Escaping High School
skunkledger.substack.com> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the strategy, as with everything, is to mitigate the impact of your disadvantages while using your advantages to the maximum. I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.
I work in exactly the type of school this describes, with exactly these kids. I’m genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead with advice/theories about their advantages vs. disadvantages despite having no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about. It makes me genuinely angry. This person can take their theories and shove them up their ass, until they bother spending time in my shoes and really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront… just to make it to tomorrow. While navigating being a fucking teenager.
Yeah, working a full-time job throughout high school didn't exactly maximize my potential. I had minimal time for much else, and it didn't exactly foster the best habits when I crammed 1st period homework into homeroom, hoped the 1st period teacher didn't call me out for doing second period homework in 1st period, and continuing that practice throughout the day trying to "just in time" my learning, as the article suggests.
It wasn't all as bad as that, not all of the time, but that characterizes much of it.
You know where & how I "escaped"? With dumb luck and public University scholarships & federal grants. The dumb luck was some quirk of genetics that put enough horsepower in my brain that I could get away with awful learning habits. So I learned fast enough that grades & test scores needed for scholarships & grants allowed me to significantly cut back on the low-skill job hours. Then during college I learned enough that I got a semi-skilled job during the end of my college years, and went on from there.
I've done the research on populations of kids that come from these backgrounds vs. others, and success rates are shitty. Sure, when I dig into the qualitative side I usually see a bit of determination on the part of those who were successful but there's always a lot of dumb luck too.
This genre of pontificating that amounts to "Anyone can do it if they just try hard enough!" completely ignores the fact that the ability to try is itself highly influenced by outside factors beyond an individual or family's control. Problems of this sort can't be solved merely by attempts to motivate the individuals, they have to be accompanied by environmental changes and interventions.
I went to a school like this for most of my youth and I’m with you. The only real strategy is to be lucky, whether it’s by having good parents or by incidentally avoiding the abundant pitfalls.
Edit: resisting peer pressure shouldn’t be worried about because it’s “the spice of life”? Yikes
99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness.
The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.
> 99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness.
That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.
Maybe that's the definition of hubris. But the tone of the above comment was too abrasive.
> genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead
that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.
Perhaps it was too abrasive.
Hubris? No, I don't have any amount of confidence to drive me to offer big, system-wide solutions. Because schooling and its issues are incredibly complicated and bring into play much, much more than just what happens inside the walls of a school building. One trivial example: students in Title I schools (read: poverty) have much higher rates of chronic health conditions. That's not really an issue in our wheelhouse, as a school, and yet we very much have to deal with it continuously. Pretty much everything in a student's environment, including their past, affects school, since school is where they spend most of their day. Yet people think you can just ignore all that and focus on teaching specific content or skills. Like kids are, academically, brains in vats, untouched by environment or circumstance.
I have already given credit to your know-how in this domain in another comment. You would be 99th percentile in knowledge, passion and experience compared to others around here. But maybe there are few ideas from the article we wished implemented in all schools. The author comes from a place of good intention.
Sustained initiative from people like yourself, backed by policy and support from the government can do wonders. And I and most people in this thread are grateful for what you do on the ground level already.
Or maybe they actually do have the experience and are sick and tired of people trotting out trite advice which is at best ignored and at worst draws attention away from the real issues by focusing people on useless advice which can be used as another stick to bash those less fortunate with.
Sometimes abrasiveness is warranted.
I’m gonna try to not write like a jerk here, but OP is pretty grating, so I’m sorry if I fail.
Parent didn’t say so explicitly, but there’s really no blog post you can write that is “how to escape from poverty as a teen in high school.” Thus, the problems with this one are not fixable. Off top:
* what’s the opening line of Anna Karenina, again? There are so many disparate challenges that poor kids can face that are more urgent than “get good exercise and send cold emails for jobs” that you couldn’t even fit them in their own book.
* even writing the blog post at all assumes these kids are reading hacker news which is, uh, cavalier. there are zillions of people hawking advice that these kids would need to sift through to even decide to follow this blog. Parents, friends, teachers, influencers, Andrew fucking Tate are all prescribing life strategies, why would they listen to your blog? Moreover, if you’re an impoverished kid who has somehow found HN and for some reason values its advice, you’re already on a better track than your peers, and you likely don’t need the advice!
* in fact, this blog is anti-advice for these people. Probably the single most valuable decision I made in my youth was to always refuse all peer pressure no matter what until I was out of my hometown. Peer pressure is INCREDIBLY DANGEROUS for these kids. They’re not Brock Turner, they’re not getting off easy and free because of daddy. one mistake can derail their whole lives. To read this guy say “don’t worry about peer pressure, it’s the spice of life” frankly pisses me off.
The real answer for these kids, again, is to get lucky until we get our shit to get as a country to make life less treacherous and unforgiving for those with less means. Unpopular here on HN, I guess, but the US is not a meritocratic libertarian tech utopia, some situations don’t have a reliable self-directed escape strategy, and not everything can be fixed by the perfect blog post.
edit: also the audacity to be like “here are some advantages of being underprivileged that you can leverage” is its own headache entire… “you won’t have to unlearn as many wrong ideas about the world”? Absolute nonsense
i think parent prefers to simply be angry than contribute to the conversation
When the author writes:
> I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories.
doesn't that somewhat justify the anger of the parent comment (who presumably "knows enough")?
If the author doesn't know enough about the topic, why the need to pontify? They could just stfu and have an opinion in topics on which they do have meaningful contributions. Not everyone needs to have an opinion on everything.
exactly. There are ideas in the OP article that can be taken and systematized into the high school system with the operational know-how of the parent commenter. The downstream effects of that would be incredible. We should be aiming for intervention as early as possible in the education system.
The parents in these situation often don’t have the emotional or social skills to do more or even realize that there are options other than be angry.
The parents are dysfunctional people churning out the next generation of dysfunctional people. It’s an intergenerational cycle that is nearly impossible to break.
I’m not blaming these people, but if you grow up in a dysfunctional functional environment it is on the level of a miracle to break the cycle.
You don’t know what’s wrong or where to look for help and in my case I was even proud of my parentification for making me “strong and resilient” while minimizing the bad things as a coping mechanism.
Hi, author of the post here. See my comment in response to light_hue_1 farther down – in the spirit of Cunningham's Law, I'd be curious about your answers to the same questions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36630576
Would also be interested to hear from anyone else who's taught at or attended a high school that's poor or in a rough area, re: those questions.
> Copied from below.
I’m one of the kids that “made it” out of these situations and it took me until I was over 40 and making FAANG money to START thinking in terms other than “not being like my dad” or “ending up poor”.
My longterm plan was “to be an electrician or work with computers.” Which was the plan I formed in 1st grade. (It took until high school to realize I meant EE not electrician, but that’s how little the actual plan mattered.)
> preserving your safety in some way
Even a comment as small as this is assuming a lot in poor areas. The only safety I had was in my own head or in my STEM classes because I could immerse myself in them enough to forget about life outside them.
Look up the problems associated with complex-ptsd, childhood neglect and parentification.
It was all about racing as hard as possible away from where I was, not about looking forward in any way. For most of my twenties my timeframe in planning was weeks or months if I felt confident.
I just got lucky I got hooked on computers and had a couple teachers that praised me for that and math.
In fact, I nearly dropped out in 9th grade to work at a Burger King so I had access to some kind of money. Instead I called CPS and moved in with my narcissistic mother who was at least financially stable. But it was a coin toss at the time.
My first job was in a factory and then in the Army, I didn’t have a plan or wants other than stable living situation and enough money for basic bills.
whenever you see the word "systemic," you can be sure that what follows is going to be painting in broad strokes at a population level and not something that is actually relevant to decisions an individual can make.
To be fair, the person that the parent is responding to is also giving extremely broad strokes. On its face listing out a set of really big barriers followed by “but they have advantages too!” can easily be seen to me like the “have you tried yoga” of being disadvantaged.
Like I can imagine a whole set of specific examples where “there are also advantages” would be incredibly offensive to say so handwavily. If someone tried to tell a teenager their experience with being sexually abused as a prepubescent child “has advantages” I would promptly try to remove that person from being near that or any other child for example.
I mean, the very point of the GP was that a lot of factors cannot be influenced by individual decisions - because they are systemic.
> really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront
Are there any good books on this topic that you would recommend? I don't expect you to write a point-by-point rebuttal to every blog post like this that comes along, but I'd sure love to do some of that work myself and well-regarded popular books on the subject are a good place to start.
The Amazon results from a search on "books about systemic issues in inner city public schools" are all over the place. Bonus points if you have a more left-leaning recommendation, because I'm already familiar with the arguments from Lukianoff, Haidt, Sowell, et al and would like to read a good counter to them.
The systemic issues start at home. Not having safety or stability in their home life leads to almost all of the negative adults outcomes you hear about.
Cptsd, parentification, and physical/emotional/social neglect (abuse too, but it’s more obvious than neglect) are the biggest things to solve based on my lived experiences.
Solving those would solve most of the “school” issues I believe.
The next level would be at the “nickeled and dimed” [0] level. Poor opportunities and little mobility is all most of these kids can look forward to. So instead they spend their downtime distracting themselves from how shitty their lives are or will be.
"From Systems Thinking to Systemic Action: 48 Key Questions to Guide the Journey" by Lee Jenkins.
I agree. There are no good solutions. Only how lucky the children are on whether having good parents
My life only got better after I quit school at 15. At the end, I had so much outside distraction, that I couldn't put up the front at school anymore. I just needed sometime free from chaos.
Quitting school wouldn’t have helped me. It would’ve locked my into that life for myself.
The chaos I had was mostly at home. School was my calm place.
This is something I hear startlingly often. It's not the majority of kids, by any means, but I've had a number of students who fail classes so they have to go to summer school, just to escape from home.
It wasn’t that intense for me or even a conscious choice. For me it was neglect and a chaotic environment. (Think growing up as a “roommate” of a depressed nonfunctional alcoholic)
Similarly, I had enough positive attention that I wanted to continue and make it to college.
Edit: bad-> intense. I need to stop minimizing what I went through.
> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.
I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.
Fluid intelligence drops with age:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4906299/
You weren't an idiot as a teenager. You were just uneducated and inexperienced.
Personally, my decaying mental performance over the years is almost palpable. I feel like I am half-dead now compared to who I was 20 years ago. Sure I was nuts due to the powerful emotions, but that just means I was alive, not a talking corpse that I am now.
Yes but when does it start dropping? Not likely in the teens. As I'd always heard and other commenters also suggest, peak brain power is usually ten years later than this article proposes. Brains are still developing in our teens, and are not at their peak yet.
The chart in the linked paper shows sharp drop between 20 and 30 years already. I remember another chart that I cannot find now, which showed wider age range and more components of intelligence and that one showed some peaks between 12 and 20.
