6 ms·

Teachers disliked him, because they knew how easily he picked up information. I'm a teacher, and this is one of the things that frustrates me deeply about our

by japhyr 10y ago

Teachers disliked him, because they knew how easily he picked up information. I'm a teacher, and this is one of the things that frustrates me deeply about our education system. I welcome students like this; they're so much fun to work with. But I usually have to make them feel accepted before I can begin to work with them. I teach in a small alternative high school, and by the time bright students get to me, they're often used to being shut down for picking things up quickly and not having to do homework. I met a really bright and interesting guy once who told me about his experience in first grade. His teacher gave everyone a math workbook, and he was really excited to be learning math. He finished the workbook in a day or two, and excitedly brought it to his teacher, expecting to be given another workbook. Instead she glared at him and said something along the lines of, "I can't believe you cheated on your math workbook in first grade!" She gave him another copy of the same workbook and told him to do start over, and that she'd be watching him. He thought to himself, "Well that sucked, but she'll watch me do it this time and know I can do it." So he did, but this time she just got mad at him and said something like, "I don't have anything else for you to do, so here's another copy of the workbook. Don't finish this so quickly." He learned what so many bright kids learn: if you learn things too quickly and speak up, you'll just make the adults around you mad and they'll give you more meaningless work to do. I know there are many teachers who handle bright kids really well, but as a system we fail many kids. These effects last years, and often times decades.

