Ask Lemmy

The racism, discrimination, and segregation. As a Native American in a white school, it was frequently traumatic. Frequently assaulted and threatened by teachers and the principal to cut my long hair. Then had to sit in class to learn about how all those things I was actively experiencing were in America's past was bullshit. <30 years ago.

Not getting to have "schooling". I was "homeschooled", in that my parents kept all 8 of us kids at home and didn't bother to provide much in the way of education beyond reading and basic math. The lack of real education I was able to overcome, but the gross lack of any socialization has left me struggling with poor social competency to this day.

The pledge of allegiance in US schools

Having undiagnosed autism and parents not believing in it. I fucking hated school

Getting out of bed.

Waking up early. Also the harest part of my work - trying to complete complex work while I can barely stay awake.

How dumb it all is. Seriously. The highly regimented structure of curricula and examination is a shitty way to learn. It’s optimised for making teaching and grading easier. And also teaching young people to be obedient facile production line workers.

But intellectually and academically, it always seemed obviously bad and boring to me. And I’ve since gotten to understand a number of academic topics relatively well to know how true this is. Proper understanding, intellectually, and skill in application, are things that are far more organic and purpose driven than the shitty curricula that pencil pushing educators spit out as though the human mind were an excel spread sheet.

All the fucking assholes

Adhd didn't exist back then.

Grade 12. Absolute waste of time. Like... "I taught myself HTML/JS/CSS, instead of listening" levels of a waste of time.

Was bullied constantly by other people in high school. Caused a lot of trauma I'm still trying to solve...

School just sucked. I was popular in school but still hated it and everyone knew I hated it. Every teacher said how college was different and shit. Well I dropped out of two colleges and joining a trade union was the best thing I've ever done.

I didn't realize it at the time, but in hindsight, not getting diagnosed with ADHD was the hardest part for me. I guess at the time, there were still a lot of misconceptions about it, so my parents and teachers never recognized it for what it was. Because I was placed in a "gifted and talented" program when I was young, my slipping grades were just attributed to laziness instead of a disorder. That spiraled into many other problems in school; failing classes, getting into trouble, and several lifelong anxieties that still follow me many years later.

Honestly, my whole life would probably have gone in a much different direction if I had actually gotten the help I needed as a kid. I don't blame anybody for not recognizing it, but it does suck having slipped through the cracks like that.

Going without motivation.

I graduated college the first time with straight C's and major that didn't have much headroom. It was a struggle and I was a terrible student. Always late, always bargaining with professors for extra time, always "faking it". I couldn't find work fitting a degree, went on to do landscaping work, field surveying work, security, all minimum wage.

Then I got into firefighting, then wildland firefighting, then saw how computer science and geospatial data played in, and the motivation clicked.

I saved my money from a pair of very very busy fire seasons (lots of OT and hazard pay), Went back to school for CS and GIS with straight A's, found the whole experience easy and enjoyable. (Not that I wasn't challenged and had late nights). If you've dug ditches for money and don't want to do that any more, the asks and challenges of college are comparatively trivial. Even in upper division classes the teachers are crystal clear about the expectations, the schedule, the tests, all of it. If you approach classwork like a job, it all falls into place in ways it never did when I had competing interests and really just wanted to fuck off, drink beer, and go skiing.

Everyone else wants to go do whatever during office hours ? Nah Im there. Every time. Etc etc

Motivation made all the difference, even when content was hard for me (linear algebra after 5 years of no academic math? Fuuuck that was some late nights for my dumb ass. )

Putting the work in.

I hated school as a kid and went back as an adult. The experience is a whole other level and actually really nice.

Sitting still and not being bored senseless. I was a hyperactive kid with adhd, having to sit anywhere for more than 10 minutes was the bane of my existence.

Sitting still and I wasn’t the only one, I didn’t have ADHD or anything, I was a boy who was in a class with a bunch of his friends and was told to sit still and quiet for 8 hours a day and if we were lucky we got a 20 minute recess but now of that was lining up and walking outside and back inside. Also, from the Midwest so odds are it was cancelled and we had to stay inside and read because it was too hot, too cold, too rainy, or too tornadoey outside.

I still get into arguments with my mom to this day about this. She told me I was “always getting in trouble” but it was because I was bored out of my mind and having to sit still all day. Me and most young boys are out into a lose/lose situation with modern schooling.

The hardest part for me was the way the criteria for success changed between high school and college.

I aced high school because high school requires one to be smart. But I barely scraped by in college because college requires self-organization and discipline.

Nobody really sat me down and raised the flag on how bad my habits were, before college. The message I always got was about how “gifted” I was and how the world would be my oyster because I’m so smart.

The only person really striving to teach me discipline in high school was my track and cross country coach. For that I’m eternally grateful, because it could have been a lot worse.

But most of my adult life has been spent struggling to develop consistent output, struggling to keep promises, struggling to show up consistently.

Don’t know if that’s gotten better since I was a kid, but if I could change one thing it would be to do a lot more to train kids to fit into a structure where others are relying on them to deliver things on time. To keep working when things get hard, and not to rest too heavily on being “smart” as a plan for future success.

Smart is like 1% of success. The rest is conscientiousness.

Gym class. Why that exists in class format absolutely stumps me.

I loved math and was good at it until we got to integrals. I could do algebra, geometry, trigonometry, probability, and derivates...and loved all of them. But my brain went splat against integrals.

I barely passed Calculus levels 3 and 4. Honestly, I should have failed them. The professor wasn't very good, he knew this, and he took pity on me. But it was ultimately my own fault.

It was kind of humiliating. I'd always done really well at math, and even tutored other students. Then I just hit a fucking wall with integrals. At that point, I fully understood how other students who struggled with math had felt all along. I had been empathetic to them. But now I suddenly knew what it was like.

I sometimes wonder if a virus or some other unknown medical situation broke that part of my brain. It kind of felt like it. Or maybe it was just beyond my natural abilities, period.

Art and music class in middle school. Literally useless. Fortunately, we no longer do such useless classes in high school. I pretty much lived my life through middle school without friends, so I hated the art class even more because we sometimes got grouped together to make some "art".