Brain morphology is irrelevant. "Development" might just mean aging. Measurable performance is all that matters.
Yes, the scientific consensus right now is that the prefrontal cortex does not generally finish developing until the mid to late 20s, and this is the main locus of executive functioning. Perhaps according to some very narrow definition of “raw brain power” one could say, as TFA does, that this is all done in one’s teens - there seems to be consensus that IQ peaks around 19-20, though even short term memory (which I think would be unambiguously classed amongst “raw brain power”) is thought to peak in the mid 20s.
It seems to overly intellectualize a problem that has a whole spectrum of factors outside of being "smart". Long term thinking, risk/reward, motivations, emotions, hormones, all that stuff is either first forming or in total chaos and it's in no way as simple as smarting your way out of it.
AFAIK the human brain matures around mid to late twenties, so you'd probably be right about this from a biological sense too
I think the neuroscience here has really gone through the pop-sci wringer. The original research was specifically about impulse control and not anything else. I think there has been some more evidence about pattern recognition etc recently.
It's always struck me as funny when people say 25 is when you're fully mature. After this point, you start to experience declines in ability. It's not maturity; it's the moment you start dying.
While you make a good point that the mid-twenties maturity is in terms of impulse control, that's kind of a defining trait for getting a scheme like this to effectively work.
Beware of unquantifiable words like "matures". It might just mean minor ongoing changes. Or it might even mean deterioration. In the end, performance is what matters, not morphology.
There's no sense in rationalizing with folks who want to quantify intelligence in the first place. They're chasing statistical phantoms. Even if we take a generous view of what they said and interpret it to mean that brain development finalizes in the mid-teens, it's still a completely myopic view of what it means to be "smart."
People quantify sports abilities down to the ten-thousandth of a second.
Have you played sports? Most sports fans and players know that determining which players are better than others in their domain is an endless debate that is in the end, still completely subjective. The only thing approaching objectivity are events like the Olympics, parts of which are still subjectively scored.. on top of that, for the ones that aren’t, better performance on a particular day in a particular event doesn’t mean one is a better athlete. To summarize: better performance at a combine 40 yard dash means nothing when it comes to performance in a game.
Author is just another grifter peddling pop-psychology/bro-science nonsense like thousands and thousands of others, since it generates like, views and even conversation (like at HN).
None of it is worth paying attention to.
Yeah my teenage self was an idiot, there's no nice way to put it.
Join the club.
Your post reminded me of this article from almost a decade ago. Using James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem as a great example:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/big-break...
I got a lot better at learning new material during my time in college. Did I get any smarter? Nope. Simply put, I learned how to learn.
It's analogous to athletics. Sure, you can have a talent for running. But you're not going to win races unless you train.
A mind is plastic, adaptable, and hence can be trained.
IQ studies show IQ caps at 25, so... yeah no remotely close.
commitment, leverage, delegation and compounding are hard to understand at that age or at least follow thru on
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.
I don't think they realize how lost teenagers can be either. Some kids have a driven vision, but a lot don't. They are still going to hang around the same parking lots and it's not because school is getting in the way.
I agree that the article over generalize several aspects of High School education. High School in most cases is the last chance people will be able to share each other experiences/lives. Afterwards people dive into the compartmentalized world of their careers and social status. Learning is just one part of the whole thing.
Yeah, I do and have done creative things and enjoy the creative output of others immensely. But given the choice, I'd rather ride my bikes, ski, sea kayak, etc. Fortunately creators have created some amazing machines and prosthetics to enable such pursuits.
Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools.
I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets of just chord sequences and important hits are not sufficient for them.
Part of it is just the nature of the Program (wind band is a highly synchronized large group activity and you cant have too much screwing around), but I also think the nature of a wind instrument where you have limited endurance and can only play one note at a time is stunting without proper instruction. Despite having great sense of rhythm and phrasing, I don't think I really understood music until I started getting chord shapes into my hands on the piano and could noodle without worrying about spending my limited endurance.
edited to add: And to be clear I do think the music programs are Good and Valuable. It's an excellent group activity and kids will work on something for months for the big concert. I did not have any other single school project with that kind of runtime and that's a valuable experience on its own.
tldr if your kid likes music dont let them settle for just wind band. Get them a guitar or a piano too. But it's fine to just like the band for what it is, too.
> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets.
This is pretty much how music is taught to all students learning 'classical' and was my experience as well. Most never really learn anything about music at a fundamental level, and can even have an entire career in the classical world not really knowing anything about what's going on in the music. Random story, but one night here in NYC I got asked by someone to bring out a visiting musician from Spain to hear some music, who had been playing in a major symphony there since the 80s (can't remember if it was Barcelona Symphony or Spanish National Orchestra). Brought him to Smalls in the West Village to catch whoever was playing that night. He was really impressed, kept on leaning over asking "how is that piano player doing that with no sheet music???". It's just not part of a regular classical musician's training, unless they're working to be a composer as well.
But back to your point, I felt the same way with music in my schools growing up. No one ever taught you how to actually play music, they just gave you sheet music and said "play this". It wasn't until much later that I started working with a jazz teacher privately that I got introduced to all the chords, scales/modes, and theories that'd you need to improvise or play music with others. Honestly, I probably would have been better off in high school if someone had told me to drop music classes altogether, handed me a bass or guitar or synth, and said go have fun with a few friends in a garage.
As far as I am concerned, classical music in conservatoire includes music theory and instrument trainings. To play in an orchestra, especially semi famous one, most likely you would need to follow an university/similar degree.
Any exam is done without a music sheet, music theory always include composition. Chord progressions comes surely later in music theory but harmony is key from classic repertoire,and counterpoint from baroque era repertoire.
Oh, absolutely. I'm not saying that a professional musician at a major symphony doesn't know about theory -- this guy I took out was clearly very accomplished in his field and went to conservatory for it. Even the classical education I had up through high school included harmony and chords. But there is a difference between knowing the theory from a technical perspective to be tested on, and completely embodying it and using it to make music. Here's a recent video of my friend's group playing [1] -- everyone involved has a world-class level of understanding of theory, but uses it to improvise, not just to read sheets.
And let's not forget that a lot of 'classical' musicians back in the day were expected to be able to improvise as well. There's just a different priority for a 'classical' performer these days and a 'jazz' performer.
> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets.
Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biology are even worse in this regard) and so on. Even literature and history are not taught as an exploration and inquiry of possible themes but as structured topics (often one per book) that you learn as being "right" or "wrong".
The emphasis on testing, and in particular standardized testing, has made this worse, since teachers who don't "teach to the test" are often penalized.
Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology".
> teach to the test
How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?"
> standardized testing
There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery of them.
> Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology".
That's an excessively reductio view of the practice of science, and frankly dangerous. I think you know better than that. I mean, is newtonian mechanics "right" or "wrong"? It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should.
Most science is working on the edge of what is known. The idea that there are "right" and "wrong" answers in practical science is what has supported peoples' belief that "hey, I heard of someone getting the vaccine and yet they got sick anyway -- what a scam!" or "Scientists said not to bother with a mask but to wash hands furiously, and now they want us to wear masks -- they don't know anything".
The reason I put "experiment" in quotation marks is a lot of "experimentation" in high school is at the level of "pour the solution from the bottle into a beaker, put a strip of litmus paper in, and record the pH." Everybody uses the same bottle of solution so there's one correct answer. That is not "experimentation" that is simply practicing a lab procedure.
"Experimentation" is open ended, and involves debugging. "Make a solution that has a pH of 7.2. How did you determine that? What attempts did you make and what went wrong." Or "reproduce the Millikan oil-drop experiment. What's the charge of the electron? How did it compare to Millikan's result and why?"
The "science is about facts" attitude is a pernicious meme in the public consciousness. It's just as bad as the deterministic teaching of history.
> It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should.
Newtonian mechanics gives unique and right answers within the domain where it applies. It doesn't apply to relativistic or quantum mechanics, but that is not relevant to high school physics.
Saying Newtonian Mechanics doesn't give correct answers is way overly pedantic.
There's not remotely enough time in high school science classes to derive much of newtonian mechanics from experiments, let alone quantum mechanics from oil drop experiments and long term experiments like testing vaccines. Heck, high school science struggles to simply teach the heliocentric model of the solar system. Most of the students don't understand what an ellipse is, and they hardly have the time to make observations over a year period to then guess at what laws govern their motions.
Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class.
> Most of us have an intuitive notion of NM already. I remember having the notion that if I threw a rock, it accelerated for a time after leaving my hand, before decelerating. I was disabused of that in physics class.
And it took a long time for people to figure that out (or how you see, or tons of other "intuitive" concepts). IMHO, if you had to chose only door one or door two, it would be better for students to leave school with an understanding of what the scientific process is (not even baconian scientific method) rather than the idea that science has some sort of weird epistemology of "facts" and "non-facts". The worst and loudest Gradgrinds of STEM education policy clearly have no idea of this.
The people who just learn facts with no understanding don't do well on tests, either. That's kinda the point of the tests. I've seen this in action plenty.
The idea that tests can't test "real" knowledge is simply wrong.
P.S. at Caltech, the science & engineering examinations were all open-book open-note. No need to memorize anything. But you were doomed if you didn't understand the material.
Even for a multiple guess test, the wrong answers are ones one would arrive at if one suffered from the usual misconceptions about how the problem should be solved. The wrong guesses are not random. The people who compose the tests aren't fools.
The problem is time. Getting 140+ people to learn their instruments is hard enough, mixing in Music theory is just gonna add to the frustration, for which most of the band will never need to know.
That even holds true for everything but the smallest of jazz combos. Could you imagine listening to a group of 20 musicians all playing from Fake Books? It would be a mess of noise.
> for which most of the band will never need to know.
What do you mean by "need"? I think, for the purpose of playing music, music theory is more useful than reading. But no one really needs to do music in the first place. It's recreation and fun and expression.
20 musicians can work together. They'd need to know how to listen and make space.
Music education got cut entirely in the East Bay public school district my kids attended. Had to move out of state.
Couldn't agree more. I think the issue is that school budgets are limited and music programs are perennially on the chopping block because they are among the most expensive and are seen as the least critical to education. The band directors fall into a cycle of needing to justify the investment by getting the kids to play the most impressive piece that they are capable of playing, even if the kids learn absolutely nothing along the way.
And have you ever tried to get 50 kids to do the same thing for five minutes? Even if that thing is sitting still, it's virtually impossible. If it's playing a song at the limit of their musical ability? You'd have a better time swallowing a shovel.
For what it's worth, contra to the other agreeing comments, this didn't happen to me. I'm sure this is all locally contingent upon an instructor with the ability and interest, but we had a jazz band I was a part of in middle school (in LA County early 90s) and we very much learned to compose and play music that was not written down on a sheet. I don't know that that kind of thing was feasible for the larger concert band, which had like 140 kids or something and one teacher.
