High school is different for everyone, and it’s not something to really worry over a great deal. The requirements are different in different places, and they typically involve passing a certain number of courses. The one I attended followed general education guidelines from the state in addition to the school system’s own requirements in deciding which classes were required.
My advice to you is just to try your best in what you do and to make whatever work you get a priority. Also, listen to Nessa. =) Looking back, it’s easy to say it was easy, but sometimes while it’s happening it’s not always that way.
I had a very easy time in high school, and maybe that’s because of the type of person I am (I graduated top of my class, got some nice college credit, and got a nice amount of money for college). It ticks me off that some people are behaving as if it’s such a joke and that anyone failing anything in it is pitiful - this point in education end up being a major weeding out stage for a lot of people. Not eveyone has the mental equipment or the level of maturity to go to college or even to succeed academically in high school (or even to pass barely), and depending on where one is the situation outside of school certainly isn’t the most helpful in the world. The people aren’t pitiful, what happened or happens is.
You won’t fail a class if you do the work. But doing the work is the hard part for most people. It does not come easily to everyone - the people who don’t do work usually do so not because of laziness, but because the work is hard for them and they’re not good at it.
Personally, I worked alot more in high school than I’m doing now in college… What with all those damn poetry projects in AP Lit, outline after outline in AP US… among other things. But the AP classes are worth taking, especially in prep for essay writing in college (not to mention they exempt you from alot of classes in college, if you take the right ones)
Anyway, just think, college is after hs, and college rocks. But you have to graduate before you get there. Motivation.
Well, the problem generally is you do more work in High School since High School is mainly busy work. In college, you may have 3 exams and a term paper, and those are mainly just a busy night before instead of meaningless assignments in every night.
People who fail to develop a decent work ethic in HS by continuously fucking off end up doing badly in college when they’re told the “homework is optional”. It removes the original extrinsic motivation of doing the work and then people fail in droves and they don’t understand why. Some busy work is useful, some isn’t. For example, I did 125+ pages of ochem homework for my honors organic chemistry class and it was all “optional”. If I hadn’t done that homework throughout the year, I would’ve been analy raped on the exams. People get popularized misconceptions of what it means to work and to show up to class and reject the idea of changing those misconceptions.
The problem though with that Sin is that a lot of teachers really don’t know how to teach students to develop a good work ethic. True discipline can only be self-driven, in order to turn oneself into a person with the knowledge to surmount the obstacles in one’s way. If you just assume discipline is as discipline does (like a lot of teachers impart to students in high school - “do this homework because I tell you to!” or “do this homework because you’re a student and that’s your job!” or "do well at school because your self-worth depends on it!), then the students are right to reject that notion of discipline, because it’s bullshit. But then high school becomes challenging and difficult to cope with, because all their teachers are so full of shit and they don’t have any self-driven realities to work toward.
And it’s really confusing. I know you know this. It’s really difficult, since people have to not only reject that false notion, but develop a true notion of discipline within themselves. One needs several guides, written or (preferably) alive, to help one develop that in oneself. And there aren’t a lot of true teachers out there…certainly not in a high school setting. Most people just have to struggle their best through, and try to live as decently as they know how to (though I will agree, that for most, “as decently as they know how” isn’t saying much - but there are some good souls). And without this self-driven discipline, high school can be validly trying on one’s integrity and one’s soul - which in turn makes all aspects of it, the homework, the tests, just getting through the day, really hard.
Oh, this is true, but I don’t consider homework that’s actually useful to be busy work. I can compare my Spanish classes from high school and my Japanese class in college- every night I have homework in both. Now, in Japanese, I’ll have to do a section in the workbook, maybe 2, and have a quiz on it the next day. In Spanish, I’d have to do around 4 pages of homework, all 4 pages on the exact same damn thing. It made sense the first time I did the stuff. It still makes sense the second. On the 8th section, it’s pretty annoying and wasting my time. It loses the students’ interest quickly when all you’re doing is drilling stuff in their head and showing no practical application other than having teachers bitch us out in Spanish, unlike in Japanese class where we regularly have to converse with each other or do stuff in Japanese.
How do people end up in senior year in danger of not getting enough credits to graduate? I was about 10 credits short of the minimum when I finished junior year. And the only way you could be failing a class is if you make an effort to fail. I never did my term paper for English in senior year (the single largest portion of my grade tied with midterm and final), and still managed a C for the year. I didn’t even score well on the tests or anything.
