Ugh. Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-intellectual? It's such short-sighted nonsense; nothing but pandering to the immaturity of every 16-year-old throughout history who day-dreamed his way through the classes that he didn't like, and justified it by whining: "when am I gonna have to use this?"
You know what? Sometimes you have to learn things that you don't think you'll "use in real life". Sometimes you have to learn how to read and write, and make persuasive arguments to something other than a machine. Sometimes you have to eat your vegetables. Sometimes you have to go to bed early, brush your teeth, and pay your bills. Life is full of hardships. Deal with it.
To all the high school kids who are reading this and thinking about dropping out, with visions of startups dancing in your heads: don't. Just don't. If you're truly the brilliant, self-guided whiz-kid that you imagine yourself to be, you'll dispatch with the homework quickly (it's easy, right?), and use the rest of your prodigious free time for more enjoyable tasks. If I could do it, so can you.
Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support learning/reading/studying, but formal education only includes those things obliquely as an accidental side effect. High School is mostly about babysitting and obedience -- your success is measured by your willingness to jump through arbitrary hoops specified by authority figures. Sure, the ones who take an interest in the material will learn something, but that has a lot more to do with the individual than the school system.
I still think going to school and college is the right decision for well over 99% of students, but I think it's a big mistake to treat formal education as a one-size-fits-all panacea.
It's been 15 years (eep), but 11th grade was not a total waste of time. My public school was large enough to have the full remedial, general, advanced, and honors class spectrum so I could avoid the dumbest elements of society. Granted honor classes where still boring but least they tried to speed things up and my classmates where mildly interesting.
Anyway, I was classified as Exceptionally Gifted (IQ 160+?) / Learning Disabled which basically meant they had no idea what to do with me. I did the whole state science, math, and chess thing so I spent time around people who where focused and intelligent in high school most of the extreme cases seemed broken. I don't feel that having children jump through more and harder hoops leads to a happy healthy life. I would have have loved a shorter more focused school day, but I don't see the value of trying to cram more facts into high school. Adding a course in investing, speed reading, or other useful skills would have been nice.
PS: I don't know if I fear success, but I don't know how I could have coped if I was profoundly gifted and everyone around me had seemed even dumber.
Is there any difference between your thinking and less intelligent people besides just being able to "get it" faster? Based on the link you give, I'm curious whether IQ isn't just a quantitative metric but perhaps also qualitative. Like, past a certain level high IQ people have a different kind of mental capability.
Also, do you meet more people than you would statistically expect who are around your level? Another interesting claim the article makes is some researchers say there are more exceptionally gifted people than their statistical distribution would predict. Since the IQ metric is based on assuming a normal distribution in the population, such a result would mean IQ scores are not accurate.
Well, it's not even quantitative metric, it's ordering metric. Making quantitative statements about IQ is quite meaningless. It is not like height or weight.
It seems to be easy to get it wrong. Even the author of the article, who studies giftedness professionally, made such mistake (she tells that IQ 190 to IQ 130 is like IQ 130 to IQ 70).
What's that supposed to mean? The meaning of IQ 190 is that it is 6 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in billion), while both IQ 130 and 70 are 2 standard deviations from the mean (rarity around 1 in 50).
When talking about children age * IQ / 100 ~= mental if it's under 16 works as a reasonable approximation for younger children across much of the IQ spectrum. So a 10 year old with an IQ of 70 has a mental age of 7, and someone with an IQ of 150 has a mental age of 15 etc. Now we have redefined IQ to have a more mathematical basis but the approximation still holds.
PS: It's not really completely accurate, but you can treat a 6 year old and a 12 year old with the same mental age in about the same way and see similar types of responses.
A very good book about fallacies of treating psychological tests as measurements is Measurement in Psychology: A Critical History of a Methodological Concept
Ah, I see. I usually think about IQ in the way Retric describes, where it is proportional to "mental age." That assumption makes it seem quantitative, so yes, it's easy to get it wrong.
Hmmm, now I realized why child psychologists still use old ratio based definition. It's just more useful for them to think in terms of mental ages.