I also played brass, for what it's worth, but never felt limited by breath endurance. I was a ~5:00 mile runner as a 12 year-old, though.
This reads to me like wanting to learn sports, and then disliking that your soccer instructor didn't teach you how to throw a ball. There's a lot you can learn about music in the classical framework, but the focus there is certainly not improvisation based on chord sheets. Generally learning about improvisation in a high school context would happen in jazz band, although in my experience lots of people in jazz band (including myself) are not too interested in improvisation either. A separate music theory class might also help although dedicated classes for that are probably even less common than having a jazz band, although if a student is particularly motivated and interested and the school is at all flexible, you can sometimes work out a deal with the band teacher to do a special run of such a class. Also music theory is just theory, it's totally insufficient without also actually practicing improv as doing it in real-time is a much harder challenge.
I wouldn't doubt if learning guitar or piano would help with this aspect, but I know plenty of people who learned it just fine on wind instrument if they want to. It's not too surprising especially for those learning wind instruments - taking a solo in high school is already scary for a lot of people, and even more so when they don't even have music to play or practice ahead of time. Also there is admittedly probably a higher barrier of entry to improv on wind instruments so a lot of the focus necessarily has to be on achieving a baseline technical proficiency before it even makes sense to think about improv (if they don't put in the prerequisite technical work, it would be hard to move to improv). For example, with guitar or piano, right off the bat I can play any note in tune and sound at least halfway okay. On a wind instrument, even playing the most basic note will sound quite bad at first, and generally the range of frequency is limited for beginners and learning to extend it can take many years. Playing in tune likewise takes years.
Anyway, all that said, I entirely agree, if someone really likes music, it's hard to go wrong with also learning guitar or piano. Piano in particular, as one of the most versatile instruments, used in so many genres, and can help with learning fundamental theory, composition, and even gives a very good sense of rhythm as the two hands have to act independent of each other in a way that other instruments normally don't have to. If I had to go back and learn a different instrument, piano would be a likely candidate.
Being in Band, one learns Music; being in a band, one learns music. The attrition rate of band students in extracurricular or post-high-school musical endeavors is a bit disappointing. It is similar to the kids forced through piano lessons who quit whenever they have a chance.
My experience playing the clarinet was the same as yours.
"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 educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles, and are stuck balancing what's important with the crap forced on them by legislatures, parents, and (hopefully) well-meaning people like the author.
At least in public schools we've been teaching people how to read incorrectly for decades because of a trend out of New York that got pushed on everybody else
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/22/us/reading-teaching-curri...
https://www.thecity.nyc/2023/2/14/23598696/nyc-teachers-coll...
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama have went from laughing stocks to already middle of the pack nationally by dumping the new system and going back to phonics
https://apnews.com/article/reading-scores-phonics-mississipp...
If the "people who have spent their lives studying education" are using learning styles it isn't hard to be smarter than them, it has been roundly debunked.
https://www.educationnext.org/stubborn-myth-learning-styles-...
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 have a specific agenda they're pushing, rather than "...presenting the facts as best they can be determined, giving voice (without fear or favor) to worthy research, sound ideas, and responsible arguments..." as they claim in the About Us section.
The funny thing about Learning Styles is that there isn't any data that supports it. But there are lots of studies that debunk it.
Here is a Tedx Talk about those studies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=855Now8h5Rs
This is one of the studies (that with citations to many dubunking studies) that I was assigned in my M.Ed program:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1539-6053.20...
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?
I thought it was very well known and didn't require thesis level citations. Several links of higher quality have been provided in the thread that show this isn't something I just came up with as was my original intent.
> 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.
Don’t agree, I think it’s a very good list of well intentioned advice.
Eg try to become an apprentice to someone talented. This would indeed be extremely valuable to anyone trying to learn a skill. The author then goes to great lengths giving advice on how to land a position like that when young.
Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it?
Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. Compounding that, most people went through the education system as students, so they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works. Usually their advice on how to fix the system is geared toward fixing the frustrations they personally felt as a student.
In reality, most people are only exposed to the education system as consumers, and therefore know next to nothing about how it actually works. Doesn't stop them from spouting off what they think they know on internet forums and blogs though. They enjoy pointing out what they see as problems, and are happy to offer quick fixes born in ignorance that have either already been tried and don't work, or don't solve the problem for reasons obvious to people currently working on it. Or better yet, the supposed problem isn't one at all, but a boogeyman that politicians are currently pushing to scare voters.
If you want to fix education, get into the mix and actually help. Sitting on the sidelines complaining isn't helping anyone. If your perspective about the education system is along the lines of "people who can't, teach", as seems to be in vogue these days, then you're really part of the problem.
The example of phonics vs. sight reading shows that professional educators are just the blind leading the blind. Parents have known for years that phonics work, but institutionalists dismissed their complaints as spouting off from the sidelines. Challenging established authority is the engine of progress in science and society. Appeal to authority is the last resort of those who have no other ground to stand on. If you want to elevate the discourse, engage with what people are actually saying, with their ideas, instead of dismissing them as idiot outsiders.
During Korean War, 1950-54, the was an alarming increase of inductees failing the reading tests.
Was this real, or a new form of draft dodging?
The Army had psychologists look into to this, and it was determined that it wasn't faking. The young men really had poor reading skills.
And the interval between 1945 and 1950 was, backing up till the 20 year olds were 5 or 6 years old, the time when sight reading was first introduced into schools in a big way.
Now, English spelling is more complex than many other languages, but there are maybe 100 rules that cover the overwhelming majority of cases.
The phonic issue is absurd, can you imagine if an entire industry followed a fad for years with minimal pushback? Now, if you'll excuse me I've been in a cave for a few years and need to check my crypto balances.
> Appeal to authority is the last resort of those who have no other ground to stand on. If you want to elevate the discourse, engage with what people are actually saying, with their ideas, instead of dismissing them as idiot outsiders.
I'm not appealing to authority, I'm appealing to evidence/experience versus ignorance and Big Important Feelings. As a scholar and an educator, I'm the first person to say how important it is to cite your sources and to argue from evidence.
So if you're going to write 12,000 words about how the education system sucks and how to get through it, wouldn't you say that some of those words should be devoted to citations? Or at least the recitation of facts? Or barring that, at least establishing the background of the author to dispense such advice? Is a single citation asking too much?
There is one external authority cited in this entire 30 page blog post: Paul Graham. I guess that really says it all though, doesn't it? 14 year olds don't know who Paul Graham is. It really tells me the intended audience of this is not 14 year old kids, but for HN.
But but but but there's a single instance of teachers being pushed to do things the wrong way and doing it (because all "educators" are the exact same rank right) for quite some time even though it was wrong so that means we have carte blanche to call the whole system broken.
> Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it?
I read this and was expecting /s but apparently not.
Please address something concrete! In the US, there are significant problems with the educational system. It's ok to write a theoretical piece thinking about ways to do things differently.
The author has some good ideas that do not deserve to be dismissed lightly. They can even be applied within an existing educational system. Examples that I think should resonate on HN:
- 1C: Produce Instead Of Consuming
- 1D: Do Real Things, Not Fake Things
Well, there are a couple things going on here. First is the blog post, which I can't really make sense of. It's 12,000 words on how to navigate high school without a single reference or citation. No evidence is presented whatsoever to support any of the assertions made. It purports to be a guide for 14 year olds but is written in a manner and published in a medium that is not accessible for 14 year olds; not many 14 year olds are reading 36 pages worth of blogs on substack. The author doesn't seem to teach 14 year olds or teach at all. He does not seem to have done any research for the post -- he hasn't spoken to any 14 year olds, or anyone else who has spoken to or teaches them for that matter. Paul Graham gets a quote though.
So really, I'm left to assume that this is just a letter from the author to his past self. That's how this reads to me.
As for the concrete advice you list, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Saying something like "get a computer" or "make a thing" will play great here on HN. But this is not advice 14 year olds want or need. Kids are creating things all the time. You do not have to tell them to create things. In fact, telling a 14 year old that they need to get a computer to before they can produce shows a distinct lack of understanding of how 14 year old express themselves creatively. Most of the advice in that section is focused on how to find a cheap computer, not how to create anything.
If you actually listen to the problems kids have today, it's not that they have a lack of creative outlets. The problems they are facing revolve around managing mental health issues, and there's not a single word about that in all the 12,000+ written.
--
The other thing going on is the generic HN discussion on education the blog post has catalyzed. The blog post doesn't really touch on the discussion happening here, so it's kind of separate, but still related. Here on HN, the discussion often revolves around the Big Important Feelings posters have about the education system. You're right, there are problems, but they are rarely identified here. The solutions offered therefore often aim to solve the wrong problems.
For example, a lot of HN posters have a problem with the number of administrators employed at universities, and they even like to cite a ratio of admin to students or admin to faculty. Then they say "They ratio is too high! Fire the administrators!"
This is a classic example of Chesterton's Fence. Firing the administrators and hiring more faculty seems like a great idea from the perspective of the student, who interacts with faculty and not administrators. But from my perspective as a member of the faculty, I would not want this at all and it would make my work and the work of my students harder (for many reasons I have articulated in previous comments if you're interested in those).
For the HN crowd, this is like saying "The computer is running too many processes. It looks like a lot of those are daemons and system processes, so let's get rid of the operating system to free up resources. That way we can run more programs, because after all, that's the point of the computer." The average HN poster will immediately see 100 reasons why that's a bad idea in a computer system, but then go to advocate for something very similar in principle when it comes to the education system.
The number of processes in a system will only give you the potential points of failure.
If we measure computer resources we come a completely different conclusion. would you use an OS that uses up more ram and cpu resources than all the programs you run inside of it combined?. How about a restaurant with more managers than cooks and waiters?.
Schools with more administrators than teachers seems like the perfect example of the iron law of oligarchy to me.
How many times THIS WEEK has this very forum cried that it's more important to care about the pooooooor devs having to work hard than not use an entire web browser as their toolkit of choice for modern applications?
> Schools with more administrators than teachers seems like the perfect example of the iron law of oligarchy to me.
So then let's cut administrators. We'll start with one of the most expensive departments on campus: IT. Let's just zero their budget, it will save a ton of money, and we will get to fire a ton of administrators.
Now I bet you and everyone else on HN will tell me 100 reasons why getting rid of the IT department on campus will be a massive detriment to campus life, and make it a terrible place for people to live and work in the 21st century.
But will the HN community be able to do the same for the DEI office? No, HN is very quick to say that DEI should be axed, the administrators do nothing, and they are just a drain on university resources.
Except that a lot of people on our campus find that the efforts of the DEI office actually do serve the goals of the larger community. Some of the brightest young leaders among our student body wouldn't be here but for the efforts and support of the administrators in the DEI office. But HN doesn't know these stories. I can't say we'd be better off without them.
