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Except school never thought me how to learn. School learning was always an uphill battle for me and using schools ways of learning was a hindrance to me in uni

Except school never thought me how to learn. School learning was always an uphill battle for me and using schools ways of learning was a hindrance to me in uni and later life. I had to figure out for myself the best ways for me to learn, but unfortunately didn’t really have a good grasp on it until much later (after uni). Hell, I was a somewhat troubled teen with problems and when I was about 14, I outright refused to go to school for a year and my poor mother couldn’t do much to make me go :/ BUT in that time, I taught myself to program, first in Visual Basic, then in python and finally I settled on C++. Sure, my knowledge was quite limited compared to what it is now after years of practical experience and a computer science degree, but that year of self study largely shaped my approach to life, exposed me to a lot of things just because I was interested, gave me drive and ambition and set me up for a career in software development. I’m not saying school was completely useless to me, but it was a rather inefficient way of learning the things I do find useful. In school, I hated most subjects like history, geography etc but nowadays I’ll happily Wikipedia binge for days on end learning about the finer points of other civilizations past or present (I’ve even started reading books on Sumerian tablets), chemistry, biology, physics, maths.. I’ve recently been binge watching YouTube videos on quantum mechanics... Then there were things I really enjoyed while in school: English essays for example were something I enjoyed writing, but I got little encouragement or help in doing so and my passion for writing fizzled out...

satori99 7y ago
I had a similar experience, though I still value skills I was forced to learn. Even things like cooking skills, that held little interest for me at the time. I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. If, by chance my interests aligned with a class topic, I excelled without much effort. My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics -- You didn't learn much about the history of science or math in science or math classes. Nor did you learn much interesting stuff about mathematical and engineering history in History classes. Art was the exception to this and I really enjoyed both the historical and practical aspects of Art classes for this reason. My school days are well in the past and I understand it's a little different for high-schooler's these days. At least I hope that's true.
- dkersten 7y ago
  > though I still value skills I was forced to learn Oh, I’m not saying it was without value, just that it was a very inefficient way of learning, which in turn means I learned a lot less in the time I spent on it than I could have or was otherwise unhappy with my school years when they could have been amazing. > I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. Yes, absolutely. Or even just that I wasn’t interested at that particular moment. Somebody recently explained to me that Montessori basically lets kids choose what to learn any any particular time (in a self learning way). I feel this would have been extremely suited to me. I was always an intuitive person who had to learn how or why things work, I’m pretty sure that I would have found myself interested in most school things at some point. > My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics Yeah I agree with this too. Also just not being very hands on. Other people mentioned the “when will I ever use this” question. School (and even uni) was pretty bad at teaching ways that you might actually want to know this thing aside from general interest. For example, I hated statistics in uni and did bad in that course (didn’t help that the lecturer was ab alcoholic but anyway), until some time later when I needed it for a project I wanted to do and I found that not only is it useful, but also quite interesting. When something is thought purely in the abstract it’s boring and seems not that useful but when you put it into practice it can be really fun and interesting.

satori99 7y ago

I had a similar experience, though I still value skills I was forced to learn. Even things like cooking skills, that held little interest for me at the time. I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. If, by chance my interests aligned with a class topic, I excelled without much effort. My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics -- You didn't learn much about the history of science or math in science or math classes. Nor did you learn much interesting stuff about mathematical and engineering history in History classes. Art was the exception to this and I really enjoyed both the historical and practical aspects of Art classes for this reason. My school days are well in the past and I understand it's a little different for high-schooler's these days. At least I hope that's true.

dkersten 7y ago
> though I still value skills I was forced to learn Oh, I’m not saying it was without value, just that it was a very inefficient way of learning, which in turn means I learned a lot less in the time I spent on it than I could have or was otherwise unhappy with my school years when they could have been amazing. > I often found that my interests were there, but misaligned. I may have been intensely interested in some aspect of history -- but not the anything on the current curriculum. Yes, absolutely. Or even just that I wasn’t interested at that particular moment. Somebody recently explained to me that Montessori basically lets kids choose what to learn any any particular time (in a self learning way). I feel this would have been extremely suited to me. I was always an intuitive person who had to learn how or why things work, I’m pretty sure that I would have found myself interested in most school things at some point. > My other gripe was the lack of integration between topics Yeah I agree with this too. Also just not being very hands on. Other people mentioned the “when will I ever use this” question. School (and even uni) was pretty bad at teaching ways that you might actually want to know this thing aside from general interest. For example, I hated statistics in uni and did bad in that course (didn’t help that the lecturer was ab alcoholic but anyway), until some time later when I needed it for a project I wanted to do and I found that not only is it useful, but also quite interesting. When something is thought purely in the abstract it’s boring and seems not that useful but when you put it into practice it can be really fun and interesting.