Of course, when I got to college this year and did nothing I failed (D or less) Bio I, Bio II, and (F) Art History because I didn’t do anywork outside of class, and ended the year with a 2.01 GPA. Now I have to makeup the two Bio courses over the summer, although I get a small break in that the summer grades will completely replace my failing ones and boost my GPA a bit.
And the moral of the story is: learn to do your work in high school.
>>And the only way you could be failing a class is if you make an effort to fail.
That’s not true. You can fail quite easily if you don’t make the effort to pass. If you try to fail, sure, you’ll fail pretty easily. But if you don’t try to pass, then you may or may not at all. It’s kinda up in the air.
Anyway, the thing about High School is that everybody takes everything way to seriously. Take things in stride, and the social aspect won’t be very difficult at all. As far as school work goes, most teachers lay shit out pretty easy, so it can often be difficult to fail.
29? only need 24 here. Don’t fail your classes. Procrastinating will probably be your worst enemy because the work really isn’t that hard. The people that I know have failed just don’t want to do the homework or the project.
Have fun in your first year, ^^ what courses are you going to be taking?
I agree completely. Having taught the past 2 years, I can tell you first hand that you essentially can’t teach anyone a particular method. The scientific method is utterly meaningless until you really put it to use. 3 years ago I would’ve laughed at you if you told me I’d advocate the power of the method, but that changed. However, it isn’t because you can’t teach them that you can’t put them into a situation where they will have the option to teach themselves. That is totally counterproductive because along that line of reasoning, you’re saying “let the person bloom into whatever he can”. It doesn’t work that way because things don’t come by intuition unless you’re Newton or Einstein. You have to give someone tools and then he’ll be able to apply what he’s learned into something creative or useful. While it is a bitch that you can’t teach people that, it is actually a good thing that you can’t because the act of learning on your own is a rewarding and much more instructive process. For example, I know evolutionary biology, genetics and molecular biology a hell of a lot better having taught it, having experienced it than having it taught to me. Because its very hard to teach someone how to really “teach”, the learning process of teaching itself was useful. So yeah, it can be confusing as all fuck, but with the strength, desire and determination, then you can pull through. If teaching or the scientific method isn’t your thing, it doesn’t make you any less of a person unless you have absolutely nothing else and sit there jacking off all day. High school, college, other life experiences, they build self discipline, character, all these things which you can’t “teach” not in the way that a course is taught but in the way the events which you encounter over time are experienced. Its a slow process and to use self discipline as an example, you don’t go into high school with a perfect discipline, that’s impossible, but you can’t say that you leave high school without having had the chance to build it yourself if you’ve chosen to. The processes are interelated and I don’t mean to use a cliche, but its part of growing up.
And Kagon: I did say “Some busy work is useful, some isn’t”. I never said all homework was useful and made a point to say it wasn’t.
The way teachers present discipline to students though, it’s no wonder hardly any students come out of high school able to discipline themselves - the way teachers present it is, “even if you don’t see the worth in this class, devote energy to it anyway. that’s discipline.” But that’s such bullshit. That’s willfully blinding yourself, ignoring your own observations. That’s just building walls around your mind, rather than, say, digging a channel for it (the proper application of your energy, to use a metaphor). Discipline must have direction, or else it’s just a fool’s game that kids play, a hundred points if you get all A’s.
What I’m saying is, a lot of students NEVER get the opportunity to learn how to apply themselves in a non-bullshit manner, to learn even that it’s POSSIBLE to do so, and so it’s hardly “their fault” if their classes are hard for them, if they can’t find the will to go on working. I, this smart kid you’d think would have a bajillion opportunities for this awareness, only got my understanding by leaving school last december, trekking across the country, nearly dropping out, and working building houses for four months. Now I’m finishing up the last credit I need, and thankfully I’m still able to get my full-scale H.S. diploma this year with the rest of my class.
Schools just don’t provide the tools for kids to have experiences like the one I put myself through (which reached far beyond just physical labor on houses), like the ones I’m sure you’ve put yourself through, Sin. In fact, with all the emphasis on doing the work for the A, or even just for the Not-F (parents especially are guilty of this IMO), the only tools schools provide are for the WRONG notions of discipline. There’s no wellspring for strength, no breeding grounds for determination. The overall high school experience alone will not awaken these things in a student, at least not in this day and age (I think it was actually better, a long time ago, but then came various educational “reforms” in the 70s or 80s…but I haven’t researched this ever, I just heard it). All high school manages to spring forth nowadays in our best and brightest is existential angst.
