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I went to a totally normal high school and found it to be way more time-consuming and stressful than college. 7+ hours in school and one to two hours of homewor

by asark 7y ago

I went to a totally normal high school and found it to be way more time-consuming and stressful than college. 7+ hours in school and one to two hours of homework much of it due the very next day plus some longer-term stuff you really ought to be working on? It was a very rare day in college when classes, coursework, and studying combined college took up 9 entire hours, and often it was way under that. High school was pretty much always 8 hours, minimum, five days a week. College was so much easier it was kinda shocking. Especially the required 1xx level classes outside my major, which comprised so much of my first year. It was like a vacation. My high school was horribly inefficient, in other words, which ended up being stressful. I gather this is the norm. Meanwhile adults were telling me those were the best years of my life—I mean I wasn't really bullied and had a pretty decent high school experience and now that I'm older I sorta get what they meant but god damn, if that'd actually been true I should have offed myself. The "real world", and college, are easier than high school, which was difficult mostly because it was both hyper-authoritarian and wasted phenomenal amounts of time.

Aloha 7y ago
I remember being so confused when someone told me these would be the best years of my life, I was like "this is it?"
- asark 7y ago
  I think the worst thing about it was that you could never just chill. It was friggin' relentless. Every day in high school's got a very do-or-die thing going on, for some reason, while at the same time feeling like the lowest-stakes thing possible. It was like stress for the sake of stress. Meanwhile those days are relatively rare in college and real life. Certainly not 5 days a week, every week, unless you seek out jobs like that. Granted the lower end of the job market's a lot less flexible and easy-going than, say, software development, but even that's usually not as bad as high school, which is pretty damning.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    I remember being asked as early as 13 where I wanted to go to college, and what I wanted to do for a living, I'm 36, and I still cant give you the answer to that last question.
    - badpun 7y ago
      That question (what do you want to do for a living) is not that important, because most of us, for various reasons (but mostly market forces), cannot work the job we would prefer anyway.
- ohithereyou 7y ago
  I feel that it speaks much more to how stunted a person's growth is if they feel that their high school years were the best of their lives.
  - Aloha 7y ago
    Some people flower early, some late. I'd suggest based on empirical evidence most people in the tech world are more apt to flower later. So for some, their peak was at high school or college - for most of us, I suspect its early to mid thirties.
    - pwodhouse 7y ago
      People are happiest either slightly before they have kids or slightly after their kids turn 18, depending on whether they had children late or early. Childless married people coast through marriage years.
yters 7y ago
Same story here. I went to US public schools and British grammar schools. The latter are no joke and much more stressful. US school I could mess around and still maintain perfect grades.
- dgabriel 7y ago
  The US is a big place, and schools vary wildly.
jandrese 7y ago
Maybe they just over-prepared you for college and that's why the first semester was so easy. Unfortunately a lot of schools make it difficult to test out of first year classes with just high school classes. It's pretty frustrating to bust your hump in high school to get a leg up on college work and then be stuck in the same class as the mouth breathers who just coasted by in high school and completely bored.
- asark 7y ago
  Wasn't so much the difficulty as the sheer quantity of homework combined with lots of unbroken butt-in-seat hours, most of which weren't very useful. A start time so early I had to wake up at like 6:45 didn't help, either. Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways. Thanks for causing me to develop seasonal depression it took me more than a decade to get over, high school. Thanks a whole bunch. But yeah, coulda CLEP'd out of at least a year of college if I'd known better. No-one told me that and I didn't figure it out until it was too late. Never even occurred to me that I could knock out all those credit hours on the cheap with some very, very light studying over a summer. I mean college is supposed to be really hard, right, otherwise what's the point? eyeroll
  - paganel 7y ago
    > Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways. This is one of most baffling aspects about the US, that is that you can have classrooms with no windows. I didn’t personally grow up as a kid in the best social-economic regime (an Eastern-European communist country in the ‘80s) but fortunately for little kid me the regime’s architects and urban planners put great emphasis on all classrooms having lots of windows, as big as possible. I later in my life became quite interested in the history of architecture and urban planning and I was able to find this idea (i.e. big windows are good for schools) in architectural magazines published way back in the 1950s.
    - jandrese 7y ago
      It's an energy thing. These schools were built in the 70s with 70s tech. Big windows meant lots of energy lost in heating and cooling. Or you got a school built in the 40s that did have big windows, but no AC that was sweltering for the first and last weeks/months of school.
DogLover_ 7y ago
I have the same experience as you but when I talk to peers I went to highschool with and say the same thing they seem to not have the same experience. I am not quite sure why that is. Might have something to do with how you treat highschool. If you don't take it seriously and don't do your homework then I guess highschool would be a lot less stressful.
ohithereyou 7y ago
My last two years of high school had 8 hours a day in class, one to two hours of homework a night (including the long term projects you mentioned), a 20 hour a week part time job, and three extra curricular activities that ate probably about 20 hours a week in meetings, fundraising, and practice. So, all, told, I was working _80 hours a week, minimum_ in my high school years. I graduated top ten in my class, and my parents were astonished that I took two years off between high school and college going to a technical school eight hours a week with a 40 hour a week job. I had cut 32 hours of work a week out of my week, and I was only 19! When I finally did go to college, the weeks during the semester were about twenty hours a week between classes, studying, projects, and tutoring and a twenty hour a week part time job. I can understand why you felt like college was a vacation because I felt the same way! The downside to all of this is that I was very poorly socialized, compared to some of my peers, when I started college. Luckily, since I had a bunch of free time, it was easy to catch up, but the first semester was difficult for me navigating all of these unstructured, unsupervised socialization opportunities. A part of me regrets that because that stunted my ability to network from the start of college - I have no idea what opportunities I have missed out on and will miss out on in the future as a result. Several people that graduated in that top ten with me who had the same 80 hour a week work week in high school could not handle the unstructured free time in college. Two dropped out of college but have none-the-less worked their way into lives that seem to make them happy, one got heavily into drugs and is still in jail, one committed suicide, and the rest graduated and seem to have kept on the track.
jackcosgrove 7y ago
The same dynamic is at work in weedout courses during college. High school is in many places a four year weedout course (actually 3.5 years) used to decide who goes to college. The obvious question is whether weedout regimens actually burnish skills. In my experience they did to some extent, but most of the effort expended was game-playing to get onto a path which would be easier or more lucrative in the long run. (Example: becoming a medical doctor or tenured professor is harder than it has to be because people are attracted by the prospect of a job-for-life.)