hunterwerlla 10y ago
You are taking that quote way out of context the next part of the sentence "but then he never made an effort to improve his grades" is the relevant part. They dislike him because he didn't try to improve not because he was good at picking up information.
- JoeAltmaier 10y ago
  In fact that may be the curse of the smart kid - things come so easily they won't put in effort when it is required. They become lazy.
  - existencebox 10y ago
    This was my story. I wouldn't even say I'm particularly "smart", just clever enough to not need to work very hard at much until late high school. BC calc kicked in, all of a sudden I was failing a class for the first time. College kicked in, all of a sudden I was getting low grades even in my strengths. It took a year of that before I even learned the most rudimentary patterns of studying and practice, and over a decade (still learning) to bake those patterns into my day to day behavior. What makes me very sad, as a slightly tangential note, my university had covered grades first semester freshman year. This let me do terribly, learn from that experience, and not have it impact my future prospects. They've since removed that, and I honestly feel sorry for new generations of students to have one less helpful safety net. With a good support system in place to help recovery, the chance to fail (in a scenario that would be "non-terminal") has been critical to my learning to suck less across the board.
  - patcheudor 10y ago
    I think you've come upon the laziest conclusion possible. I was one of those smart 'lazy' kids & my poor performance in school wasn't in any way due to being lazy, rather it was due to not caring about school. By middle-school I'd figured out grades don't matter. My parents made too much for me to qualify for college scholarships and honestly, I didn't need scholarships anyway since money wasn't remotely an issue in my family. I simply needed to ace one test. Because I knew grades didn't matter and that college was covered I didn't do the work, not because I was lazy, but because it was busy work & I had better things to do like running a regional BBS, cracking software, and writing demos in 6502 assembler.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      So 'lazy' and 'not caring about school' are different? Sounds like rationalization, which middle-schoolers are very good at.
      - electronvolt 10y ago
        I'd argue that they pretty clearly are different, if you're talking about generic laziness-as-a-quality versus subject specific laziness. Someone who isn't interested in school might be willing to work very hard at improving in a sport, or work very hard on their extracurricular club, or work very hard to teach themselves assembly and programming, or to learn a musical instrument. They might even be willing to work hard to teach themselves math, but be uninterested in putting effort into math class. I guess it depends on if you consider "laziness" a universal character quality or not.
- japhyr 10y ago
  I read never made an effort to improve his grades as refusing to do the rote work that schools often require in order to earn a high grade. I've seen so many situations where students pass their tests with perfect scores, but receive low grades because they don't do their homework and don't do all of their in-class assignments.
  - CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
    That was me, except I did most of the in-class assignments. Homework was actually detrimental to my understanding: I'd lose interest in the subject and forget things. (I'm glad that, instead of doing homework, I spent my spare time teaching myself more interesting subjects.)
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- patcheudor 10y ago
  I was a "C" student in high-school and the teachers mostly hated me, but so did a lot of the students. It wasn't until my 20 year high-school reunion when the class valedictorian told me this that I understood why there was so much animosity: "You were so smart, far smarter than me, but you refused to apply yourself. You wouldn't do the assignments, didn't pay any attention in class, and generally didn't care about school at all. I hated you for that and I'm sorry."
  - jddjdbdbd3 10y ago
    Yeah, took me until early 20s to realise this. I just always thought everyone else had the same contempt for seeking praise from authority that I did. I just thought they were all just really good actors. It simply did not occur to me that anyone would want to recieve praise from a "superior", let alone be annoyed with those who waste the opportunity to gather that praise.
tonyarkles 10y ago
I had a high school computer science instructor who did a really good job of this. I had already learned C (on DOS) by age 11 or 12, and thus the Visual Basic course in high school was pretty easy for me to do. I took the class pretty much to boost my average and have computer science credits on my transcript. Anyway, I get my first assignment back, 10/10. Awesome, just like I expected. Get my second assignment back, 9/10. What? Oh, he didn't feel like I had commented my code very well. Ok. I'll do better next time. Next assignment, 8/10. I had used "x" as a variable name, and another pickier detail. Next assignment, 7/10. Even pickier details; things like UI spacing. The worst was that my peers, who struggled a lot more and their code was often pretty bad, they were doing better than I was in the class! But I kept at it and kept improving, getting better and better at nailing down every possible detail. Managed to get marks back around the 8/10 to 9/10 range, but never 10/10. Nearing the end of the course, I started looking back at my grades and came to a brutal realization: "I'm significantly better at this than most of the people in the course, but my marks don't reflect that!" I went and talked to him and raised my concerns. He gets this big grin on his face and says "Oh, I've been recording those as 100%s the whole time. I just wanted to keep challenging you, within the scope of what the curriculum gives me. I really wish I could have given you better projects, but that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. You're doing fine, and I think you've improved a lot since the start of the course." Ended up getting the "Best grade in Computer Science" award that year. Thanks Jeff!
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago
  This is such a tough thing about the arbitrary grading styles of grade school. They're grading to "help you improve", not to confirm your abilities. However, as you see it very much can hinder your abilities without the right teacher! I remember many experiences where I lose faith in the teachers ability to accurately grade. It's down hill for many of us from this point without solid mentors. This changed for me in college. I hope it got better for you as well.
  - tonyarkles 10y ago
