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On the other hand, this creates an adverse effect of specialising in what you're good at and what will be best for qualifying you for the type of degree you wan

On the other hand, this creates an adverse effect of specialising in what you're good at and what will be best for qualifying you for the type of degree you want to do, at the expense of a broader education. I too took Maths, Physics and Computing to A level because I knew I'd want to end up doing a Physics or Computer Science degree, and because I knew these subjects were my safest bets for As. For those outside the UK education system, all As at A-level is essentially the minimum requirement for getting into the best UK universities, so you're under a lot of pressure to ensure you get them if you want to go to one of these. I would have really liked to carry on studying other things - French, in particular. But because there would have been more of a risk of me 'dropping' to a B in French, as opposed to a maths/science subject, though I would have enjoyed it I would have been foolish to do so under that system. Instead I ended up taking French night classes years later, when I was out of University and the general educational funnel where you are strongly incentivised to focus solely on your specialisation of the moment for the best grade(s). It was much harder than it would have been at 16, and I'm much worse at French now than I could have been as a result, which is a real shame. Specialising early has benefits, for sure, but a very real drawback is that you have to sacrifice the development of other skills, knowledge and interests to do it properly. I'm not convinced 16 is a better age than 18 to start doing that, even if it means you're ultimately in education a year or two longer.

L_Rahman 11y ago
I found the American university and its distribution requirements for engineering majors to be a nice counterbalance to my A Levels. My A Levels were in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, and because of my A Levels received credit for Calc 101/102, Bio 101/102, Phys 101/102, Chem 101/102. This left me with 32 credits of electives on top of my biomedical engineering distribution requirements. I used them to classes on art curation with the Walters museum in Baltimore, to explore concepts in philosophy and singularity in a writing class and examine the bioethics of genetic engineering.
mikekchar 11y ago
Just to cheer you up a bit, I taught EFL (English as a Foreign Language) for 5 years and did quite a lot of study into language acquisition. I now firmly believe that it would not have been any easier for you to learn a language at 16 than at your current age. In fact, you have many other advantages at an older age that would argue that you will do much better now. I could write a book on the subject, but very quickly, the myth that children learn faster than adults is just a myth. In fact, the average child (who is doing almost nothing other than studying their native language in every waking moment) learns about 1000 new word families per year up until they reach 20 (at which point they will have acquired about 20,000 word families). "Word family" means a word and it's associated extensions -- police and policeman are one word family. It also includes conjugation/inflection of verbs, etc. The average 5 year old has about 5000 word families and probably about 2000 grammatical constructs. It takes them 5 years to learn that. Talk to a 5 year old so you can get a sense of what kind of proficiency that means ;-). A 10 year old has about 10,000 word families and about 3000 grammatical structures (basically all except very strange ones). They can't read a newspaper and understand it, but they can watch your average movie or TV show without any difficulty. To achieve adult level proficiency with an ability to read news papers, read technical documentation, write well in your job, etc. takes about 18-20 years. Many, many people in the general population fail to reach that level. Your failure has very little to do with your age. If you spent 10 years studying French full time, you could do much better than a 10 year old. Your failure has to do with the fact that languages are taught very, very, very poorly at schools (even private night schools). There are unreasonable expectations (like 2000 words of vocabulary -- words, not word families! -- will make you "fluent"). Also, the instruction tends to focus on teaching you grammatical rules from which you tortuously try to construct sentences. If you diligently apply yourself you will be able to construct many grammatically correct sentences... which are idiomatically wrong and hence unhelpful unless you have very accommodating conversation partners. My big helpful hints: - Don't compare your fluency/proficiency in French with that of your native language. It will take you at least 20 years to reach that level, unless you find some amazing shortcuts. - Learn languages by sentence, rather than by vocabulary or grammar. Take an exemplar that you don't know the meaning to and learn it. Don't bother with grammar rules unless you just happen to like grammar. - If you happen to like grammar, study it in French, not English. This will give you a wonderful supply of exemplar sentences to learn. - Study frequently for short periods of time. 15 minutes 3 times a day will give you much more ability than a 10 hour session once a week. - Study realistic sentences. Read books. Doesn't matter what. Just struggle through and memorize the meaning of any exemplars that you don't know. - Watch TV with subtitles. As much as you can. - Get a lot of French music (with lyrics). Learn them and sing them with the original. Record yourself and study the differences. - Don't ever give up. Ever. Even if you give up, start again. Start today. Start now. It's only 15 minutes. How is 15 minutes going to hurt you? - Find a reason to continue doing this. It doesn't matter what it is, but you need reasons to fuel you for at least the next 5-10 years. Your 16 year old self may have been able to comprehend the basic of basic french basics as they shoved it down your throat at school (possibly without actually letting you speak). Your older self actually has a chance to learn the language with fluency and proficiency as long as you take a realistic approach. Good luck!
tragomaskhalos 11y ago
You can somewhat offset premature specialisation by doing a mad combination of A levels - e.g. I did Pure Maths, Applied Maths and (ancient) Greek (initially Latin as well but gave it up as four was too much like hard work) :)
- davnicwil 11y ago
  That's an impressive mix! There's a joke in there somewhere about maths and ancient greek complementing each other quite well ;-) Question for you - roughly when did you take those A levels? When I did my Maths A-level it was just one subject with 4 pure modules, and 2 applied modules (I did Decision Maths and Mechanics - again, another pointer to specialisation towards Physics/Computer Science). I'm not sure if there was such a thing as separate pure and applied maths A-levels (IIRC the body was AQA) - could be wrong of course, but would be interested to know if this was a thing before, or after, I did mine, as I think it's actually a pretty good idea.
  - tragomaskhalos 11y ago
    This was way back in I think 1983, since when successive governments have jiggered about with the system god knows how many times of course!