To respond to your original question, I have a hunch that intelligence variance (as opposed to IQ) is indeed quantitative.
It kind of make sense. Intelligence seems to correlate positively with simple stuff, like reaction speed or short term memory span.
Qualitative differences may arise as consequence of applying different "processing power" throughout your life.
For the first order effects, you can imagine that if you don't have enough "CPU-minutes", for some problems you simply time out.
For the higher order effects, it's like compound interest. For example, as written in the article, smarter kids start to speak and read sooner, thus they acquire more information and they also acquire it at higher rate. And as we know from financial compound interests, even tiny initial amounts can balloon into huge sums given enough time.
Back to my question about the distribution, if IQ is just a rarity ordering metric based on rarity, then IQ testing is somewhat confused. For example, say someone scoring 150 on an IQ test is rarer than someone scoring 160, they should be ranked higher according to your definition of the metric. If the claim in the article that higher IQs occur more frequently than predicted, then something like this scenario is possible and IQ scores may be unreliable as a rarity ordering metric.
At any rate, is there quantitative metric for intelligence?
Simplified view: people solve a test with a number of questions. They are getting ordered by how many questions they get right.
Tests are constructed to produce Gaussian distribution of numbers of correct answers. Some questions are easy, almost everybody can solve them. Some questions are difficult, almost nobody can solve them. There should be progressively less and less people getting more questions right.
But in reality, it's not a perfect Gaussian distribution. There are some numbers of questions that have more people getting them right than would be predicted by normal distribution.
Now, about quantitativeness. We could get somehow quantitative metric, if questions would simple and uniform in structure, for example test composed just of "how fast you can multiply x-digit numbers" task, or test solely composed of "how fast you can arrange pieces into a particular shape" task.
But it's not like this. There are different tests, some of which have several thematically different sections. Even inside one section, questions do differ a lot (for example, some shapes are harder to compose of primitive elements, how would you quantify this difficulty?).
To further complicate matters, usually completely different tests are used for different intelligence ranges.
And we are not even speaking about normalizations. Your rank is computed just for your age group. For the same raw score, you get extra points if you are younger or older than the optimal age.
If I remember well, there is a fast ramp up of raw scores till 18 years, followed by a slow decline afterwards (rate of decline is slower for more intelligent people).
And then there are national/race differences. And Flynn effect. It's much more messy than it looks.
A reasonable analogy might be replacing a 200hp engine with a 300hp engine in the same car. For a wide range of day to day things they only change is their acceleration. However, at higher speeds increased drag comes into play. So the harder the task the longer it takes them to get there. Untill they just can't keep up. For some things there is little noticable difference but othertimes it's striking.
A good example might be an Algebra II homework mistake. We where doing 2 equations 2 unknowns in class which was simple and the homework was the end of chapter quiz. Well I sat down and the first 4 questions where like that but the next set had 3 equations and 3 unknowns and a few seconds later I figured out how to do that. It's seemed odd that the homework had something new but it was easy enough so moving on. The next day I realized I had not been paying attention and did the next chapters assignment. It took the teacher two weeks to get to that point. I remember thinking what are most of these people just dumb?
A more extream example: A few years before that my had an agument with my 3 year older sister and ended up doing some of her math homework. I do recall her say ok yea this is easy. She skipped 8th grade and was the salutatorian and took AP calculus so it's not like so was slow behind or anything it was just obvious based on the questions.
As to the statistics I don't think think there is much point in measuring IQ's over 150 or so. It's not that people don't become smarter, but it's harder to find how generally intelligent someone is. Plenty of people can solve an Rubik's Cube in under 45 seconds, but how long would it take them the first time they saw one? There are plenty of mental leaps that are easy after you have seen them, but they take can take a long time to show up and 3 people might each solve a different one first. According to several people I was 3 before I spoke my first word, but my first words where "Please pass the butter" so how do you measure that?
"Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work?"
I don't grant your premise. There's busywork in everything, and I never found high school to be worse than anything that has come later in life. We've all got to wait in the same line at the supermarket.