    It really did change in university, but it was a pretty serious wake up call; the material was genuinely challenging (electrical engineering/comp sci dual degree). The really great thing about it was that I could stick to the defined path for the stuff that I found really challenging, and stake out my own path for the stuff that was coming too easy. Edit: I almost failed out of engineering during my first year because I hadn't properly developed the skills and habits necessary for really putting effort into challenging school work. I do joke a little bit about the 51% I got in "intro to statics": since it's a 51% and not a 50%, I know that I earned that 51 and it wasn't a mercy pass :) As an example, my EE degree doesn't have any out of the ordinary stuff in it. We had a fair bit of latitude in choosing courses, so I went towards DSP and FPGAs, just because I found that stuff more interesting (and easier to be engaged in), compared to say power systems. My CMPT degree, though, I once again found myself in a position where a lot of it was too easy (A kid who has been hacking on C and assembler for 6 or 8 years is going to be miles ahead of the other first years who are writing code for the first time). So I went ahead and loaded my schedule up with more challenging courses (elective advanced algorithms, elective compilers, etc). The only flaw with that plan was that most of the harder courses were dual listed as undergrad/grad courses, so when I went back for grad school there were a bunch of courses I couldn't take, because I'd already taken them in undergrad. It all turned out well though.
throwaway942 10y ago
Thankfully I had some teachers, like you, who thought I was fun to work with. When I exceeded her class, she had a college professor friend of hers slip in work for me, and occasionally supplemental tutoring. It was awesome. Being able to challenge myself with upper division calculus while stuck in state-mandated algebra was probably the only reason I survived those courses.
ryandrake 10y ago
It's not that the teachers _dislike_ him, it's that they are frustrated that he is not following the curriculum and conforming to the lesson sequence and timeframe planned for. I found US public school education was not about learning and mastery. It's about conformity and obedience. Learning the subject matter is secondary--the key to succeeding at this institution is to do things in the expected way, at the expected pace, even if it is mind-numbingly verbose and slow. It's a hack: You learn the expectations and do the bare minimum of what is precisely expected, because both less than and greater than the bare minimum will be penalized. I had a rough time in school until I grokked this hack. Do your homework. It's easy of course, just takes a long time to do since so much gets assigned. The point of doing homework is not to learn, it's to show obedience--you were told to do the homework and you did it. Show your work. It doesn't matter if you can do division in your head, kid. You're expected to write down the specified intermediate steps so just turn your brain off and do it. The point is to follow the prescribed process, not to master the subject. Class participation. This is a gift to the outgoing/popular/sports kids to inflate their grades. Just figure out how many times you need to say something in order to get full credit, then raise your hand and say something (anything, it usually doesn't matter) that amount of times. Public schooling is a series of hoops that you need to jump through at no slower or faster than the prescribed pace. The smart kids figure this out. The REALLY smart kids tend not to figure it out unfortunately.
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  Unfortunately all these 'lessons' mimic skills that will be needed by adults in the corporate world. Work in groups even when they're dysfunctional, show off and write lots of supporting documentation to get yourself promoted, and learn to tolerate seemingly arbitrary or broken management decisions.
  - ryandrake 10y ago
    I don't know if it's unfortunate. It's certainly by design. The societal purpose of public schooling is to prepare the future service workers and corporate drones of America to follow procedures and not get too curious. The (pre-determined) future leaders of America have their own track with private/prep schools, tutors, and Ivy League higher-ed, where the focus/purpose is, I would imagine, very different.
vinbreau 10y ago
I grew up in a small rural town in the 80's. I was one of the first kids to have a computer in that area. I was 9 years old in 1980 and had begged for one. By the time I entered high school I was just starting to learn Assembly. Our school had never had a computer course before and the first one opened up my Freshman year. I was so excited. The teacher was also the Typing class teacher and had almost no experience with computers. She was picked solely because she could type. On the first day I excitedly told the teacher how much I was looking forward to the class and how much I already knew. She gave me the course book to bring home and asked me to find the spot in the book where my knowledge could be tested. It was a huge disappointment, the courses mostly focused on spreadsheets and data entry with some Basic programming. I had already written many programs on my own to automate various tasks. I had written a few simple video games, worked with joystick inputs, even built a simple alarm system for my room using serial input and some basic wiring. When I brought her the book the next day and explained I already knew everything in the book she got visibly upset with me. Her attitude towards me became terse and she decided I was too big for my own good and should start at the beginning. That course was pure misery. I'd finish my lessons within the first half of a single class and have nothing to do. I'd start tweaking my programs, but it felt like fiddling my thumbs. The teacher came to treat me like a bad element and in return I became antagonistic to her. I once switched the cables between my and a friends computer so my typing would go to his screen and vice versa. I showed the teacher I had ahem programmed the computer to react to my voice. My friend would type in the responses to my voice, his results appearing on my screen. The teacher looked dumbfounded, she seriously could not process what was happening and sat down at her desk. It was hard to respect a computer class teacher who couldn't figure out how easily we had tricked her. From there it just got worse and worse. I had many teachers like this, where they felt I was too big for my britches and needed to be put in my place. I was very much like the first kid described in this essay.
sidek 10y ago
My most distinct memory of early education is my grade seven teacher yelling at me, saying that he never wanted to see me read a book in his classroom ever again. I used to read books in class after I finished whatever trivial in-class work we had... apparently, this was more annoying to him than the kids who didn't do their work and loudly talked about their drug consumption.
- jdeibele 10y ago
  Somewhere along the way in public school I learned to put my book in my lap and my head on the desk. Evidently it was OK if I looked like I was asleep ...
- belovedeagle 10y ago
  The thought of anyone getting ahead in life is truly frightening to these people.