by asark 7y ago

Aloha 7y ago

I remember being so confused when someone told me these would be the best years of my life, I was like "this is it?"

asark 7y ago
I think the worst thing about it was that you could never just chill. It was friggin' relentless. Every day in high school's got a very do-or-die thing going on, for some reason, while at the same time feeling like the lowest-stakes thing possible. It was like stress for the sake of stress. Meanwhile those days are relatively rare in college and real life. Certainly not 5 days a week, every week, unless you seek out jobs like that. Granted the lower end of the job market's a lot less flexible and easy-going than, say, software development, but even that's usually not as bad as high school, which is pretty damning.
- Aloha 7y ago
  I remember being asked as early as 13 where I wanted to go to college, and what I wanted to do for a living, I'm 36, and I still cant give you the answer to that last question.
  - badpun 7y ago
    That question (what do you want to do for a living) is not that important, because most of us, for various reasons (but mostly market forces), cannot work the job we would prefer anyway.
ohithereyou 7y ago
I feel that it speaks much more to how stunted a person's growth is if they feel that their high school years were the best of their lives.
- Aloha 7y ago
  Some people flower early, some late. I'd suggest based on empirical evidence most people in the tech world are more apt to flower later. So for some, their peak was at high school or college - for most of us, I suspect its early to mid thirties.
  - pwodhouse 7y ago
    People are happiest either slightly before they have kids or slightly after their kids turn 18, depending on whether they had children late or early. Childless married people coast through marriage years.