Then you can go down the list of things to cut. Do we cut health services? Well, that would be nice, but the local community doesn't have the necessary health infrastructure to support the student population, and the USA doesn't have socialized medicine. Therefore, parents would rather send their darling precious to a school that does have a health center, so we can't cut that.
Do we cut the sports program? HN crowd sure likes to gripe about the athletics department, but the HN crowd also can be found in the Linux Lab at their respective schools, so of course they would be fine with this. But as it turns out that young people really like to exercise and play sports, so cutting the athletics department will seriously deter brilliant young people who are also physically active. So we can't cut that.
Do we cut the police department? I mean, why does a school need a police department anyway? Well as it turns out, parents prefer to send their precious darlings to a padded environment, where the blast radius of youthful indiscretions are contained, and don't leak into the unforgiving federal and state criminal justice systems.
These days, large universities like Stanford aren't just schools. They are actually small cities, and they provide services you'd expect of a city. It turns out faculty aren't the only people on campus who keep things running smoothly, or who serve to implement the educational goals of the university. There are plenty of administrators who work to do the same. We can't just axe them arbitrarily and expect things will automatically improve because they were administrators, and who needs administrators? I think you'll find a lot of pushback when you start suggesting cuts you think are obvious, and not just from the administrators themselves, but from the people they serve.
What this author's 14 year old self would say to their elder instantiation: "What's a computer, boomer?"
Always fascinating to see a forum with a population who see themselves as special outliers, but also think that they have some unique ability to speak authoritatively on what the other 99% should be doing.
> come into our job and tell us how to do it?
Many people practice teaching in a variety of settings. Their demonstrated ability has little correlation with their credentials.
If someone gets stuck on an amateur plumbing or construction project, they call a professional. In other words, the professional competence is trivially demonstrable and applicable. Can you imagine needing a credentialed teacher to get you out of a bind?
> they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works.
Although the average person may be incorrect about how to fix it. It's not a good sign that almost everyone leaves with the feeling that something is deeply wrong and almost any alternative would make more sense.
> because they have had one child
Merely being exposed to more examples isn't data, you also need superior methodology. Even in educational academic studies you will find a lot to be desired in this regard.
The people I know who are most vocal about education have many children (4-8+). And they put their money where their mouth is and homeschool. Also, their children tend to grow up with a wide variety of personalities and lifestyles.
> get into the mix and actually help
The system is designed to remove autonomy and responsibility from teachers. They are overwhelmed by curriculum, and program mandates from school, district, and state. The best teachers I had were essentially opted out. A few completely donated their time and refused to participate in any school trainings or events outside their classroom.
The best way I can see to get involved is probably to advocate for vouchers and organize teaching in your neighborhood.
> Can you imagine needing a credentialed teacher to get you out of a bind?
Incredible hubris to say such a thing, after we all went through a pandemic, during which teachers were expected to risk their lives and actually sacrificed their lives in service of keeping their communities running. That's all I have to say to you.
That doesn't address the point. I also do not agree with that narrative.
> Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it?
Teachers apparently need to be told, because they spend YEARS teaching kids how to do arithmetic on paper instead of handing out calculators and focusing on high-level mathematical modeling instead. There are lots of such insanities in the curriculum, not to mention loads of propaganda (not a US citizen, but AFAIK there is a lot of propaganda in US schools too).
Not to say anything about the merits of your idea, but do you have anything to back it up? I mean, I'm assuming you do, because this whole sub thread I started was about people who don't know what they're talking about telling others who know better what to do. And I presume your evidence must be very compelling, for you to feel confident in calling what others are doing for a living "insane" and "propaganda".
What I don't understand, though, is why you're not providing this very compelling evidence along with your comment.
Evidence of what? That doing arithmetic by hand like in 19th century (as opposed to arithmetic understanding/intuition/modeling) has zero applications in professional and personal life? Isn't that obvious? When was the last time you did long division by hand?
Or that mathematical modeling does have applications in both personal and professional life? Isn't it trivial to come up with numerous examples?
Or that mathematical modeling is so important it deserves place in the curriculum? Now that would be hard to show, but I never claimed it does. I just said it is relatively more valuable than pen-and-paper arithmetic, which is obvious from above two points.
Also, status quo does not get free pass. I imagine you would find it really difficult to defend pen-and-paper arithmetic, especially when everyone can see it's just bureaucratic inertia and technophobia.
> Evidence of what? ... Isn't that obvious?
I'm loving how everyone is proving such good examples of the things I'm talking about in my root post. First, to be clear I'm not engaging with your proposal.
But the point is that you seem to have a very strong opinion. Strong enough at least to muster yourself to type a fairly substantial reply (now two) to me using very strong language like "instanity" and "propagainda". Yet where does this opinion come from. I can respect if it comes from experience. Unlike a lot of posters on HN, I put value on expertise and experience. Yet you are not claiming to have expertise or experience, so why is your opinion so strong?
I expected on your second reply that if you had evidence to link to, you would supply that, but you have neglected to. Instead you claim that what you argue is obvious to you, and I guess by extension should be obvious to us all.
To address your overall point directly, your premise is flawed from the start.
There's been plenty of mathematical modeling added to the curriculum over the years, and the existence of students doing arithmetic on pen and paper doesn't really negate that. Read the book "Mindstorms" by Seymour Papert, it goes over a lot of the reasons why arithmetic is done the way it is in the school system. But actually it's principally about how to change it with mathematical modeling, and makes a compelling case for the usage of computers in the classroom beyond mere calculating engines. I'm sure you would enjoy it.
But I mean, why couldn't you cite that body of work to me. And no, the dynamics at play here are not in fact obvious in reality. You think these things are obvious because you haven't actually thought about this issue at any depth beyond consulting your feelings. I'm not saying that to be rude, but you've literally told me exactly this in your last reply.
Honestly I was expecting you would cite Papert given what your were arguing. But the reply you gave me is a perfect instance of the problem I was complaining about in my root comment. Even if you're right, the fact that you can't back up your position beyond "isn't it obvious" is very troubling for the sake of discourse.
Because if you look into this body of work, you'll see vibrant efforts to bring mathematical modeling to young learners, that have been going on for decades, spearheaded by educators and teachers around the world. So no, teachers don't need to be told. They're actually doing these things you are complaining they are not doing. So are they "insane", or is it just that you are ignorant as to the status quo?
> Isn't it trivial to come up with numerous examples?
And yet you didn't offer even a single one.
> Also, status quo does not get free pass.
The status quo has the benefit of being an existence proof tho. If you're going to call someone administering the system insane, given how wildly successful the system has been at driving innovation, then you better have a very strong argument.
But what have you brought to the table? You don't claim to have any relevant experience, you don't claim to have spoken to anyone who does, you provided any research to support your claim, you don't even claim to have done research, and you don't even feel the need to offer even a single example or hypothetical to support your argument. All you've said is that you've consulted your feelings, and you find your argument to be obvious. I mean... would someone else presenting an argument this way convince you? This is not an argument, it's a shell of an argument.
P.S. I actually very much agree that mathematical modeling should be taught to children instead of arithmetic and long division.
I am all for evidence-based decisions, but you are asking for evidence that sky is indeed blue. Like seriously, you want me to prove that math is actually used somewhere? How about it being used in the evidence you are asking for? And when was the last time you used long division? I am sure there are nuances that average student or parent cannot see, but the thing with schools is that they are so rotten that a long list of serious flaws is visible to the public along with corresponding solutions.
Your demands for evidence for the obvious are just a form of red tape intended to protect the status quo. This sort of behavior is the definition of bureaucracy: no action can be taken until approved by the bureaucrat (via curriculum, law, funding, or management decision). In the end, everyone in education just wants to be protected from the stress of change and the challenges of technology.
All I am asking for is for you to do even one single solitary ounce of effort in validating your assertions. Just like, the minimal, basest, most barebones effort beyond consulting your feelings. The barest of effort is not red tape. If anything, your argument style is doing great to reinforce the status quo, because it will convince exactly 0 people to change their ways.
I provided to you just the kind of evidence that would be necessary to convince people, and I have used to convince many people of exactly what you're trying to push here. Published work by experts in the field who have thought deeply about the subject, published works on the subject, and even designed and tested new curricula in a scientific manner. That is what you need to show people, not just glib statements about how what you're saying is "obvious" and how the people who are doing differently are "insane".
But I didn't go about it calling people "insane" in their actions, because that's the fastest way to get an immediate stonewall. These people are not insane, they are in fact as sane as you think you are, and a huge chunk of them (could even be a majority, certainly every teacher in my department) actually agree with you. But your whole approach of disparaging the very people trying to make a difference, trying to implement the change you want to see. You are calling this system rotten and you literally have no understanding of it, as you've shown here in your posts to me.
I'm open to being convinced that you know what you're talking about, but you keep telling me that you don't want to convince me, so I'll take you at your word that you know nothing about this topic you feel so passionately about. Definitely worthy of a bookmark for the best example of "Big Important Feelings" I've found in the wild so far. Cheers.
> Published work by experts in the field who have thought deeply about the subject, published works on the subject, and even designed and tested new curricula in a scientific manner.
This is called "paralysis by analysis", a special case of "penny wise, pound stupid". There's a lot of low-hanging fruit in education that does not need much thinking. You are free to optimize the solutions as much as you want, but don't use that as an excuse to delay change. Also, some changes (computers in particular) only bring benefits when implemented at scale. Small incremental tests will always show negative results, because they will be dominated by costs of the change.
> All I am asking for is for you to do even one single solitary ounce of effort in validating your assertions.
Homeschooling parents validate tons of possible changes all the time. I did it too. One thing you learn when homeschooling is that major changes can be implemented quickly, easily, and cheaply by single person. You can iterate so quickly you end up being limited by the compulsory curriculum rather than by opportunities for improvement. You then look at the glacially slow pace of change (or even regression) in "professional" education and cannot help thinking it's insane. Something must be very wrong with the system.
> But your whole approach of disparaging the very people trying to make a difference
Are they really trying to make a difference? My impression is that teachers just want to do the minimum work they have to do and then go home. I have never seen a teacher care the way parents care. There are exceptions, rare innovators, but exceptional teachers, if they avoid traps of educational fads and try to implement real change, quickly run into resistance. They are locked in the inertia of the large organization. Their hands are tied, they get frustrated and they eventually give up.
And BTW, it's not my job to show something is propaganda. It's curriculum designer's job to show everything in the curriculum is an undeniable scientific fact. That's easy to do with math or physics but much harder with humanities and arts, which is why all the propaganda concentrates there.
What evidence would satisfy you? If I produced a study I imagine this would not change your world view, especially considering it's your occupation.
>Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large.