When I read nerd complaints about formal education, I get the feeling that the prevailing sentiment is one of entitlement: "if I have to do anything I don't like to do, then the system is broken." Smart kids seem to have this sense of entitlement worse than many people -- probably because they're so easily bored.
Trouble is, you're always going to have to live and work with people who are slower than you are. You can skip out on high school in an attempt to avoid it, take college classes early, rush into graduate school, whatever. Eventually, however, you run smack into the wall of society, and you've got to work within its framework. The ability to persevere through busywork is an extremely valuable skill in that context.
It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabulary assignments to help our SAT scores. She saw my perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT's that year, but she still gave me zero's on those vocab assignments.
So I learned how important busy work was without actually doing it. In life looking for ways to avoid busy work has helped my advance. Teaching people that they need to waste their time stops being useful when you start measuring people on their performance not how they got there. The real reason teachers grade easy assignments is to let people who work hard, but have no idea what there doing pass.
PS: IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives. If doing well in high school correlated with doing well in life people might start caring about their performance.
In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond:
1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting).
2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too.
There are times to recognize busywork for what it is and eliminate it (i.e. where you benefit other people by eliminating it), and times to just suck it up and do it (i.e. where you can't change it and/or don't benefit enough other people by trying). Part of the art of being successful is knowing how to discriminate between the two scenarios, and how to respond accordingly (i.e. diplomatically).
The problem with student complaints about high school curricula, is that they clearly land in category two. Your bad experience with 9th grade geometry doesn't mean that the learning 9th grade geometry is wrong -- it means that you had a bad 9th grad geometry teacher, or that you brushed him the wrong way, or some combination of the two. And in that situation, you can suck it up, and do the work you need to do to get an A, or you can complain and get a bad grade.
Life is full of these situations. Complaining about the unfairness of the situation is not the correct response.
Don't forget the most important and IMO best option:
3) Do just enough busy work to get a decent grade, and don't whine about it too much.
That's my method. If I have a 100% in CS, what's the point of doing all the pointless busywork? Just relax for a month until your grade drops to a 92%, then you have to start working a bit.
That's the first option I listed: do the work quickly, then do something else. I never said that the goal was to get perfect grades in everything; the goal is not to be a martyr in the name of improving the system.
I was in a similar situation. I took college calculus in 8th grade, and linear algebra and discrete math in 9th. I was still a high school student, though, and my high school expected me to spend ridiculous amounts of time on math I'd learned years earlier. Ditto for science, English and history. My choice was
3) Do the minimum required to stay eligible for sports as an underclassman and then drop out once I was old enough to do so legally.
It's not that they do poorly but they are under represented when compared to others of similar intelligence when you look at CEO's and other top positions.
PS: Find the number of US precedents that where valedictorians in high school.
I'm sorry, I don't normally care about misspelling here and there, but it's really hard to take a post seriously when it spells "Presidents" and "were" wrong in a span of three words....
If the point of school is to teach kids to deal with the busywork of real life, why not just have kids work 30-40 hours a week? Same result, except the kids could earn real money.
11th grade for me seemed quite intellectual. In those 1300 hours of busy work I learned about infinite series, analytical geometry, differential calculus, basic group theory, basic linear algebra, and this is just maths. While I had to relearn most of this in college in more rigorous format, most of my intuition in maths I have from this time.
I skipped maths class to attend rehearsals for the lead role in the school play, and learnt trig from trying to understand how Doom BSP worked.
I also got more from trying to automate Linux than I ever did in those non-practical Logo and Pascal exercises. My school had no concept of task-based learning.
Some of the same social structures apply to both, as well.
The cartoon applies to my comment, as well. "The way we've always done it" can be a mercilessly rote and inefficient path. The bit of Perl I picked up (along with a hodgepodge of regex, SQL, VBA -- I know, but I had to use the tools at hand -- and whatnot) boiled a five person department down to one person, all the while handling significantly increased complexity with greatly improved accuracy.
If I hadn't taken the initiative and taught myself, none of it would have happened.
Of course, the ex-jock brought in from the outside to CEO, and his team whacked it, anyway. Just like high school.
But I walked away with a better skill set, to a better job.
