for
6 days a week imitating a human photocopier. Mass lectures don't make sense in
the modern age. It would be far more effective to just video the top lecturers
and let the rest spend their time actually talking to the students, rather
than at them.

I could rant as well about education being taken over by exams. How often at
school did you practice working in groups, collaborating on joint essays,
learning to function in a team? I would guess almost never. Because it makes
it too difficult to grade an individuals contribution. Did you ever do
original research or experiments? Were you given free rein to choose projects?
Did you ever see an exam question that made you stop and think? It sometimes
seems like the entire education system is built around the fear of cheating.

I know its easy to sit around and complain. Its certainly a popular thing to
do in geek circles. But we have to recognise that there is a problem in order
to fix it.

Progress is being made, slowly. The rise of open courseware means that
educational materials are no longer being treated as commodities that
universities have to protect and keep secret. Once its out in the open
artificial selection will take hold and material will begin to improve. The
best lecturers now have audiences of tens of thousands rather than just a
single room.

------
charlesju
On a completely unrelated note: I thought Perl was a girl, haha.

(I actually build a AIM bot in Perl when I was in High School, so don't judge
me -- I can be nerdy too)

------
mantas
My 11th grade:

Coding at night Sleeping at school :p

Hoeworks? I thought they dont give any after 8th grade..

~~~
Raphael
Homework is at the discretion of the teacher, and is also highly correlated to
subject. For example, math might be every day, history once a week or so, and
a couple gym class health assignments the whole year. But it seems to have
nothing to do with what grade you're in. I thought that writing assignments
would gradually get longer, but my final essay senior year was half the length
of my 7th grade science report on the human body, so I was clearly mistaken.

I always thought the whole sleeping at school thing was pretty lame. I can't
say I haven't nodded off a few times, but it seems disrespectful to your
teacher and peers. Although, it is a pretty funny break from material when the
teacher creatively awakens or badgers the offender. (Or, best of all, let's
them sleep through to the next period and awake to utter confusion.)

~~~
jimbokun
"I thought that writing assignments would gradually get longer, but my final
essay senior year was half the length of my 7th grade science report on the
human body, so I was clearly mistaken."

I remember my college freshman year class where every writing assignment could
not exceed a single page. The professor's explanation: "You have spent several
years learning how to put more things into your writing. Now you will learn to
take things out." It was a very important lesson in writing concisely.

Not that this reflects your case, but it reminded me of this and thought I'd
share.

------
ivanzhao
before we all argue this with our own experiences, we need to first put the
"human variability" into account...

------
zack
This is so true. In fact, I'd wager that my perl skills are ultimately the
most valuable component of my resume. I learned perl in 10th grade by hacking
on AIM robots, messing around with the Net::AIM module I found on CPAN.

Then I got a job [still in 10th grade] writing a robot for some woman in
Canada. This was fundamentally a huge thing, because it opened my eyes to the
possibility that I, despite my lack of formal credentials, could generate
income based on my skillset.

Honestly I haven't touched perl in years, and now most of my hacking is in
PHP/JavaScript, and honestly I'm happy that I don't have to deal with perl
anymore...but it definitely gives me some cred.

Llama book 4 lyfe!

------
danw
Not HN material