They don't care about how to educate children writ large. They care to the extent that they think you are failing their child, specifically. You would do well to remember that as an educator, you have a responsibility to the public. If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your dignity, perhaps you shouldn't be a teacher.
>If you really find parents concerns to be beneath your dignity, perhaps you shouldn't be a teacher.
As a person who does tech work, you are now sentenced to be forced to listen to every single asshole who wants to tell you their "super awesome app" idea that "should take like a weekend right" to make and "will get us rich", and you aren't allowed to complain or point out how they have no idea what they are talking about
Those guys don't have any stake in anything except a half-baked idea, and furthermore they can clearly be shown not to know what they're talking about.
It is not comparable to a parent's concern for the welfare of their child. A teacher's duty to their student is obligate. Dismissing out-of-hand the input of the one or two human beings who know and care more for that child than anyone else on the planet should be considered malpractice in that line of work.
Personally I teach adults, so in my capacity as a teacher, parental concerns are not my concerns.
In my capacity as a citizen of this country and as a taxpayer, I also don't care about busybody "concerned parents" who feel the system is failing them personally. My concern in this capacity comes down to how the system is building a better community for everyone. Individual parental concerns shouldn't turn into culture wars.
What I'm trying to say is that when it comes to their own children, they are not being "busybodies". It is their right to voice their concerns, and it is the duty of educators to listen to these concerns and take them seriously. You can't just brush them off. Even if the parent is being unreasonable, it is part of your job description to make them see reason.
Sorry, to be clear I teach adults, so it's not part of my job description to make any parents see reason. The concerns of one adult do not impact the way I teach any other adult, no matter how they are related.
As for my role as a citizen, I'm thinking specifically about my local community, which is beset by people who have very loud feelings about certain books existing in the school library. A lot of communities are facing this issue.
I call these people busybodies because nothing that they do or say is based in reality, but only on their feelings. It's feelings all the way down just, like the linked blog post. All they're doing is making everyone's lives harder: other parents, teachers, administrators, and especially the students. For what? There's no actual problem being cited. This is all to quell their own feelings about books. That's pretty much the definition of being a busybody.
Teaching is not nearly as hard as you lay it out to be.
The problem is teaching is los pay and low status in most places, and as such mostly attracts people who are terrible teachers.
Our kids are in private school now because our public school is a dumpster fire of bad teachers and admins. The private school teachers don’t get paid a lot but they are valued and highly motivated to actually reach kids. The difference is astounding.
And the private school teachers aren’t doing anything exotic or difficult. They are teaching just like kids were taught decades ago. Heck, my fifth grader is learning Latin.
Your comment is self-contradictory. You say the problem is low teacher pay and status, but then point out the private school teachers aren't highly paid, but are motivated.
If I were to speculate, I suspect the differences are:
1. Modestly higher pay in the private school, attracting better teachers
2. More selective student body in the private school, making the school environment more conducive to learning for average and above-average students, and more attractive to teachers
3. No public-sector union in the private school, leading to more accountability for teachers
The second point is important. Private schools exclude all the kids whose parents lack the motivation, time, or resources to place their child in an exclusive institution. They exclude the children who didn't learn the behavioral skills to conform to the expectations of a private school. They exclude many children with disabilities even if they can't explicitly discriminate. Meanwhile, public schools are required to include children with disabilities (often involving disruptive behavior) in class with other students to the extent practical.
Public schools are charged with upholding the social contract that all children are entitled to a Free Appropriate Public Education regardless of their social status, wealth, disability, or the financial or emotional capacity of their parents. It's a heavy burden to carry, but it's one that we as a society have decided is worth the cost. Your children's private school doesn't carry that burden.
My post wasn’t contradictory, because you missed the part about status.
Our private school teachers are treasured, and are honored to be part of the long tradition of this particular school.
My children are also the same children they were in public school, but they are learning more now because they have better teachers. The knowledge gap of them transitioning from public to private school was considerable.
Intrinsic motivation is a factor, I agree with that. But it is more than that. Public schools (as a rule) are not getting our best and brightest, they’re more getting those who are settling for it for their job.
* Editing to add I agree on lack of unions in private schools. Our public school teachers in NJ at least have no real accountability at all.
I guess I just don't think you've made a good case for _why_ the private school teachers are better than the public school teachers. I don't think it's intrinsic motivation. Do you really think status is a sufficient explanation? Why aren't public schools getting our best and brightest?
It's not that I think I have bullet proof answers to these questions, but I feel like you're not acknowledging that these are important questions to answer if we're to understand why your children are getting a better education in private schools.
My theory is that it largely has to do with teachers prefering to teach the subset of children who get into private schools. As a rule, private school kids are better behaved and less difficult to work with. It's important to note that I'm not saying public school children deserve an inferior education. Their lack of behavioral and emotional skills is not their fault. In fact, those are skills that should be taught in school.
> Teaching is not nearly as hard as you lay it out to be.
> Our kids are in private school now because our public school is a dumpster fire of bad teachers and admins. The private school teachers don’t get paid a lot but they are valued and highly motivated to actually reach kids. The difference is astounding.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. You have N=1 child, and you extrapolate everything from that one child, especially how to teach all children. Your fifth grader is in fifth grader for a single year, and so your experience on fifth graders is limited to that. The teacher teaches 20-30+ new fifth graders every year, for decades, and has a wide range of experience.
I'm sure your fifth grader is very smart and talented. To be learning Latin in 5th grade, they must be. And so what has happened to their old classroom at public school? That classroom is now absent one of the brightest, most engaged members of that community. I'm not saying you were wrong to change schools, that was a good move for you. But for the teacher, you made their job actually harder. And think about what happens when all the top students sort themselves into the top private schools. Where does that leave the public classroom?
This is why your experience was night and day. Take all the top students and put them in a room together, and the learning happens almost automatically. It's like magic. Take all the bottom performers and put them in a room together, and it's like pulling teeth. It's torture.
So yeah, in some sense you're right. Teaching people who want to learn isn't all that hard. It's actually a lot of fun! But that's not all there is to teaching, and so I would implore you to maybe adjust your perspective to account for this.
My kids aren’t top students at all. They both have learning disabilities. My son is highly sports oriented, my daughter is very musical. They both have trouble with traditional subjects.
They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.
They both struggled with their knowledge deficit transitioning into the private school.
They are doing very well now. Not straight A’s, but they are learning what they need to learn and flourishing as people.
I have seen this repeated for many other families. A lot of public schools are simply awful.
"B" students are in fact top students. That you think they aren't is one of the things I've been pushing back on in my career.
I have several learning disabilities including dyslexia and ADHD and was also a top student, so those aren't exactly determinative. Many of my top students are neurodivergent. I get a dozen letters every semester from my top students regarding their learning disabilities.
Excelling in sports and music is also indicative of highly talented students with vast aptitude. Your kids are actually probably far above average, but you can't see that, because your N=2.
I’m sorry, are you indicating you know my kids better than I do?
The kids got “B”s because everyone who showed up got Bs. It was social promotion.
This became painfully obvious when the first marking period scores in many classes was F and D in the private school. And was backed up by equally bad standardized testing scores.
No, I don't presume to know your children. But I am more qualified than you to compare them to other children, because that's part of my job (unless it's your job too, I dunno). Based on what you've told me, and that's all I have to go off of, your kids are above average. It's kind of wild to me that you're on here arguing with me that they're not.
Kids who get A's, B's (even some C's); and do sports or music are well on their way to successful futures. The kids getting Fs and Ds who aren't involved in any music or sports are the ones who won't be getting spots at top colleges. That's not to say they can't have successful futures nonetheless.
Maybe so we're all on the same page, you can articulate what the profile of a "top student" looks like to you.
You need a reality check, dude. The fact that you think you can judge people’s children better than their parents based on a few sentences on HN lays bare your poor assumptions.
I said I can judge your kids better relative to other kids because I have extensive experience doing it. If you think you can do that better without any experience actually evaluating kids, then I think it's you who needs the reality check. It's such hubris to think you can do the job of an experienced professional better without any experience or training whatsoever, and that's the whole problem with busybody parents.
The few sentences you provided are highly correlated with very successful students. Learning Latin in 5th grade is not something 90% of children do. Immediately your kid stands apart for having done that. Same with sports and music. Combine that with good grades, and that's the profile of a top student. What more do you want? Again, what's your conception of a top student, and how do your kids not qualify? Is it because they're not getting straight A's?
Still so wild to me that you, as a father, are arguing post after post to me, a dog on the internet, that your kids are below average. I mean, regardless of what reality I live in, what's up with that? Who are you really trying to convince here?
> But I am more qualified than you to compare them to other children
Do you have any evidence that your qualification gives you better comparisons?
Wait so the standardized test scores of your kids went significantly down when they went to a private school?
>They both got “B”s in public school, despite their standardized tests showing them in the 15-20th percentile.
What do you think a "B" grade means?
15-20% == 80-85%
What is a B average?
"B" = 80-89%
So, their standardized scores more or less lines up with their grades.
> 15-20% == 80-85%
That's not how percentiles work. (The upthread 15-20 was %ile not %.)
I mean, I can imagine a test where the 15th-20th %ile range happened to be a score of 80-85%, but that would be coincidence or design of the specific test, not a natural equivalence.
I figure this was the same mistake as the first other response, I made the same one initially when reading that comment and thought they were saying "B" was lower than it should have been, not higher than it should have been. How "percentile" actually works isn't something I've given any thought in like a decade or more, my first read was "top 15-20%" before going back and remembering it's actually more like "bottom 15-20%" (or more precisely something like "better than 15-20% of other takers").
Education majors in college have some of the lowest IQs.
See https://thetab.com/us/2017/04/10/which-major-has-highest-iq-...
or they're just being honest, it was a nicely written piece and no one knows everything
educators are garbage because they don't work empirically, they experiment on kids and the experiments have been failing since the 60s, causing mass amounts of fatherlessness but none of them are even willing to see themselves as the issue because no snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible
Life long educators are suddenly teaching boys can be girls in kindergarten. They are a joke.
Wow. You guys just can’t think of anything else, can you?
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.
> 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.
Reminds me of the quote "the A students lead the C students, who are the bosses of the B students"
You're right that today's high school diploma has little meaning. There's nothing wrong with the idea of the diploma, but plenty wrong with the institution that issues it.
For example, you found tech certifications to be valuable to you, and indicated a GED was valuable as well.
> 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
Sounds like quite a privilege.
> Sounds like quite a privilege.
Cool. And?
Yep, I was privileged to have a computer at home and family members who worked at a university so I could get a dial-up SLIP Internet connection and access to Usenet and IRC.
So what. How is that even a remotely useful response to my comment?
The article is explicitly advice for students. It matches the path your life took, but would your advice to drop out and get a GED be good advice for someone without your privilege?
Point out where /I/ provided advice for anyone? I described what I did and my observations, I didn’t provide advise for anyone else.
