Nobel Hobos 2 wrote:Rojava Free State wrote:
Everyday at my highschool was torture, dealing with all the junkies, retards and weirdos. I told a guy who still goes to my school that he'll be thankful when he escapes.
Don't hold out false hope. You know some kids go wild when they get out of school, and some land in jail.
What you should tell your friend is actually the opposite. "Man it sucks to not have a job, and not even have school. You'll long for the days you had a reason to get out of bed"
Yeah it's propaganda. But telling your friend he'll be thankful is kind of propaganda too, isn't it?My last year in highschool was pretty easy. For one thing, year 12 was hardly more than a half-year. After that we could come in to talk to teachers, but we were mostly expected to revise for the final exams. Which were well before the end of the regular school year, I think to allow time for marking the exams, appeal against the marking, and resitting the exam if permitted.
In school, I had my best friend John. And a surprising number of other boys who considered me their friend, despite me being barely polite to them. Well two of them I did genuinely like, and made some effort with, but I never was much good at being a friend. Abnormally small monkeysphere I think. But also something I was totally unaware of, ie me having the gay part of being bisexual. Also definitely somewhere on the autism spectrum: I think some of the girls and boys I'd known since little school got to like me despite me being stand-offish, and maybe they interpreted my put-downs as friendly attempts to improve them. I could say more, but it would reflect badly on my adult conduct.
In 1979 (and perhaps still) we had a system called the "Trial HSC". It was sold to students as an unmarked trial-run for the real HSC which they would show to employers or use to get into university. Actually its main purpose was to calibrate schools, and the half of HSC mark coming from teacher assessments would be scaled up or down, then put in with the final HSC exam results. Anyway I got high marks in the trial HSC, like a hundred (out of 500) more than I would need to get into the course I wanted at university.
Then there were parents and teachers pestering me to aim higher. Why study boring old maths and physics (ie the courses I could easily get into) when I could study Medicine or Law ... yeah, by totally busting my ass with study for three months, and getting into courses that are both long and hard, then into careers that are hard as fuck ... they meant well, they thought a career of study and career of work which would tax my mind would be best for me.
I'd like to say I shrugged off their advice, but actually I reacted against it. I did no further study, and I started drinking (I was 16, two years underage, but I had a beard and affected adult ways, so a conveniently nearby bottle shop sold me wine and sherry). I actually turned up drunk and carrying a bottle to one of my exams (English I think), and when the results came in (published in the city paper actually) I had 50 or so less than in the trial HSC. Still enough to get into the course I wanted.
My mother had split from the family by then. Actually she'd been seeing the guy she split with for several years (my dad knew about that, but neither my sister nor me did, it was quite a shock). Around about that time, my mother's disapproval would have made quite a difference, but things I and my sister said when she left alienated her from us all. My father's disapproval didn't mean much to me, because I was already hardened to it. My father had an even higher opinion of my intelligence than I did myself (I thought "best in my year cohort at school" but he thought "best of his generation in the whole world") and I had already given up on living up to his expectations. All I wanted was to get into the big pond of a major university, aim high at first (physics and math are actually high aspirations, there aren't many tenured positions from which to do unfettered work, and you'll be competing against intelligences so far above the average they are alien). Then choose my field. Yeah, I thought I was going to have a field, I wanted to know Everything about Something.
On the basis "you enjoy what you're good at", I took Physics and Mathematics. To please my father I took Computer Science. And to please my mother (without asking her) I took Philosophy.
Then I took drugs. The next year and a half are very colorful in my memory; in a sense I learned a lot. But in retrospect what I did was a shameful squandering of the FREE tertiary education offered to me by the Whitlam government. It was still provided, not yet abolished by the Fraser government, no credit should go to Fraser it's all down to Whitlam. Who by the way introduced free citizen healthcare, later abolished by the Fraser government. I did my share of protesting while at university, but that does not excuse the disgraceful abuse of free tertiary education which I committed.
Well I think I'll leave it there. My final year of high school was easy because I didn't try very hard. I got into the course I wanted at university, I passed 3/4 of courses in first year, then 2/3 courses in second year, and was eligible to take courses in third (graduating) year, all at no cost to myself. But I never knew what I wanted to be, or wanted to do, so I dropped out and embarked on a course of being a confused bum. Overqualified confused bum you might say.
*This is what people don't get when they call for "more STEM": to make a real contribution in the ancient and rather narrow fields of Math or Physics you have to be crazy smart. Shoving mediocre students into tertiary education in those fields, gets you a sufficient supply of high school teachers and may feed into other fields by cross-discipline, but it makes it harder for the really talented mathematicians and physicists to gain the peaceful tenured positions they need to do their best work. We need to rediscover patronage, aka tenure. We need to pick the best and give them generous lifelong pensions without even a requirement to teach, to sit in a campus office, or to do any administrative duties. Such liberty of the mind is not for everyone ... only for the best minds. Such patronage, in every major field of science and perhaps even in some humanities subjects, will be repayed a thousand times over to society.
Interesting story. As for my highschool, think of it as purgatory. When you leave, you either go to a better place, or a worse place. I still don't know which one I went to.
