I was never cool in school

[andrewducker]

In lieu of any actual content from me (my brain is still out of gear), I present theferrett saying things would be saying if I could. Here.

Nobody would say that I was eager to learn, but I knew that what they called "teaching" didn't exactly count as learning. I understood what they were trying to teach me, but I didn't get the whole point of having to repeat what you knew twenty or thirty times to pass the class. The only time I did homework was when I was confused on a concept and needed to get it right, which meant that my homework grades were riddled with empty zeroes and half-understood concepts.

I also refused to read books that I disliked. If a book was great, I'd devour it and turn in a cheerful essay on it… But if it sucked, I'd stop about a quarter of the way through and never finish. I read enough books to know what good literature looked like, and I could tell the teacher in explicit detail why I didn't think it was that good. Sometimes they agreed with me, but it didn't help my grades.

I wish someone had told me, "Look. School isn't about intelligence. It's a test of endurance. In real life, being smart won't be enough to get you by – you need to buckle down and do shit that you hate all the time. Losing weight, balancing your checkbook, doing the drudgery of any day job – we all hate them, but if you want to make anything out of your life you'd better hop to 'em, son.

Comments

[channelpenguin.livejournal.com]

Stuff like that makes me think that I really did get away with a hell of a lot in my schooling, didn't I? I never did homework, or stuff I foudn boring, was way ahead of the class on everything - at primary school they sorted out extra, more advanced stuff for the clever ones -unfortunately at secondary we we left to rot (probably the start of my decline into physical, rather than intellectual pleasures), probably because a good percentage of the teachers were dimmer than I was, and some had not even managed to make use of their longer life to get any advantage.

But I got away with it all. Because they could see that I knew my shit, even if I didn't seem to exert anything like as much effort as anyone else. (same thing happened on the sailing course on Cowes. I was kind of shocked to learn, after it was all over, that why there was never anyone about in the evening was not that they were all off doing social things to which I wasn't invited, they were studying. For hours every night. I wondered what on earth they found to do - none of the classwork was remotely hard.)

So, I never learned the lesson Ferrett is on about. The "need to buckle down and do shit that you hate all the time". I still haven't. I'm still getting away with it. Shouldn't be, probably, but I put in enough mad bursts of activity to get by.

And I do disagree with "if you want to make anything out of your life you'd better hop to 'em" - that's not life! That's dull and boring conformity. I wish I hadn't wasted so much time on staying financially secure when I was younger, and had maybe took off and seen the world. I wouldn't recommend the 'standard path' to any young person, and I'm always delighted when people I meet are off doing 'crazy' things.