My kids attend a different Silicon Valley school that has an academic culture that I find very difficult to understand. A very high number of students load up on college-level advanced placement courses starting their sophomore year. A 'B' is considered a failing grade. What is baffling to me is that the bulk of the pressure is peer pressure, and not directly from teachers or parents. It is typical that kids who transfer to high schools in other states wind up as valedictorians, where they'd barely make the top 10% here.
Jocks, burnouts and socialites seems so, so long ago.
I guess if you're a kid living in Palo Alto, you are living in an environment where everyone and everyone's parents are high achievers and that is what is expected of you. In order to get admitted to the best colleges, everyone is gunning for the straight A's. If all your peers are getting straight A's and you get a B, yea I can see how that can have an impact on you, seeing that that now takes you to the bottom of the rankings.
I do not live in Palo Alto and I have never been to Silicon Valley either. I would like to ask what you think about this culture of over achievers telling their kids (via social pressure or directly) that they need good grades when all I can here is that you should not care about grades if you want to become a great entrepreneur.
That seems quite a paradox to me but again, I'm just hearing echoes of propaganda from SF. Could it be that people actually buy the "entrepreneur / do-it-your-way bullshit" for themselves but fear to apply it to their kids?
Also, I'd like to point out that most of the greatest scientific minds of our era did get mediocre grades in school (I'm not talking about the Gates or Jobs college dropout fairytale).
It's simple: For every runaway-success person with crappy grades, there are ten people with great success and great grades, and a hundred if not a thousand people with no success (or even failure) and crappy grades.
If you make a simple "expected success" calculation, much like the expected value concept, you will see that you should encourage your kids to have good grades. It really does make a difference, maybe not directly, but as a correlation with other stuff, most def.
Basically, do not base your life strategy on black swan events. That works for VCs because they make a lot of bets. You are an individual and only get to make one bet. You want that bet to pay off.
If you're going to be a black swan, your grades won't matter. If you aren't, and you likely aren't, they will.
"Could it be that people actually buy the 'entrepreneur / do-it-your-way bullshit' for themselves but fear to apply it to their kids?"
I sense that this is a very wise observation. I know college dropouts with large homes in the Palo Alto area who take their kids on east-coast college tours via private aircraft. These kids might be better served getting lost in the Andes, but many parents wouldn't hear of such a notion.
@Swizec: That's for sure but I'm not talking about the benefits of getting good grades. I'm talking about a culture that oppresses children and fixates everything on grades when what counts is that your child is happy and intellectually sound which I do agree is somehow related to grades in school (related like correlation, not causation).
I think many of the 'greatest scientific minds' got mediocre grades because they were so smart that school bored them. They did not find them challenging enough so that didn't have the motivation to participate in class.
The tech college dropouts like Bill Gates (Harvard) and Zuckerberg (Harvard) probably worked hard to get into their alma mater. I think still think good grades are a good indication of future success.
> Could it be that people actually buy the "entrepreneur / do-it-your-way bullshit" for themselves but fear to apply it to their kids?
Most of the Gunn students' parents aren't on HN, nor are they entrepreneurs (nor are most people on HN entrepreneurs). For the record, suburban Palo Alto is also very different from SOMA in SF. I know that this seems like a very _minor_ distinction to outsiders, but it matters: the kids (and their parents) aren't usually exposed to folks living with roommates, those who are "getting by" with freelance jobs while building more valuable career skills, and so on...
> Also, I'd like to point out that most of the greatest scientific minds of our era did get mediocre grades in school (I'm not talking about the Gates or Jobs college dropout fairytale).
A mediocre grade, by definition is a C. While I'm
willing to concede that one doesn't need straight A's to be a scientist, it's hard to see how one could make any contribution to a relevant STEM field with C-graded understanding of basic algebra and proofs (without, e.g., making up for it elsewhere such as via community college courses taken on the side or re-taking those courses in a university).
I'll say without hesitation that "take hard courses, don't worry about dragging down your GPA by a few points" is _great_ advice, but that's not the same as "all else being equal, mediocre grades have no consequences."
However, that advice implies getting to a university in the first place, and that's the problem students in Palo Alto are facing: even ten years ago (when I was graduating HS/entering college -- note I graduated from Monta Vista HS, a school that's somewhat similar to Gunn, but ahem -- farther from Stanford and Caltrain) the perception (which isn't the entire story, but still has a strong basis in reality) was that 1) one can't get into a good (UC Berkeley, UCLA, or another equivalent public or private university; Stanford or MIT are a different matter altogether...) university without a (I'm using the older SAT scale...) 1400+ SAT score and 3.8+ GPA 2) without attending and graduating from a good university, one may still have a decent career, but one will be less secure (whether financially or in terms of career mobility, job satisfaction, or even selection of romantic partners) in other ways. I don't think the situation got any better since then, if anything it intensified greatly after the 2008 crisis (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_is_Over).
(Note: there are definite advantages to attending a name-brand university, but it isn't -- at least, yet -- the absolute requirement, without which one will never be admitted to the a rewarding and successful career.)
I highly recommend arranging a screening of the documentary
"A Race to Nowhere". It was an eye opener for me and other parents in Los Alamos (a NM town with many similarities I think) and places this peer pressure into proper perspective for parents, kids, as well as teachers.
Not that I think this is conscious, per se, but I think part of it might be driven by the need for their school to be a "top school." It's not enough just to take AP courses and get As, the overall ranking of the school you do it at ends up affecting your admission chances. Staff might have similar concerns around funding.
That probably puts a lot of pressure on all the students to keep up the standard, probably past a level that makes sense for any diverse student body.
It's generally either-or. If you're a jock, you are not academic. The varsity teams are poor at my kids school because most kids in sports as freshman and sophomores drop out of the teams as juniors and seniors to focus more on academics.
My kids attend a different Silicon Valley school that has an academic culture that I find very difficult to understand. A very high number of students load up on college-level advanced placement courses starting their sophomore year. A 'B' is considered a failing grade. What is baffling to me is that the bulk of the pressure is peer pressure, and not directly from teachers or parents. It is typical that kids who transfer to high schools in other states wind up as valedictorians, where they'd barely make the top 10% here.
Jocks, burnouts and socialites seems so, so long ago.