I feel compelled to add that my work didn't result in anyone losing their job. Rather, the company was already experiencing strong pressure both financially and, perhaps more so, philosophically from the senior management team that was parachuted in from elsewhere. Headcount in my department was reduced via attrition and a slightly accelerated retirement.
I kept the department afloat. I should have bailed, but personally it wasn't a good time for a transition.
I'd hate for my work to result in others being laid off. In a prior position, I spent a lot of time mentoring and defending a replacement, giving her time to get up to speed.
I also spent a lot of time volunteering my "kung fu" to acquaintances in other departments. Saving an accountant two days' work sorting manually through borked phone records, via a couple of minute Excel hack, provided a certain satisfaction.
There's so much emphasis on "competition" as well as "the way". (All the more ironic for all the "corporate speak" espoused regarding "cooperation".) I'd rather grow people while appreciating their differences, and hoping for some of the same in return.
To try to tie this back to "11th grade", it would be nice if "the Perl hacker" didn't so often have to feel themself quite so the outsider. Or maybe that trait is orthogonal fro the "Perl/hacker" trait? Seems to be a fairly strong correlation.
11th grade was when I read Applied Crypo & Practical Internet Security within a few weeks of each other... Spent the next few years incredibly paranoid...
When I was in HS I recognized it as a waste. I didn't really learn much. The people around me didn't care and it mostly felt like day care. It all was mostly busy work. The only way to get a "challenging" education was to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as joining Key Club, marching band, AP everything, extracurricular this and that, all of it just a way of padding a college resume. Now those are things you will never use in real life. I did not want any of that.
So I dropped out early and went straight to college. No one cares what you did in high school. No one ever asks.
I don't know what kind of HS teaches about Keats but It did not appear in my enriched English classes (between normal and honors); 5 paragraph essays did, though. The few highlights of high school were the calculus class I had to fight tooth and nail to get into and of course programming. But I didn't just want to learn more about programming I also wanted to learn more about automata, AI, security and so on.
I also do appreciate the finer arts. I went to New Mexico Tech and learned a great deal of engineering but also humanities. It was only then that it was presented in a rigorus manner. What do you think will appeal to "nerds" like us? Memorizing a list of kings and dates? Or learning about the strategics and logistics of geo-politics?
As for your "life is full of hardships" quip, as if that tells me anything, that's a great story. It really is.
You're talking to someone who not only went to a public high school (and not a particularly great one), but had to fight to take college courses, as well as the few AP classes the school offered. I was just as bored as you writing five-paragraph essays; I winced my way through such winning courses as "Home Economics" and "Typing", as well as a chemistry class where everything was taught as a fact to be memorized, without context or theory. When I went to college, I was convinced that I hated biology, because in high school it had been taught as a simple matter of memorizing nomenclature (I went on to get PhD in biochemistry, so I guess I was wrong about that).
So yeah, high school sucked for me sometimes, too. But I think the difference is this:
"The only way to get a "challenging" education was to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as joining Key Club, marching band, AP everything, extracurricular this and that, all of it just a way of padding a college resume."
Ya know what? I did a lot of that stuff because I enjoyed it. I didn't pad my resume by playing in the band; I absolutely loved to play (still do). And I took the AP classes because I learned more. I'll give you that Key Club kind of sucked, but then again, I never really joined -- I was too busy with the debate team and the newspaper. And my knowledge of Keats? Occasionally useful on trivia nights down at the bar.
You can see these things as hoops, or you can see them as opportunities. I'd rather know the guy who does the latter.
I guess then you are one of the few who liked things like debate team, key club, the school newspaper, or other clubs. I didn't. I would wager that a large number of people don't, either. Yet we're forced to sit through it and be told that if we don't like it we are being arrogant or that it is bad.
I'm sorry if I just can't see the value of spending hours and hours of my youth putting together the school newspaper that no one reads, or the joys of blowing on an instrument that no one likes listening to but if you do, that's fantastic. I don't think you're bad or different for liking them.
But I don't like them or cared to spend time on them. And that doesn't make me a bad arrogant person. It just means I had different goals.