L_Rahman 11y ago

I found the American university and its distribution requirements for engineering majors to be a nice counterbalance to my A Levels. My A Levels were in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology. Studied biomedical engineering at Johns Hopkins, and because of my A Levels received credit for Calc 101/102, Bio 101/102, Phys 101/102, Chem 101/102. This left me with 32 credits of electives on top of my biomedical engineering distribution requirements. I used them to classes on art curation with the Walters museum in Baltimore, to explore concepts in philosophy and singularity in a writing class and examine the bioethics of genetic engineering.

mikekchar 11y ago

Just to cheer you up a bit, I taught EFL (English as a Foreign Language) for 5 years and did quite a lot of study into language acquisition. I now firmly believe that it would not have been any easier for you to learn a language at 16 than at your current age. In fact, you have many other advantages at an older age that would argue that you will do much better now. I could write a book on the subject, but very quickly, the myth that children learn faster than adults is just a myth. In fact, the average child (who is doing almost nothing other than studying their native language in every waking moment) learns about 1000 new word families per year up until they reach 20 (at which point they will have acquired about 20,000 word families). "Word family" means a word and it's associated extensions -- police and policeman are one word family. It also includes conjugation/inflection of verbs, etc. The average 5 year old has about 5000 word families and probably about 2000 grammatical constructs. It takes them 5 years to learn that. Talk to a 5 year old so you can get a sense of what kind of proficiency that means ;-). A 10 year old has about 10,000 word families and about 3000 grammatical structures (basically all except very strange ones). They can't read a newspaper and understand it, but they can watch your average movie or TV show without any difficulty. To achieve adult level proficiency with an ability to read news papers, read technical documentation, write well in your job, etc. takes about 18-20 years. Many, many people in the general population fail to reach that level. Your failure has very little to do with your age. If you spent 10 years studying French full time, you could do much better than a 10 year old. Your failure has to do with the fact that languages are taught very, very, very poorly at schools (even private night schools). There are unreasonable expectations (like 2000 words of vocabulary -- words, not word families! -- will make you "fluent"). Also, the instruction tends to focus on teaching you grammatical rules from which you tortuously try to construct sentences. If you diligently apply yourself you will be able to construct many grammatically correct sentences... which are idiomatically wrong and hence unhelpful unless you have very accommodating conversation partners. My big helpful hints: - Don't compare your fluency/proficiency in French with that of your native language. It will take you at least 20 years to reach that level, unless you find some amazing shortcuts. - Learn languages by sentence, rather than by vocabulary or grammar. Take an exemplar that you don't know the meaning to and learn it. Don't bother with grammar rules unless you just happen to like grammar. - If you happen to like grammar, study it in French, not English. This will give you a wonderful supply of exemplar sentences to learn. - Study frequently for short periods of time. 15 minutes 3 times a day will give you much more ability than a 10 hour session once a week. - Study realistic sentences. Read books. Doesn't matter what. Just struggle through and memorize the meaning of any exemplars that you don't know. - Watch TV with subtitles. As much as you can. - Get a lot of French music (with lyrics). Learn them and sing them with the original. Record yourself and study the differences. - Don't ever give up. Ever. Even if you give up, start again. Start today. Start now. It's only 15 minutes. How is 15 minutes going to hurt you? - Find a reason to continue doing this. It doesn't matter what it is, but you need reasons to fuel you for at least the next 5-10 years. Your 16 year old self may have been able to comprehend the basic of basic french basics as they shoved it down your throat at school (possibly without actually letting you speak). Your older self actually has a chance to learn the language with fluency and proficiency as long as you take a realistic approach. Good luck!

tragomaskhalos 11y ago

You can somewhat offset premature specialisation by doing a mad combination of A levels - e.g. I did Pure Maths, Applied Maths and (ancient) Greek (initially Latin as well but gave it up as four was too much like hard work) :)

davnicwil 11y ago
That's an impressive mix! There's a joke in there somewhere about maths and ancient greek complementing each other quite well ;-) Question for you - roughly when did you take those A levels? When I did my Maths A-level it was just one subject with 4 pure modules, and 2 applied modules (I did Decision Maths and Mechanics - again, another pointer to specialisation towards Physics/Computer Science). I'm not sure if there was such a thing as separate pure and applied maths A-levels (IIRC the body was AQA) - could be wrong of course, but would be interested to know if this was a thing before, or after, I did mine, as I think it's actually a pretty good idea.
- tragomaskhalos 11y ago
  This was way back in I think 1983, since when successive governments have jiggered about with the system god knows how many times of course!