by japhyr 10y ago

hunterwerlla 10y ago

You are taking that quote way out of context the next part of the sentence "but then he never made an effort to improve his grades" is the relevant part. They dislike him because he didn't try to improve not because he was good at picking up information.

JoeAltmaier 10y ago
In fact that may be the curse of the smart kid - things come so easily they won't put in effort when it is required. They become lazy.
- existencebox 10y ago
  This was my story. I wouldn't even say I'm particularly "smart", just clever enough to not need to work very hard at much until late high school. BC calc kicked in, all of a sudden I was failing a class for the first time. College kicked in, all of a sudden I was getting low grades even in my strengths. It took a year of that before I even learned the most rudimentary patterns of studying and practice, and over a decade (still learning) to bake those patterns into my day to day behavior. What makes me very sad, as a slightly tangential note, my university had covered grades first semester freshman year. This let me do terribly, learn from that experience, and not have it impact my future prospects. They've since removed that, and I honestly feel sorry for new generations of students to have one less helpful safety net. With a good support system in place to help recovery, the chance to fail (in a scenario that would be "non-terminal") has been critical to my learning to suck less across the board.
- patcheudor 10y ago
  I think you've come upon the laziest conclusion possible. I was one of those smart 'lazy' kids & my poor performance in school wasn't in any way due to being lazy, rather it was due to not caring about school. By middle-school I'd figured out grades don't matter. My parents made too much for me to qualify for college scholarships and honestly, I didn't need scholarships anyway since money wasn't remotely an issue in my family. I simply needed to ace one test. Because I knew grades didn't matter and that college was covered I didn't do the work, not because I was lazy, but because it was busy work & I had better things to do like running a regional BBS, cracking software, and writing demos in 6502 assembler.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    So 'lazy' and 'not caring about school' are different? Sounds like rationalization, which middle-schoolers are very good at.
    - electronvolt 10y ago
      I'd argue that they pretty clearly are different, if you're talking about generic laziness-as-a-quality versus subject specific laziness. Someone who isn't interested in school might be willing to work very hard at improving in a sport, or work very hard on their extracurricular club, or work very hard to teach themselves assembly and programming, or to learn a musical instrument. They might even be willing to work hard to teach themselves math, but be uninterested in putting effort into math class. I guess it depends on if you consider "laziness" a universal character quality or not.
japhyr 10y ago
I read never made an effort to improve his grades as refusing to do the rote work that schools often require in order to earn a high grade. I've seen so many situations where students pass their tests with perfect scores, but receive low grades because they don't do their homework and don't do all of their in-class assignments.
- CiPHPerCoder 10y ago
  That was me, except I did most of the in-class assignments. Homework was actually detrimental to my understanding: I'd lose interest in the subject and forget things. (I'm glad that, instead of doing homework, I spent my spare time teaching myself more interesting subjects.)
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
patcheudor 10y ago
I was a "C" student in high-school and the teachers mostly hated me, but so did a lot of the students. It wasn't until my 20 year high-school reunion when the class valedictorian told me this that I understood why there was so much animosity: "You were so smart, far smarter than me, but you refused to apply yourself. You wouldn't do the assignments, didn't pay any attention in class, and generally didn't care about school at all. I hated you for that and I'm sorry."
- jddjdbdbd3 10y ago
  Yeah, took me until early 20s to realise this. I just always thought everyone else had the same contempt for seeking praise from authority that I did. I just thought they were all just really good actors. It simply did not occur to me that anyone would want to recieve praise from a "superior", let alone be annoyed with those who waste the opportunity to gather that praise.