I kind of wish I would have tried theater or band in High School, just for the experience and interaction with other people. Just to do something I normally wouldn't.
Typing was a pretty important course for me. It's painful watching those around me who can't touch type. Though, I'm guessing in this IM world, most kids today don't even have to take a Touch Typing course - they learn it through osmosis. But, back in the day - Knowing how to type was invaluable.
Though, I must admit, we really could have skipped the day of learning how to fold a formal letter in three folds, what the platen was, the carriage shift, etc...
'I winced my way through such winning courses as "Home Economics" and "Typing"'
Others have already addressed Typing, including the Mighty Steve Yegge, so I won't dwell on that.
Home Economics just requires the right attitude. Like me and my friends would move everything from one drawer to another when the teacher wasn't looking, just to mess with her head. We would experiment and sneak ingredients into dishes that the recipe did not call for. We would beg for the right to make the Kool Aid (insert Steve Jobs joke here). The teacher was mostly a good sport, maybe because we were a bunch of guys being good sports about taking in a Home Ec class and having fun with it (in our admittedly immature way) instead of whining and complaining about it.
Why is it that self-professed "nerds" are always so blatantly anti-intellectual?
Anti-intellectual is the wrong term. Anti-system or anti-academia would be better. The nerds you refer to generally believe strongly in learning and becoming smarter (indeed, knowledge and intelligence are measures by which many nerds brag) but not so strongly in the system of academia, "qualifications" and systems of education.
I believe the argument is that claiming that a weekend hacking Perl is of greater value than an entire year's worth of academic school work undervalues skills like reading and writing, history, even math and the sciences. Maybe if you are arguing that you knew the entire curriculum from front to back before entering the 11th grade then one weekend of Perl might be of greater value. But if there are even a few things in each subject you didn't know before hand then claiming that a weekend of Perl is more valuable is just hyperbole.
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to think that high-school kids who are reading this are arrogant and stupid. I'd be willing to bet that most aren't, and most know that the long-term gains of staying in high school will outweigh the short term losses due to boredom.
As for learning things you won't "use in real life"? I agree, it's good. But I'm sorry, some classes don't just teach you things you won't use - they just don't teach you. How much good will it do you to analyze dozens of books in essays about their arbitrary qualities, eh? Not that much. Maybe English would be more useful if the high schools didn't have to cater to the lowest common denominator. But public schools have to, and the end result is that many classes are slow-paced, repetitive, and thus, boring.
And please. Please, please, please, can you stop considering high school nerds as anti-intellectual, narrow-minded, arrogant idiots? The amount of people who share your view make tolerating being one very difficult at times, especially when your administrators or teachers refuse to comprehend the idea that maybe it is possible for people to learn things on their own and not have to repeat them in class.
I'm sorry if this response sounds feels overly acrid or acidic, but honestly, as a "self-professed nerd", I find your comment extremely insulting, probably because I've had to deal with many people who base their entire opinions of me on such ideas.
"Maybe I'm misinterpreting you, but you seem to think that high-school kids who are reading this are arrogant and stupid."
You are. I'm talking to the people who see stuff like this, and think about dropping out. Clearly, that set doesn't include all high school kids.
"As for learning things you won't "use in real life"? I agree, it's good. But I'm sorry, some classes don't just teach you things you won't use - they just don't teach you. How much good will it do you to analyze dozens of books in essays about their arbitrary qualities, eh? Not that much."
...and when I was in high school, I said the same stuff. "Why do I have to learn about Keats?" "Why must I write structured essays about James Polk?" "What will I ever gain from knowing the rules to basketball?" "Why can't I just learn more about programming?" On and on.
But you know what? I was an idiot. Back then, I didn't have the perspective to know what was important and what was unimportant (for that matter, I'm still learning what to value). Had people let me study whatever I wanted to study in the 10th grade, I would have missed out on exposure to a lot of stuff that I find very valuable today. I would have turned out to be a very one-dimensional person.
Try not to find this advice condescending, and see it for what it is: one nerdy guy who has been there, telling you that you don't know everything, and don't have enough experience to make good judgments about what knowledge is valuable in life. In the meantime, you can learn something from every situation -- just so long as you want to learn.