There’s way too many people who reply to every personal anecdote shared online by “calling out” the sharer’s “privilege”, which adds absolutely nothing of value to the conversation and implies that nothing about the sharer is relevant or important except their demographics.
It’s not the efforts I put in seeking out mentors, contributing docs and code and my time volunteering in open source, studying and passing certifications, or any of my long hours and excellence in the workplace. Oh no, no, not any of that. It’s my “privilege”, that’s all that matters.
Oh fuck off, both of you, seriously. You don’t know anything about me and your responses to what I shared are a net reduction in value to this entire conversation. Be better.
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 "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not.
I'd add something about living your own life (career, relations, hobby) instead of being "locked" by your friends. Dont go to X school just because your friends go there.
Friendships decrease/end too. You may barely see them 5 years later due to... life
>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.
They aren't worthless.
Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school.
So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.
It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class.
Nearly everyone is much better off doing other things with their time than studying to try to get an elite college for a good deal.
There's little evidence that where you go to school matters.
If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be you at Harvard.
>There's little evidence that where you go to school matters.
That's not quite true. There is little evidence that if you go to Penn instead of Penn State you have different results, but there are caveats. First, you have to be able to get into both.
[edit]The studies control for selection, so the ones showing no increase in wages are studying the same cohort at Penn and Penn State, but there are more students at Penn State that are not members of that cohort than there are students at Penn.
Second, you need to go to a college with enough people and have access to a similar cohort of intelligent, hard-working and advantaged students.
>If you take Albert Einstein and you put him in a community college, he's still going to be Albert Einstein, and you're still going to just be you at Harvard.
Maybe so - most people aren't Albert Einstein, though, and that Harvard degree gets you a look at places where the community college degree does not.
Penn's not really the level of school that will be that much better over a flagship state school. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and maybe a few more are that level.
The median Penn grad ends up making a bit more money than the median Stanford grad and less than the median MIT grad. They all make considerably more than a Berkeley grad, who makes considerably more than someone from Iowa State University.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit... https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/projects/college-mobilit...
> Penn's not really the level of school that will be that much better over a flagship state school. Harvard, Yale, Stanford, MIT, Princeton, and maybe a few more are that level.
Pretty sure Wharton fits in with the profiles you mentioned.
The College… yeah, sounds about right (maybe a flagship state school honors program).
Penn students apply to a specific school, so the student body profile of each school is quite different (sometimes to almost comically different degrees).
Regarding Penn vs. Penn State, the valedictorian at my PA high school got into both. He ended up going to the Penn State honors school, and he's doing great today. Salutatorian (same GPA actually but one fewer AP class broke the tie) went to Penn and he's also doing great. So I guess that's to say.... shrug.
Honestly I'd live in State College over Philly any day of the week.
Somewhat surprisingly, the impact on lifetime earnings of attending an elite college is nil for men but strong for women.
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 my point; plus I'm kind of a late bloomer to math so it's more relevant to me than rote.
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.
That's the most charitable interpretation I can think of. Wouldn't you agree that stereotypes are most impactful with first impressions and then diminish over time for those who know you?
It's a bit of a self fulfilling prophecy. If you have the requisite skill and persistence to be in the top 10 in the class, you probably don't need to be in the top 10. But if you have that skill and you don't use it to be in the top 10, what are you doing instead? It better be something good, because competing against other highly motivated and skilled peers for a top 10 spot builds a lot of character and fortitude. Top 10 in my class are the best of the best. No one is sneaking in there.
> It is almost certainly not worth your time to try to be in the top 10 in your class.
In Louisiana, it literally gets you a free public college education.
Which for a depressing number of kids in Louisiana, is one of their only hopes of breaking a cycle of poverty.
In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades.
Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency.
At best they show effort (or "caring" parents)
>Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher
Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :)
This way everything is up to your score, not school name or cool prof who inflates grades
Tests have their own sets of problems too. A single, high stakes, high pressure test to determine everything is just as absurd as grades, and tends to bias for those who have time and money to prep.
I prefer wholistic evaluations. You are more than both your test scores and your grades and your school and your demographics. But if you put them all together one can get a decent picture.
While tests arent perfect, then they are at least fair, transparent and almost bias free unlike other methods.
>tends to bias for those who have time and money to prep.
Hmm?
So you have time to do various stuff for grades, but dont have time to prepare for exam?
It feels like copy pasted argument from discussions about exams in general, not when comparing them with grades like we do.
>But if you put them all together one can get a decent picture.
Concrete things, please.
How would you evaluate person.
In general, exams measure peak performance. Grades measure sustained performance.
The literature is quite extensive that although standardized tests have substantial predictive power as to college performance, adding grades and other factors is substantially better. Eg https://news.uchicago.edu/story/test-scores-dont-stack-gpas-... and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6963451/
You assert without evidence that testing is unbiased. This is widely disputed. You will find some literature taking the opposite view, of course, but given that the debate rages among professional researchers, a plain assertion doesnt carry all that much weight.
http://m.portlandobserver.com/news/2020/jan/14/college-admis... https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED537716.pdf
Cheating on college entrance exams is rampant in China and other countries. This is another downside of high stakes exams.
As far as a wholistic view, I think including attributes such as grit, leadership, and talent across many areas such as writing, the various arts and many other fields is useful.
How can you introduce bias in ABCD e.g math tests?
>think including attributes such as grit, leadership, and talent across many areas such as writing, the various arts and many other fields is useful.
How do you measure leadership?
And prevent bias/preference from the examiner?
I suggest doing some research. There are plenty of published papers on the topic.
I don't really disagree with you; I was just pointing out the way it currently is, at least in the US.
The USA used to be a hybrid, but many schools are getting rid of looking at (ACT/SAT)test scores and that leaves them with just grades.
I think you've missed the point about TFA's discussion on grades. Here's a link so you can go back: https://skunkledger.substack.com/i/125171481/b-dealing-with-...
Basically, high grades aren't the end-all, be-all of school. They aren't a way of defining ones' worth. The analogy of treating school like a job really applies here. TFA also points out the risk of bad grades.
I should point out that TFA's advice works for conventional high school, but less for prep school. I had so much homework in prep school that it was nearly impossible for me to pursue the kinds of things TFA advocates for. Had I known better, I would have insisted on going to public school. (But all my friends were going to prep school; another mistake from TFA that I fell into.)
Yes - this is why I said:
>So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.
It was a reply to someone who missed the point about the discussion on grades.
> Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college.
How do they make it cheaper to go to college?
Merit scholarships that are based mostly or entirely on grades are relatively rare and extremely competitive.
And the cheapest colleges are often the least selective ones (like community college or state schools).
In my experience state schools that weren't very selective were also the ones offering scholarships for students with high grades/test scores etc. Many of my friends went to the school they did instead of a more prestigious one due to being offered more tuition assistance/scholarships for their high school achievements.
Personally I was able to skip a full semester and change of classes thanks to taking every AP course I could during high school as well
As an example, Georgia offers scholarships for all students above certain GPA cutoffs. The Hope and Zell Miller programs, specifically, pay for many students to attend schools like UGA and Georgia Tech.
Many programs and scholarships have grade cutoffs or maintenance requirements and while scholarships aren't entirely based on grades the grades are often a prerequisite.
> Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.
I have this archetype which I constructed over the years, that I named "34-year-old Patrice".
By just looking at him, you wouldn't be able to tell that 34yo Patrice dropped out of high school, took some odd jobs in his youth which eventually got him into trouble, so he did time. At age 26 he got out and started turning his life around and despite all this hardship is currently a functional member of society and in some regards even more successful than his peers.
Point being, life is more complex than just taking and passing tests. I feel like more teenagers should be told this as early as possible.
"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.
> Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not.
This is also a place to tailor things. If you are particularly good at learning ahead of time, then you can learn a lot of things "just in case" at a low cost, increasing the chances that something you learned is useful.
If you aren't especially good at it, then you're going to have much lower chances and JIT learning makes sense for all the reasons in TFA
> Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless.
I'd like everyone who makes this claim to try submitting resumes of a fresh college graduate with a low C average to a dozen companies and see if even a single one of them calls back.
Grades are a means to an end, which is different than being worthless.
>I'd like everyone who makes this claim to try submitting resumes of a fresh college graduate with a lo
Even better - Ive found my first software job during 1st year and nobody asked me about grades, but this is not US.
Learn your stuff, have interesting stuff in CV and it should be doable, right?
I actually had a low C average, and I only got my first job because I didn't put my GPA on my resume and one company forgot to ask me my GPA; the interviewer later confirmed that they would not have moved on to a second round (much less hired me) had they known my GPA.
At e.g. a college job fair, not having the GPA on the resume jumps out immediately and the recruiter would ask me for my GPA and write it on the resume if it wasn't there. With the GPA on my resume, I had several recruiters say "You might want to save this for another company because we aren't calling you back with that GPA" and hand me my resume back. This included, with zero exceptions, every SV company at the CS job fair at my college.
After the first job, you are much less likely to be asked for GPA, but it does still occasionally happen.
Weirdest (right out of college) interview was where I had gone through all the stages, including a multi-hour on-site, they were talking salary range, specific roles, and when I could start, but then they had to fill out a form for HR. The dialogue was roughly:
Interviewer: You're coming right out of school, right?
Me: Yes
I: Okay, I need your GPA
M: 2.2
I: Oh. (long pause, looked very uncomfortable) alright then.
They suddenly switched from being obviously ready to hire me to perfunctorily filling out the form.
I am in the USA and have not shared nor been asked my GPA in any job interview.
I throw my university GOA on my CV because it looks good without taking up much space, but is ultimately meaningless at this point. No one asked for it, no one probably cared about it, but it is still something I’m proud of given the struggle in earning it.
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 better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5. If I could wave a wand and changing things, I’d restructure civilization to expect children to be present everywhere with their parents or other family members, learning by being part of civilization as every young adult currently does.
My parents do not speak fluent English, they have zero grasp of the sciences or even basic math (they still have trouble grasping percentages and fractions), and are very susceptible to scams by cult leaders from their country of origin. Same for almost all of my aunts and uncles, who lives hundreds or thousands of miles away.
I would have been doomed without an external setting where I got to interact with much more qualified people.
Well, yes, the adage that "It takes a village to raise a child" still holds.
Yeah, and the best way to do that is to have the village organize a central location where everyone's kids can go learn a variety of skills and subjects from a variety of well-educated adults. Otherwise you're asking every individual adult to meet people very different from them and develop such good friendships that they are willing to spend significant time with your kids.
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 day to work, focused and without worry for their child. If all parents had to bring their children to work, would that not diminish their ability to work?
Can an electrician focus on his work when a young child is with him? 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?
