You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

taelor comments on Why do people ____? - Less Wrong Discussion

25 Post author: magfrump 04 May 2012 04:20AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (255)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: taelor 04 May 2012 04:15:15PM *  7 points [-]

I hated school because it was boring. I didn't exactly hate the teachers, but I didn't have any concept that they might want to teach something.

Back when I was in highschool, a friend and I were accidentally sorted into a general level course, when by rights we should have been put in an AP-level course. Neither of us ever really got anything out of the teacher's lectures, and were able to ace the tests purely on knowledge gained from reading the textbook; consequently, we were bored out of our minds in class, and amused ourselves by competing to lure the teacher off on increasingly interesting and increasingly irrelevant tangents. A side result of this was that the other students, who actually needed a the hear the subject explained by a teacher, got shafted. I should note, however, that neither of us had any real animosity towards the teacher or the students -- in fact, we absolutely adored the teacher; rather than being a malicious attempt to disrupt the class, we saw it as merely a friendly game between the two of us that happened to negatively effect other people's learning of the material -- a consequence that we were indifferent towards.