= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
ChrisHibbert comments on Your Most Valuable Skill - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (95)
PlaidX: halfway through primary school i said "alright, that's enough of that"
PlaidX: and everyone was like "but you HAVE to go to school!"
PlaidX: and i was like make me and they said I GUESS YOU DON'T, THEN...
PlaidX: it was amazing how easy it was, in the end
kim: was it
kim: i remember having to do a lot of stupid correspondance school crap
kim: and then some alternative high school where you only had to go ten hours a week and it was self-paced
kim: until I finally just hit 17 and got my GED
PlaidX: the truth of the matter is, the educational system does not have a lot of leverage
PlaidX: the worst they can do to you is expel you, and that's... not particularly threatening, if your goal is to not go to school
PlaidX: this will go on your permanent record young man!!!
kim: can't the state put you in foster care if you aren't getting an education, though?
PlaidX: i guess, in theory?
PlaidX: i've never heard of that actually happening
kim: i wish my mom wouuld have been less paranoid about that, it would've saved me a lot of trouble
PlaidX: you were what, 13 or so?
kim: well
kim: let's see.. 12 when I refused to go to middle school any longer, then we tried enrollment in a private high school when I was 13
kim: and that lasted for... two months? three?
PlaidX: and your house wasn't full of black mould or anything
kim: not that we knew of
PlaidX: i don't really see CPS coming in and dragging you away for not doing your schoolwork
kim: the important thing is that my mom thought they would
kim: and I didn't want anyone to think I was shirking away from schoolwork, anyway. I never had a problem with that
kim: just all the people that happened to be at the school
PlaidX: again though, what would your mom actually have done if you simply refused to do the schoolwork? thrown you out?
kim: hmm, I dunno
kim: maybe put me in a mental institution
PlaidX: to save you from being put in a foster home.
kim: no, because if I'd have refused to do any schoolwork, clearly my emotional disturbance was to the point where I could try to kill myself again
kim: I don't know
kim: reasonably, nothing, but it would've strained our relationship to say the least
PlaidX: i'm not suggesting you have to be a dick about these things, just calmly explain why schoolwork is a load of rubbish and then when they try to get you to compromise, say no, and then they give up.
I tried that, and they did, in fact, make me. They were bigger than me, and they were willing to literally pick me up and carry me to the school. Furthermore, I had to see psychiatrists and take antidepressant medication that, at the time, I didn't want. (Incidentally, my father told me that a friend of his, who he referred to by name, once had to go to family court because his daughter was late to school every day for a long time, and he didn't want the same thing happening to him.)
I'm having a lot better luck with "not getting a job" than "not going to school" though.
Worked for me after 8th grade, THANK Belldandy and Cthulhu.
Not really sure how it worked - if my parents ever had to deal with any legal attention or truant officers, I didn't hear about it.
Well, I pretty much told them I planned on spending all day surfing the Internet and playing video games until they stopped supporting me. You seemed to have a better excuse.
You also probably weren't shoved into special education after second grade. I spent third through seventh grade learning basically nothing from my actual schoolwork while the rest of my native school district caught up to me.
I'm always jealous when I hear about mathematical prodigies who are doing advanced work at young ages. I would have been one of them if I only I had someone who was willing to teach me math more complicated than arithmetic!
It may sound like a better excuse to people in this community, but I assure you that to my parents both "excuses" would have sounded one and the same:
"It's great that you want to work on 'artificial intelligence' or whatever when you grow up, but right now, young man, your schoolwork comes first. You're not going to sit around on the computer all day while you're living under our roof." (etc.)
I second this jealousy! Though in my case, I had the access to higher math (at least enough to get started). What I didn't have was anyone who cared about the rather remarkable fact that I was interested in it. I mean really, truly cared -- to the point of taking some kind of action. Whenever I did something that showed what might be called exceptional ability, whether it was learning calculus or writing symphonies, the reaction of my parents and the school authorities was always "that's great, but..."
(Incidentally, I don't want to unfairly condemn my parents. They would have been just fine for 99% of the children they might have had, and it could have been much worse for me. But never underestimate the stupidity of the U.S. public school system.)
I'm sure we'd all be (all of Less Wrong, except I, who am not very smart - that's some weird grammar by the way that I just used) mathematical prodigies - if we only had someone who was willing to teach us math, because Gods know why, we were too lazy to go to a public library, pick up the books and study ourselves!
One can waste a lot of time, especially at the start when most of the literature is inaccessible and one lacks common sense to at least look through standard curricula -- this can be easily fixed with the right guidance. Plus, it's not obvious that learning research science can be fun, something I had no idea about up to the last years of college (there was language barrier as well).
At the time, I didn't know my public library had such textbooks. :(
To use the internet term... I know that feel.
Do you do advanced math now? If not, why not, and why would it be different at a younger age?
Well, I haven't done much advanced math recently, but I did do quite a bit in college. ("Advanced" math seems to start with calculus...)