> I was an idiot. Back then, I didn't have the perspective to know what was important and what was unimportant...
And what makes you think the people designing your high school curriculum knew any better or that teaching you important things was even their goal?
I think with a little guidance from well educated people I could have spent my high school years learning a hell of a lot more important things than my school wanted me to.
I agree with your advice that dropping out of HS should be discouraged, but mostly just because it'd hurt you later if you didn't have a decent grasp of reading/writing/math and a diploma to get past the stigma of not having one.
"And what makes you think the people designing your high school curriculum knew any better or that teaching you important things was even their goal?"
I don't think they knew for sure, but they had a hell of a lot better idea about what was important than I did, at the time. And in retrospect, they weren't too far off.
Most people who teach and design high school curricula are incredibly dedicated people, who want you to learn. They certainly aren't doing it for the money and fame.
"And what makes you think the people designing your high school curriculum knew any better or that teaching you important things was even their goal?"
The insinuation here borders on slander.
How much time did you spend asking your instructors for more interesting work to do? Did you ask them about why they chose the curriculum they did? Whether there were better choices? For advice on guiding your personal learning process?
If so, you might have a case to make here (but only for your specific teachers, not the entire profession). If not, you malign your teachers without enough evidence to back your accusations.
I remember two teachers specifically, who were ecstatic to have a student who actually gave a damn about learning. One affectionately (and jokingly) called me his "disciple." They went out of their way to find experiments for me to do in the course of applying for my state's summer science school. They found ways to help me learn more about computers and programming.
If you just blew your teachers off and did not even engage them about how they could help you learn, the blame falls more on you than them.
If it was anything like my school, the teachers had very little choice in curriculum.
The English teachers were told what books to teach. The math teachers had the books picked out for them. The AP teachers had a strict test for which to prepare us. Foreign language teachers likely had the most flexibility in retrospect. The science teachers didn't have enough money to do much more than teach to the book. (Some of them did an admirable job none the less.)
Mind you, the teachers liked me. I didn't complain about the grades, asked questions, and was engaged with the learning process. That doesn't mean I don't regret dropping out after the sophomore year (1995) like I almost did and go to the community college. I regret not getting my associates and cashing in at the end of the boom so that I could have gone back to college in my time.
Thanks for the response, I appreciate it. I guess you get a wider perspective as you age, and I don't really have much of an idea about what I'll think later.
Though I might disagree with you on specifics, I agree that it's important not to restrict yourself to a limited set of things. I guess I was slightly annoyed mainly due to the fact that a few of my school admins sound very similar, except they don't bother to take the time to explain their views in a less condescending sounding way.
No problem. For what it's worth, I realize that high school (especially public high school; I went to one, too) can be a brutally authoritarian place sometimes. I pretty much hated most of mine, for the same reason.
That said, there are parts of high school that I'd give money to experience just one more time. And of all of the people I know, I don't think anyone has ever said that they wished they'd paid less attention in school. Good luck with it.
I attended college prep high schools and was a 3.9+ GPA student, took many AP courses, etc. I ate the dog food. But at the end of the 11th grade I decided I was through, and left early for college en route to a PhD in CS. Looking back, I am disappointed at myself for being so focused on the main curriculum -- the only activities that I am proud of now were ones done outside of it.
I think the flaw in your argument is that you assume that ignoring school yields narrow mindedness. It does not have to be so. For example, in my spare time I developed a web site of a well-known physicist that was eventually reviewed by the Scientific American. I can understand how someone would consider that narrow, but it required me not only to read physics and hack HTML (this was the mid-90s), but also to write essays, develop design skills, and become comfortable holding my ground in discussions with people far my senior who wanted the site changed in one way or another. These were all invaluable skills that I learned, really internalized, only because I pursued something that I considered important. With the exception of one class, that never happened at school.
That being said, I agree that in order to get a PhD one needs a certain level of tolerance of inane work. But that tolerance should be extended only to activities that stand in the way of accomplishing some goal that is important to you. To people reading this board a high school diploma is irrelevant, so I think most schoolwork does not achieve any particular goal for them.