tonyarkles 10y ago

I had a high school computer science instructor who did a really good job of this. I had already learned C (on DOS) by age 11 or 12, and thus the Visual Basic course in high school was pretty easy for me to do. I took the class pretty much to boost my average and have computer science credits on my transcript. Anyway, I get my first assignment back, 10/10. Awesome, just like I expected. Get my second assignment back, 9/10. What? Oh, he didn't feel like I had commented my code very well. Ok. I'll do better next time. Next assignment, 8/10. I had used "x" as a variable name, and another pickier detail. Next assignment, 7/10. Even pickier details; things like UI spacing. The worst was that my peers, who struggled a lot more and their code was often pretty bad, they were doing better than I was in the class! But I kept at it and kept improving, getting better and better at nailing down every possible detail. Managed to get marks back around the 8/10 to 9/10 range, but never 10/10. Nearing the end of the course, I started looking back at my grades and came to a brutal realization: "I'm significantly better at this than most of the people in the course, but my marks don't reflect that!" I went and talked to him and raised my concerns. He gets this big grin on his face and says "Oh, I've been recording those as 100%s the whole time. I just wanted to keep challenging you, within the scope of what the curriculum gives me. I really wish I could have given you better projects, but that gets pretty complicated pretty quickly. You're doing fine, and I think you've improved a lot since the start of the course." Ended up getting the "Best grade in Computer Science" award that year. Thanks Jeff!

matt_wulfeck 10y ago
This is such a tough thing about the arbitrary grading styles of grade school. They're grading to "help you improve", not to confirm your abilities. However, as you see it very much can hinder your abilities without the right teacher! I remember many experiences where I lose faith in the teachers ability to accurately grade. It's down hill for many of us from this point without solid mentors. This changed for me in college. I hope it got better for you as well.
- tonyarkles 10y ago
  It really did change in university, but it was a pretty serious wake up call; the material was genuinely challenging (electrical engineering/comp sci dual degree). The really great thing about it was that I could stick to the defined path for the stuff that I found really challenging, and stake out my own path for the stuff that was coming too easy. Edit: I almost failed out of engineering during my first year because I hadn't properly developed the skills and habits necessary for really putting effort into challenging school work. I do joke a little bit about the 51% I got in "intro to statics": since it's a 51% and not a 50%, I know that I earned that 51 and it wasn't a mercy pass :) As an example, my EE degree doesn't have any out of the ordinary stuff in it. We had a fair bit of latitude in choosing courses, so I went towards DSP and FPGAs, just because I found that stuff more interesting (and easier to be engaged in), compared to say power systems. My CMPT degree, though, I once again found myself in a position where a lot of it was too easy (A kid who has been hacking on C and assembler for 6 or 8 years is going to be miles ahead of the other first years who are writing code for the first time). So I went ahead and loaded my schedule up with more challenging courses (elective advanced algorithms, elective compilers, etc). The only flaw with that plan was that most of the harder courses were dual listed as undergrad/grad courses, so when I went back for grad school there were a bunch of courses I couldn't take, because I'd already taken them in undergrad. It all turned out well though.

throwaway942 10y ago

Thankfully I had some teachers, like you, who thought I was fun to work with. When I exceeded her class, she had a college professor friend of hers slip in work for me, and occasionally supplemental tutoring. It was awesome. Being able to challenge myself with upper division calculus while stuck in state-mandated algebra was probably the only reason I survived those courses.