Edit: This is also a rather amerocentric take. What of other countries educational systems where you can choose more directional high schools. Where the final year of highschool IS an apprenticeship in some vocation? Where you leave school, with no debt and with experience on the job. And all the countries where education is free. Countries where relevant experience is a part of the degree? Where courses in teamwork, leadership and other skills are a part of higher education? To discard educational systems because of the defects of a single country's defects seems poorly thought out.
> 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.
Would that not utterly stratify social classes?
Yes. This is one of the outcomes the anti-school crowd is after.
Is there a name for this tactic of projecting motivations on others in order to explain their behaviors?
Theory of mind.
I see where you were going, but I don't think Theory of Mind quite fits.
ToM says that a person understands someone else to have their own knowledge, ideas, motivations, etc. But this behavior is not simply understanding that others have their own motivations, but imputing negative motivations onto others.
It's estimates of future behavior from past public behavior and public statements and documented funding. Ask a teacher how they feel about Betsy Devos and you will get two very very very different answers largely depending on political ideologies that have nothing to do with teaching because of her history and "friends".
She isn't exactly friendly to public education, and a lot of the funding for pushing for voucher programs comes from religious organizations.
For a concrete example, our state has had vouchers for decades, and it has done jack, diddly, and squat for improving public schools in the area, because it turns out letting the rich kids go to a school only they can go to just means they have an easier time neglecting the other hundred thousand kids in the state that weren't born to the local power family. Meanwhile up north where there isn't enough density to support a school as a private business and not enough rich families to want it anyway, everyone is put into the same couple schools which struggle to ever have enough money to do even the basics but the teachers are good and the material is good and the effort is there, so for the kids that want education, there's a perfectly good one for all to have. I was classmates with a famous Senator's niece, and we had the same teachers and it turns out the world doesn't end when you let the poors learn stuff.
Normal
Don't be so cynical. There are serious problems with schools and there's no visible progress, so many people gave up. They concluded the problems are endemic and permanent and the only way to fix them is to dissolve the schools entirely.
Which is why they are pretty much universally funded by religious fundamentalists who spent their past years trying to force textbook writers to deny climate change or evolution as basic scientific facts.
This isn't disillusioned people looking to tear it all down and rebuild a wonderful new system, unless you think Betsy Devos is some sort of anarchist. These people have very specific complaints about the school system that rarely have to do with the actual problems of actual outcomes, because the people who by and large ARE getting actual bad outcomes from the public school system don't really have a voice.
What religious fundamentalists? Maybe in the US? Where I live, schools are actually a source of aggressive religious propaganda. But the problems with schools are far wider than that they become ideological battlefields with propaganda-filled curricula. Lots of non-religious and moderate people see the problems.
> Would that not utterly stratify social classes?
Not today. Schools no longer have monopoly on education. They actually prevent kids from learning by overloading them with the official curriculum, leaving no time or energy for informal education.
Isn't this how we end up with a lineage of uneducated blacksmiths? I am from a rural town focused on oil and gas and some agriculture. There were no software developers were I was from and the internet was only dial-up before I left. A lack of schooling would see me in a O&G work camp right now because I would have been exposed to nothing else.
Anyone who is interested in programming will learn about it regardless. It's especially easy today with things like Google and Youtube.
OK, how about becoming a doctor? Software development is a bad example for today, but was an excellent example for when I was growing up because Youtube and Google both did not yet exist and the personal computer had just started appearing in everyone's home. The resources weren't there.
How would this new setup allow me to become something other than what is immediately around me?
> The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life.
There's nothing "default" about Civilization, which entailed intentional centralization and creation of bureaucracy.
We don't live in a society where 80% of people farm shitty land to survive, and no one of sound mind wants to turn back that dial. We're not bringing our kids to roam sheepishly around oil rigs, mines, labs, sales floors, whatever.
I think everyone has an opinion on how education could improve, but there's no superior (or viable) substitute for it at scale.
Notwithstanding, this isn't zero sum in the first place: parents can teach their kid at leisure, and they do. They expose them to their interests and their work, to some extent.
And lastly, there's no such thing as "absent from life". Even if this is only meant to convey the idea that schooling shelters kids away from any and all interesting things in society, this is untrue (and by extension, it would suggest that you're "absent from life" if your shit job doesn't meet some arbitrary criteria, or otherwise that your shit job is "full of life" but school isn't).
> Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5.
I'm not aware of anyone in the US going into to debt for school before the age of 18.
Are you confusing the free public education that's offered throughout the US with the optional college education that some, though definitely not most, take out loans to attend?
18 years of school, not age
Thats crazy imo
You are limited to your sorroundings with less ways to move up due to lack of awarness
I bet it would increase inequality hard
I love this idea. It's done a teeny tiny bit in the form of work experience, but actually we should make a scheme where workplaces get some kind of incentive to let the kids come and hang around, maybe even do some work depending on what it is.
I would sprinkle this around the school calendar so that you had a few weeks a year where you could sit at various places of work and see what was going on, instead of little weeklong academic breaks plus a mega long summer holiday. Not everyone loves the academic side of things and this could be a good break, plus it might provide some motivation for the question of "why am I learning this" that everyone has at various points in their education.
I’m confused. Are you suggesting children should be working?
As I read the parent's point, I think he is advocating for kids seeing their parents work more often. As it is, kids in US don't experience the reality often. More than that, parents shield them from the reality as long as it is possible, because the reality mostly sucks.
I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't honestly say that I learned anything useful ( I could have, but did not ).
I thought this was only me! For me, my dad was self employed as an "accountant" of sorts, and specialized in what might be called forensic accounting of Medicare reimbursements. He dragged 12 year old me into hospital data processing centers at 3am to print records so he could do his work.
In this case, he had a certain amount of records to print in the time allotted, and he needed two operators to make the window. I learned a lot of useless knowledge about which medical procedures qualify for extra reimbursement for Medicare, and also what Sunset Park, Queens looked like at 3am. Nothing really useful in life.
I think if my dad had hired someone and let me sleep and play on the computer instead, that probably would have turned out better for me.
They probably expect the kids to be involved/help, but that depends a lot on the parents' jobs. Like I was of some help to my dad in elementary school (helped him with basic IT/networking/data stuff), but my mom worked with biohazards that had very good reason for not wanting children around so any time we had to go to mom's work we were locked in a break room for hours.
My mom was a teacher and for some reason I ended up the entire school's IT dept as a preteen, despite the school's IT dept being acceptable, just not staffed 100% of the time. I did pretty well at running a photocopier and stuff, though when I was older I eventually realized that letting a ten year old run and DIAGNOSE AND FIX the photocopier was not something that should have happened.
My mom was single and poor so I also got to spend from 3pm to 7pm most evenings sitting in her classroom, which for some years was an actual server closet, desperately trying to note die of boredom while my mother had meetings and graded papers.
This was so useful, important, and necessary for my future /s
Back when my dad had an office job, I would visit him in his office. We'd be locked in a room with a (fancy for the time) IBM PS/2 for 8 hours. It blew.
> I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often.
I think these were called apprenticeships at one time
Works pretty well if you're a landscaper or something.
What if you have some soul-crushing dead-end office job? How long do you think a 6-year-old would last in an airline customer support call center?
That teaches the 6-year-old something too.
Not just that they should be working, but they should only be exposed to their parents' social circle. There should be no opportunity for children to meet people from different social backgrounds.
One of their parents' social circle. The other is too busy feeding them and making sure they don't run into traffic or disappear somewhere to play video games. So you've suddenly halved the number of people who can get real work done.
Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew very fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.)
For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.
> For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.
No. It's really not. As someone who has been involved in the system that admits you to top ranked universities and whose summer hustle also paid well in highschool. This is not a slam dunk. It's one small piece. And it could easily backfire and be a negative depending on how you write it. For example by writing it as if it's a slam dunk.
These sort of overt economic arguments tend to go over very poorly.
Yes, point - there is no candidate good enough to get admitted, if he is stupid enough in making his case. That friend's son didn't build a people-oriented business by being stupid.
(OTOH, I wouldn't call it a "summer hustle" when you've paid your CPA more for routine tax prep than any of your peers have earned before graduating. Hopefully yours was similarly lucrative.)
An example of your point - another old friend had a nephew who was an "obvious" candidate for an Ivy / Stanford / etc. on academics, etc., etc. The nephew was also an out-of-the-closet white supremacist, both online and in his application essays. Zero offers, even from third-tier schools.
It's not just an argument that they should let you in, it's a BATNA – it's an opportunity for them to argue that they are worth your time.
If they don't even try to convince you, you should probably stick with your business.
> If they don't even try to convince you, you should probably stick with your business.
For someone invoking BATNA, I would hope you understood the concept of distributive bargaining.
Top universities get lots of good candidates. The lawn care business guy - he's just one of them. The school doesn't lose much if he doesn't go there, and thus he is not worth that much of the school's time.
Right after getting his master's degree my friend's father stood before a choice: accept a desk job paying X a month, or make X per job installing and repairing A/C units.
That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.
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.
It's also kind of dangerous though, there's a reason these people need to be certified. Dealing with a 5V breadboard? Yeah I'm game. Disassembling the housing of something to figure out which part needs to be greased or came loose? Yeah sure. My computer science training has prepared me to think outside the box and solve novel problems.
But if it's got 240V mains going through it, I'm not going to touch it. I like how my EKG currently looks and want it to stay that way. Why are humans made out of such a conductive material again? My CS degree didn't do anything to help me here beyond my biology class giving me an appreciation for how much meat-circuitry my body has that relies on fractions of a single volt to operate my vital organs.
This specific repair scenario is not dangerous. It is such a common failure with a cheap fix that it’s simply worth killing the circuit, unplugging the old one, plugging in a new one, turning the power back on, and seeing if it works.
Worst case scenario, you have a new capacitor. Best case scenario, you save hundreds of dollars.
Here’s a video. You can even skip all the diagnostic tests, as all you care about is replacing the capacitor. If that doesn’t work, call an expert.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWH38Rg1iMI&pp=ygUeUmVwbGFja...
https://www.homedepot.com/c/ah/ac-capacitor-replacement/9ba6...
> This specific repair scenario is not dangerous
I believe you, but I also know I'm not qualified to examine whether or not the repair in question is the non-dangerous one you're describing or the lethal one that looks pretty similar. I have all kinds of respect for you for being able to fix your own stuff, but even if I think I know what I'm doing, I'm still going to pay somebody who definitely knows what he's doing to do it for me.
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.
Ah okay, this is admittedly not what I had in mind. When I read replacing a capacitor, I was imagining a soldering job, not a plug and play consumer part. You're right - this seems pretty doable for your average homeowner.
Well, the hard part is finding that capacitor. I try to repair almost everything and very rarely it is possible to find the damaged component without extremely specialized skills. The best you can hope for is that someone else has done the work for you and posted it in a forum. Even then it is often the power supply that goes first and those parts are dangerous to work with.