This seems like somewhat of a reply to my comment, just more general.
I actually am very intellectual. I kind of want to drop out, but that doesn't meant I have any intentions of doing so. I know that learning to write and such will be useful once in awhile in my adult life. And more importantly, I know that good grades will get me into a good college (and hopefully also get me a good scholarship).
I'm #1 class rank at the 42nd-highest-ranked public HS in the US. So just because nerds like coding more than school and wish they could trade school for coding doesn't make us all unintellectual
I wholeheartedly reject the notion that a person of school age is inherently unable to determine when his time is being wasted. Frankly, I think your argument is a crass generalization.
For starters, it's ridiculous to think that a person supposedly capable of learning what is taught by the system is incapable of learning how to accurately identify inefficiencies and failures in the system. This ought to be an acknowledged fact in any system that claims to respect it's students or has any faith in their ability to succeed.
Furthermore, it would be downright ignorant to suggest that these inefficiencies didn't exist. They are widely acknowledged as existing in the quality of the curriculum, the teaching, the educational environment, the materials, and in the bureaucracy which surrounds it all. Schools have problems. It's absurd to think that the very people for whose benefit this is all said to exist should simply grin and bear them. In fact, I can't think of a more dangerous attitude to instill in the workers and voters of the next generation than "deal with it". Likewise, giving them the idea that learning is supposed to involve large amounts of pain and hardship is absolutely counterproductive to the goal of education.
Learning is not a hardship. It can be a challenge, sometimes a very large one, but by and large it is an autotelic activity that people are born quite enamored of, and I believe depicting it as an unfortunate fact of life for the sake of making people tolerate their own suffering is "short-sighted nonsense" that most often puts people off of the whole activity. That students find their schooling a hardship worth avoiding ("Math is hard, let's go shopping!") has considerably less to do with the nature of the subject itself or immaturity on the part of the student than it does the excision of most of what is pleasant and motivating about learning in favor of imposing artificial constraints and quantifiable metrics of dubious meaning.
That it is entirely possible to graduate from school as an oaf and ignoramus is indicative of a problem, and for those that both detect that and are not motivated by the extrinsic rewards on offer, it renders the value of obtaining those rewards dubious. In short, if you care about learning more than you care about graduating, modern public high school may not be a good place for you. It may even be harmful.
It's not uncommon for highly intelligent students with passionate interests and a willingness to expend great effort in pursuit of those interests to have an inordinately difficult time with the work they're assigned, being unmoved by the extremely abstract and distant goal of graduation or the threat of punishment so often delivered to underachievers. Those that "deal with it" may wind up with poor or highly inconsistent academic records, which further erodes what value the experience might have had toward achieving their goals by constraining their options for higher education. I think it's a terrible shame that we tell these students that they are wasting their talents, while simultaneously requiring that the majority of their time and attention during the years of their lives where they are most capable of developing those talents be devoted to a system which is at best inefficient and at worst actively damaging.
Make no mistake--I would agree that given the circumstances of inexperience, lack of leverage, and an education system that is at times ferociously resistant to dissent, it can be extremely difficult for a person in that position to make such a large decision with a high degree of confidence, and that errors in judgement are not rare. But I also think that anyone attempting to make it through life without risking such errors is best advised to kill themselves post-haste.
Deciding to drop out is not a decision that should be made lightly or without a sufficiently better alternative readily available, but to dismiss the option entirely on the grounds that suffering is inevitable is foolish and arbitrary.
"It's not uncommon for highly intelligent students with passionate interests and a willingness to expend great effort in pursuit of those interests to have an inordinately difficult time with the work they're assigned....those that "deal with it" may wind up with poor or highly inconsistent academic records, which further erodes what value the experience might have had toward achieving their goals by constraining their options for higher education."
You probably don't want to hear this, but even straight-A students are bored by some of what they learn. The difference is that the straight-A students have learned to persevere through boredom, while the smart-but-underperforming students often haven't. It's a useful filter, and the people who discriminate against the latter group aren't simply being capricious.
(For the record: I was always one of the latter group. I'm coming at this from the dirty side of the filter.)