yters 7y ago

Same story here. I went to US public schools and British grammar schools. The latter are no joke and much more stressful. US school I could mess around and still maintain perfect grades.

dgabriel 7y ago
The US is a big place, and schools vary wildly.

jandrese 7y ago

Maybe they just over-prepared you for college and that's why the first semester was so easy. Unfortunately a lot of schools make it difficult to test out of first year classes with just high school classes. It's pretty frustrating to bust your hump in high school to get a leg up on college work and then be stuck in the same class as the mouth breathers who just coasted by in high school and completely bored.

asark 7y ago
Wasn't so much the difficulty as the sheer quantity of homework combined with lots of unbroken butt-in-seat hours, most of which weren't very useful. A start time so early I had to wake up at like 6:45 didn't help, either. Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways. Thanks for causing me to develop seasonal depression it took me more than a decade to get over, high school. Thanks a whole bunch. But yeah, coulda CLEP'd out of at least a year of college if I'd known better. No-one told me that and I didn't figure it out until it was too late. Never even occurred to me that I could knock out all those credit hours on the cheap with some very, very light studying over a summer. I mean college is supposed to be really hard, right, otherwise what's the point? eyeroll
- paganel 7y ago
  > Throw in lots of classrooms with no or insufficient windows, and certainly none in the hallways. This is one of most baffling aspects about the US, that is that you can have classrooms with no windows. I didn’t personally grow up as a kid in the best social-economic regime (an Eastern-European communist country in the ‘80s) but fortunately for little kid me the regime’s architects and urban planners put great emphasis on all classrooms having lots of windows, as big as possible. I later in my life became quite interested in the history of architecture and urban planning and I was able to find this idea (i.e. big windows are good for schools) in architectural magazines published way back in the 1950s.
  - jandrese 7y ago
    It's an energy thing. These schools were built in the 70s with 70s tech. Big windows meant lots of energy lost in heating and cooling. Or you got a school built in the 40s that did have big windows, but no AC that was sweltering for the first and last weeks/months of school.

DogLover_ 7y ago

I have the same experience as you but when I talk to peers I went to highschool with and say the same thing they seem to not have the same experience. I am not quite sure why that is. Might have something to do with how you treat highschool. If you don't take it seriously and don't do your homework then I guess highschool would be a lot less stressful.

ohithereyou 7y ago

My last two years of high school had 8 hours a day in class, one to two hours of homework a night (including the long term projects you mentioned), a 20 hour a week part time job, and three extra curricular activities that ate probably about 20 hours a week in meetings, fundraising, and practice. So, all, told, I was working _80 hours a week, minimum_ in my high school years. I graduated top ten in my class, and my parents were astonished that I took two years off between high school and college going to a technical school eight hours a week with a 40 hour a week job. I had cut 32 hours of work a week out of my week, and I was only 19! When I finally did go to college, the weeks during the semester were about twenty hours a week between classes, studying, projects, and tutoring and a twenty hour a week part time job. I can understand why you felt like college was a vacation because I felt the same way! The downside to all of this is that I was very poorly socialized, compared to some of my peers, when I started college. Luckily, since I had a bunch of free time, it was easy to catch up, but the first semester was difficult for me navigating all of these unstructured, unsupervised socialization opportunities. A part of me regrets that because that stunted my ability to network from the start of college - I have no idea what opportunities I have missed out on and will miss out on in the future as a result. Several people that graduated in that top ten with me who had the same 80 hour a week work week in high school could not handle the unstructured free time in college. Two dropped out of college but have none-the-less worked their way into lives that seem to make them happy, one got heavily into drugs and is still in jail, one committed suicide, and the rest graduated and seem to have kept on the track.

jackcosgrove 7y ago

The same dynamic is at work in weedout courses during college. High school is in many places a four year weedout course (actually 3.5 years) used to decide who goes to college. The obvious question is whether weedout regimens actually burnish skills. In my experience they did to some extent, but most of the effort expended was game-playing to get onto a path which would be easier or more lucrative in the long run. (Example: becoming a medical doctor or tenured professor is harder than it has to be because people are attracted by the prospect of a job-for-life.)