ryandrake 10y ago

It's not that the teachers _dislike_ him, it's that they are frustrated that he is not following the curriculum and conforming to the lesson sequence and timeframe planned for. I found US public school education was not about learning and mastery. It's about conformity and obedience. Learning the subject matter is secondary--the key to succeeding at this institution is to do things in the expected way, at the expected pace, even if it is mind-numbingly verbose and slow. It's a hack: You learn the expectations and do the bare minimum of what is precisely expected, because both less than and greater than the bare minimum will be penalized. I had a rough time in school until I grokked this hack. Do your homework. It's easy of course, just takes a long time to do since so much gets assigned. The point of doing homework is not to learn, it's to show obedience--you were told to do the homework and you did it. Show your work. It doesn't matter if you can do division in your head, kid. You're expected to write down the specified intermediate steps so just turn your brain off and do it. The point is to follow the prescribed process, not to master the subject. Class participation. This is a gift to the outgoing/popular/sports kids to inflate their grades. Just figure out how many times you need to say something in order to get full credit, then raise your hand and say something (anything, it usually doesn't matter) that amount of times. Public schooling is a series of hoops that you need to jump through at no slower or faster than the prescribed pace. The smart kids figure this out. The REALLY smart kids tend not to figure it out unfortunately.

cmrdporcupine 10y ago
Unfortunately all these 'lessons' mimic skills that will be needed by adults in the corporate world. Work in groups even when they're dysfunctional, show off and write lots of supporting documentation to get yourself promoted, and learn to tolerate seemingly arbitrary or broken management decisions.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  I don't know if it's unfortunate. It's certainly by design. The societal purpose of public schooling is to prepare the future service workers and corporate drones of America to follow procedures and not get too curious. The (pre-determined) future leaders of America have their own track with private/prep schools, tutors, and Ivy League higher-ed, where the focus/purpose is, I would imagine, very different.

vinbreau 10y ago

I grew up in a small rural town in the 80's. I was one of the first kids to have a computer in that area. I was 9 years old in 1980 and had begged for one. By the time I entered high school I was just starting to learn Assembly. Our school had never had a computer course before and the first one opened up my Freshman year. I was so excited. The teacher was also the Typing class teacher and had almost no experience with computers. She was picked solely because she could type. On the first day I excitedly told the teacher how much I was looking forward to the class and how much I already knew. She gave me the course book to bring home and asked me to find the spot in the book where my knowledge could be tested. It was a huge disappointment, the courses mostly focused on spreadsheets and data entry with some Basic programming. I had already written many programs on my own to automate various tasks. I had written a few simple video games, worked with joystick inputs, even built a simple alarm system for my room using serial input and some basic wiring. When I brought her the book the next day and explained I already knew everything in the book she got visibly upset with me. Her attitude towards me became terse and she decided I was too big for my own good and should start at the beginning. That course was pure misery. I'd finish my lessons within the first half of a single class and have nothing to do. I'd start tweaking my programs, but it felt like fiddling my thumbs. The teacher came to treat me like a bad element and in return I became antagonistic to her. I once switched the cables between my and a friends computer so my typing would go to his screen and vice versa. I showed the teacher I had ahem programmed the computer to react to my voice. My friend would type in the responses to my voice, his results appearing on my screen. The teacher looked dumbfounded, she seriously could not process what was happening and sat down at her desk. It was hard to respect a computer class teacher who couldn't figure out how easily we had tricked her. From there it just got worse and worse. I had many teachers like this, where they felt I was too big for my britches and needed to be put in my place. I was very much like the first kid described in this essay.

sidek 10y ago

My most distinct memory of early education is my grade seven teacher yelling at me, saying that he never wanted to see me read a book in his classroom ever again. I used to read books in class after I finished whatever trivial in-class work we had... apparently, this was more annoying to him than the kids who didn't do their work and loudly talked about their drug consumption.

jdeibele 10y ago
Somewhere along the way in public school I learned to put my book in my lap and my head on the desk. Evidently it was OK if I looked like I was asleep ...
belovedeagle 10y ago
The thought of anyone getting ahead in life is truly frightening to these people.