The difference amounts to how much time they have to waste. I didn't care about grades 'till grade 12. From 9 to 11 my grades hovered around 65% to 75%. I didn't do any homework, besides the obviously mandatory huge projects/group work. As soon as Grade 12 hit and the universities were watching I studied every night and got mid 90s. Best decision I ever made. I learned VB & SQL during that time, some electronics, so mechanics, worked as a programmer found out I hated it. All vastly more useful than a 92% in grade 9 drama or art.
I definitely agree with the point that some drudgery (with benefits that aren't immediately obvious) is necessary in schools, but the state of public education in the US is pretty bad, and in many cases this cartoon is spot on.
I don't see how being opposed to doing busy work in high school (and consequently day dreaming through less interesting classes and coding until 4 in the morning in place of doing homework) makes one anti-intellectual.
I was the stereotype for this comic: in 11th grade I got cold-called by a recruiter who didn't know my age, but saw my resume after seeing my post on a LUG mailing list. I took the job (a jr. sys admin position) essentially drove the grades for most of my classes (except two, where I got A's -- that I'll mention later) down to D or C level.
Sounds like a typical anti-intellectual nerd: barely passing classes just to skip out after lunch to go work a sys-admin job and code Perl, right? Well, out of the two A's the first A was fairly easy to guess: AP Computer Science. The second A was AP US History (complete with a 5 on the exam, highest grade in the class, excellently written essays).
Senior year wasn't much different (except s/Computer Science/Calculus/ and s/US History/Biology/). In the end my GPA wasn't good enough to compete in freshman admissions so I ended up enrolling in a community college. I ended up getting a near 4.0 gpa there and transfering to a to a private university after just a year.
To transfer I needed to write a personal statement. I wrote it on my whole experience: of getting poor grades in most courses, but enjoying the AP program and taking on "adult" work while still a school student.
In community college and university I took courses in philosophy, history, political science and literature all in addition to my major courses.
After college I only interviewed at two search engines and only for mid to senior level positions. I'd think most of my class mates who worried about having a 4.5 (yes, that's possible with AP courses) GPA in high school, Key Clubs and sports teams weren't nearly that lucky (the CS majors amongst them are likely still stuck trying to make their way out of doing QA/support or writing business logic in Java), nor did they end up developing as broadly interested in the intellectual sphere (choosing to concentrate on making their transcripts look good vs. on learning).
That's my story but it's not the only one like this. There are plenty of nerds who may be poor performers in high school but who are very well rounded intellectually and who ultimately end up shining in college (they get in by hacking" their way in: either through extra-curricular like robotics teams [only extra-curricular that I really regret not joining in high school; one member of that team ended up at a UC school with a 1.7 gpa] or by transferring from a community college, or through a alumni recommendation from a boss/coworker).
Problem is: high school instruction generally is poor, teachers coming from bottom of the college class or as a "last resort" option for not getting into med-school/grad-school (while there are many great exceptions, e.g. my calculus and AP US history teachers being the ones who influenced my the most); it's easy to cram one's way into college (and high schools are pressured to become cram schools) and there's too much emphasis on mentally dull labour (physical education classes, sports, busy work) in school.
I agree with one thing: don't drop out of HS to work (I didn't) -- either for yourself or for someone else. Also, don't drop out of college to work for someone else. Do, however, consider doing your senior and junior years of high school at a community college (another regret I have: not taking advantage of such a program offered by our HS/CC district).
You know what? Sometimes you have to learn things that you don't think you'll "use in real life". Sometimes you have to learn how to read and write, and make persuasive arguments to something other than a machine. Sometimes you have to eat your vegetables. Sometimes you have to go to bed early, brush your teeth, and pay your bills. Life is full of hardships. Deal with it.
To all the high school kids who are reading this and thinking about dropping out, with visions of startups dancing in your heads: don't. Just don't. If you're truly the brilliant, self-guided whiz-kid that you imagine yourself to be, you'll dispatch with the homework quickly (it's easy, right?), and use the rest of your prodigious free time for more enjoyable tasks. If I could do it, so can you.