I think it is unfair to solely blame the parents and the teachers for the students inability to dig their own path. People are weak and people willingly blind themselves in order to avoid taking a harder path. Sacrifice is a hard thing to do and why do people not want to sacrifice? Lotsa reasons and we can’t solely blame this on the changes of that make our society “modern” because this has always been a problem. People become complacent of their living arrangements as they build certain social networks they become dependent on and ignore the harder tasks in life for a variety of reasons whether its peer pressure or their own inability to deal with reality. School, self-discipline, that’s not the only case in which people build walls around their minds. Kids willingly start doing that at a young age. Its called conformity and I really don’t think you can argue with me about the prevalence and power of conformity within the world. Even in individualistic societies such as our, conformity as a powerful hold. To use an extreme example (and a joke I like to make), “the number one thing people with a life do is get their tongues pierced to assert their individuality, like everyone else”. While I really don’t mean EVERYONE does that, I think it is reasonable to believe quite a few people do these kinds of behaviors to fit in a group and to fit in groups as superficial as we know groups to be (ESP in HS), one builds walls. Like dissolves like. You won’t find a person like me blending in and I don’t have to be anti-social to prove it (like a self fulfilling prophecy). Everyone gets the oppurtunity to reject the system. Plenty of people get the oppurtunity to work things themselves. The reason they don’t is because they make a choice not to. We all make choices which we might not realize the implications until later on. The problem is that they are trapped within the system which the school is a part of, which is society as people like it to be. People schackle themselves willingly, not the other way around.
School is there to provide kids with basic tools to move forward. When you’re in school, you have lots of oppurtunity to grow as a person and if you choose to not see something, I don’t blame the teachers, but I blame you. I expect someone to be weak because that is a very likely probability. You can talk to me about how they don’t want to be that way when in fact, the fact they are that way and that they don’t want to be is only symbolic of their weakness, inefficiency, unwillingness to sacrifice. People put blinds on themselves to present themselves with a pretty organized picture of the world, to explain what they can’t understand because they fear the unknown and society reinforces that fear for them by sucking them in and tieing them down. And that is not the fault of the teachers (even if the teachers fell into the same trap) because the teachers aren’t advocating for or against this. They’re there to teach their math or their chemistry or their biology while everyone sits rolling their eyes at them.
So you are right, school doesn’t give you the experience to really deal with what you put yourself through. I’ve had quite a few experiences that school wasn’t there to prepare me for either. But that’s not the school’s fault. The school is part of a system. I do not like the system, but sometimes the system has its uses and its in imperfections one must learn to use the system and extract what there is to extract and recognize the flaws of the system you are stuck with. For the same reason that you can’t teach how the entire E.coli genome works in an introductory biology class, what school is there to do is give you a few tools to work on the next phase of experiences which everyone will be dealing with. Because there are differences between everyone’s experiences, it becomes impossible to foresee every experience and prepare everyone for these experiences. That would be a waste of time and it wouldn’t help almost anyone because these wouldn’t be common experiences they’d all have to deal with. When it comes to these kinds of events, the weight is on you and as I mentionned earlier, it is a richer learning experience to learn it yourself than it is for someone to have told you what it was. You don’t understand the true meaning something bears until you’ve been directly involved in it. I don’t fully comprehend the extents of what you’ve gone through just like you can’t fully comprehend the extents I’ve gone through despite how you can tell me about your way of rejecting the system and I can tell you how I rejected the system. Nothing could’ve prepared us for it and it is not others responsibilities to prepare us for it. In the event that we should need help when we are involved in it, yeah, many aspects of society should be there for you, but as I’ve learned throughout my life, it is very hard to even depend on your closest friends when you’re in situations like this, so forcing an impersonal system like a school to give a damn and pitch in for a single individual within hundreds or thousands is unreasonable.
What with all those damn poetry projects in AP Lit, outline after outline in AP US… among other things. But the AP classes are worth taking, especially in prep for essay writing in college (not to mention they exempt you from alot of classes in college, if you take the right ones)