It is not hard to find, and requires no special skills. Every residential AC compressor has a removable cover where the capacitor is mounted. No soldering required either, just connecting and disconnecting.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWH38Rg1iMI&pp=ygUeUmVwbGFja...
Home Depot has a tutorial too:
https://www.homedepot.com/c/ah/ac-capacitor-replacement/9ba6...
I'm talking about consumer electronics like TVs, washing machines, kitchen appliances, laptops and graphics cards. The latter need specialized soldering equipment even if you know exactly what's wrong. Those are the devices that break most often. Normal people don't have a compressor that they need to repair (and even compressors have digital control circuitry).
And this is the kind of stuff that made my friend an owner of two apartments before the age of 40.
I disagree. I think that what college offers is more than an increase in salary. For hyperbole’s sake, you could use the argument of ‘my trust fund is already paying me more than your median graduate’s full-time job’ and most would roll their eyes at such a statement.
Try talking to someone who's worked a few decades as a Development Officer at a major university. Would they want their institution to be associated with Mr. "I will never need to actually work" Trust Fundee? Or with a real-world proven entrepreneur & business management prodigy?
FWIW, with a 42% admission rate, donor-related applicants are 7 times more likely to be admitted to Harvard than other applicants. Based on this, I would say they tend to want to be associated with people who already have money, regardless of what they may say.
Yes-ish.
If the wealth "in play" is merely a trust fund large enough so that the applicant can live modestly without ever working, they won't care. (And any "I don't need to work" argument would be a huge red flag.) Similarly - I cannot give my grand-niece a 7X boost on getting into Harvard by donating $1,000 to Harvard.
Vs...if I was a billionaire, and ask a Harvard Development Officer about my grand-niece getting admitted to Harvard, then I could get her far more than a 7X boost.
You've either never spoken to people in development or didn't understand what they do.
For one, they aren't involved in admissions at all.
Their goal is to make long term relationships so that both sides, the donors and the university get something out of it. Not to judge people based on where their money or connections come from.
"Involvement" need not be official.
Development people have influence, and definitely want future financial success stories moving smoothly through their university's admissions pipeline.
Is that the choice though? It's more likely that you have to choose 100 people among 30 trust funders, 2 business prodigies, and 200 ordinary people.
Getting money that way isn't impressive, though. But surely there's some value to someone who's, presumably, intrinsically motivated to attend for some reason. That thing everyone born on the treadmill fakes being.
> Getting money that way isn't impressive, though.
Depending on how big the trust fund is, I think you'll find it will open more doors than a summer lawncare initiative.
> ‘my trust fund is already paying me more than your median graduate’s full-time job’
that'd be a good argument too. why go to college if you have income security? go do something infinitely more interesting and fulfilling
The perspective changes if one is choosing to go to a school that costs $100k+, especially in debt. At that point, it becomes a business decision.
This seems to be another strong argument for social class being a huge player in determining your success - as you say it was a well-to-do suburb. Good on them for taking advantage of the opportunity, but just as vitally the opportunity was there to take.
You don't need "an argument" that social class is the biggest player in determining success when the statistics have told us this plain as day for decades.
From the opening:
> college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life
Many colleges, especially the prestigious ones, would explicitly deny that as their goal as being too vocational is dismissed for reasons of class history
True-ish. OTOH, they're also busy "selling" their diplomas as uber-valuable tickets to financial and social success in life - for which their applicants, students, and families thereof should be willing to pay any price, bear any financial burden...
> 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 that when there's trust and mutual respect in place.
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.
This is the sort of approach that's utterly foreign to me.
When people in my class started turning 18 teachers reminded us that compulsory education doesn't apply to them any more, so they're free to leave at any time - with appropriate consequences regarding their chances of passing, but nothing else.
They still almost certainly live at home and I imagine there’s an expectation from their parents to finish high school. There’s definitely a big line between being a crappy student doing the bare minimum vs dropping out.
Does that make high school a daycare?
I don't get it. At age 15 I had curfew, but could generally come and go as I pleased. At age 17 I was at times left alone at home for a few nights. This was all normal in my teenage years in my corner of the world.
Why would high school need to function as a daycare? The teachers would definitely rather not have to deal with this on top of the usual responsibilities.
I really like the author's advice to do the "real" thing instead of the "kid" thing. This is what kids in more primitive societies do... if the family is subsistence farmers, the kids are helping do economically productive work from the moment they can. Even in farming communities in the US, kids are driving tractors, fixing cars, actually doing real adult work. Important for kids in the knowledge worker segment to do the same.
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and agree with most of what this post says in isolation, but unfortunately I think it misses the point in a broader context. This advice works when children/students have plenty of support from above. It can be counterproductive when they don't. It's preaching to the comfortable upper-middle-class choir.
These days I live in silicon valley and my wife's family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they've attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don't know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you're born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. "Getting your friends together and busking" sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don't win any form of competition. So I don't consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.
Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged.
> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way.
Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don't have time for alternative highschool guides. That's why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago.
I've had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family.
People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.
> It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes
It's exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you're going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they're massively overworked and underpaid. They don't have time for this nonsense.
> Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work.
Seeing the author's reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn't talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I'm bad conditions is not charming.
Hi, author of the post here - thanks for chiming in! Was hoping to hear from someone who had worked in or gone to a school like this. This part of the essay was admittedly the most guesswork-heavy; I included it because that seemed better than the alternative of not mentioning economic disparities at all, or of telling kids at poor schools they're resigned to doom.
I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious to hear more about your experience and thoughts on what strategies work best for teenagers in economically/socially/geographically disadvantaged situations. Do you follow the post-school life trajectories of any former students? Do any manage to achieve upward mobility (this could look like the "homeless to Harvard" human interest story you hear every year, but it could also look like someone who goes from a childhood of abuse or abject poverty to a relatively stable blue-collar job and is safer and happier as an adult than as a child)? What advice would you give to a fourteen-year-old student?
This isn't to say that there aren't massive obstacles in their way (especially for the ones who have to devote all their time to securing basic needs like food/shelter/sleep), or that their circumstances are their fault, or that systemic change wouldn't be a more powerful lever. What I'm wondering is, assuming you're a kid in this situation and you don't have a hand on the lever of institutional power, is there anything you can do beyond the standard "stay in school" advice to improve your circumstances, even if the improvement is just from "very bad" to "kind of bad"?
> People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide.
What careers do the students you know typically aspire to? Or are they usually resigned to the prospect of an unfulfilling job?
I’m one of the kids that “made it” out of these situations and it took me until I was over 40 and making FAANG money to START thinking in terms other than “not being like my dad” or “ending up poor”.
> preserving your safety in some way
Even a comment as small as this is assuming a lot in poor areas. The only safety I had was in my own head or in my STEM classes because I could immerse myself in them enough to forget about life outside them.
Look up the problems associated with complex-ptsd, childhood neglect and parentification.
It was all about racing as hard as possible away from where I was, not about looking forward in any way. For most of my twenties my timeframe in planning was weeks or months if I felt confident.
I just got lucky I got hooked on computers and had a couple teachers that praised me for that and math.
In fact, I nearly dropped out in 9th grade to work at a Burger King so I had access to some kind of money. Instead I called CPS and moved in with my narcissistic mother who was at least financially stable. But it was a coin toss at the time.
My first job was in a factory and then in the Army, I didn’t have a plan or wants other than stable living situation and enough money for basic bills.
Thanks for writing this up - it's helpful background. Glad you seem to be doing better.
Sure, I wanted to be able to share a bit about how fundamentally differently life is for poor people or people with certain classes of problems growing up.
>What careers do the students you know typically aspire to
They usually aren't looking past whether they will be going to bed hungry that night or not. Seriously man, you come off like a scene from arrested development, like you just have never seen a poor kid in your life, or more importantly, haven't even tried to volunteer at an organization that attempts to help these kids.
Notwithstanding my asshole-ishness in my original comment, I actually appreciate you asking these questions. I don't have all the answers. I can gesture at some of them, which I will do later tomorrow (today? Hi, it's 2:00 am). I started to write out an answer and just got sad thinking about it, but I didn't want you to think I was just going to ignore you.
Appreciate this a lot! No rush.
It is a decent list, but it probably should be qualified that for a good portion of the population, general education is likely not a bad thing. I love that the article emphasizes practical knowledge, but as I am trying to remember my younger years, I think I rarely thought about any of it in those terms.
This is for fearless kids. Most kids, I think, would be scared to death by these suggestions. It's an embarrassment minefield. It's better to start experimenting in a more private way in places where you are clearly welcome - student competitions, newbie-friendly websites, publishing stuff quietly without advertising it, reading and lurking, submitting tiny contributions that are clearly wanted, etc.
Kids these days do not suffer from scarcity of opportunities. They suffer from lack of confidence. They need to gain confidence through little successes. Sending them out into the world doing things way above their current skill level is going to result in confidence-crushing failures.
Sorry but there is no way to min/max life. We all do not get the same amount of time and opportunities. This reads as a verbose and pompous perspective on what one should do around high school age to "succeed" and has absolutely no reflection on the people who actually succeed. A-type people will continue to overachieve and write these types of posts, but their definition of "success" is just different.
We are trying to codify this: https://puthir.org.
My son (and our first learner) launched his portfolio (real work, not fake stuff) back in December and he added his new math toy last month. We expect his portfolio (+ his experience, skill and knowledge) to grow over the next couple of years. Here is his Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838.
> 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.
I'm sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time/resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being "those are non-issues".
Because teenagers have not yet fully developed the parts of their brain responsible for impulse control. Add into that mess heightened hormone levels screaming to fuck or fight, and you've got a recipe for misbehavior.
That can be overcome with good parenting, but you don't have to get a license to pop out a brood.
This is wonderful, and I say that as someone who did REALLY WELL in high-school. Which is to say, I have no regrets about any of my schooling (I went on to complete law school) -- but if I'd thought about things more in this way, it would have better mentally prepared me for thinking about AFTER that.
> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there.
This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t feel like I really got to peak “raw brainpower” until about 22-23 years old.
"wear a helmet until you are comfortable with whatever wheels you are riding" sounds like a formula for "die on a bike once you've hit the dunning kruger effect"
As a 16 year old, thank you.
tl;dr - only read the intro
> by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could;
1. This presuppoess that "smart" is the essential ingredient for success. How about maturity/self-discipline? There is no way a 14 year old has the maturity of an 18 year old to deal with learning or doing difficult things.
2. IME a very significant problem that teens have learning is the "fixed mindset". When they are unable to do something right away, especially if they observe their peers can, most don't know how to put in the work to improve. In fact, they behave as if they cannot improve. Concealing one's inability to do something is very common.
The author does bring this up in "4F" but I don't feel like it addresses the problem very well. It postulates an ideal student who will connect with someone who is more motivated than them, but then not just ride their coattails. I don't even see that in the business world.