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I think so... and in their defense: I've been there. I was sorta shoe-horned into super-mediocre Midwestern colleges here in America due to my mother working a
by folkhack 6y ago
I think so... and in their defense: I've been there.
I was sorta shoe-horned into super-mediocre Midwestern colleges here in America due to my mother working at a private institution in the same city that I grew up in. I went for art and computer science... outside of a couple of exceptions the professors were horrible, and the student body even worse being a dumping grounds for rich Illinois suburbs that thought their kids couldn't/wouldn't get in trouble in small town Iowa.
My point is - I can relate. So many of these kids are disenfranchised for some reason or another and I'm more empathetic to it because I couldn't haven given two s$@ts in college myself - there was zero value vs busting my butt on professional/personal programming projects. Like - teaching us Pascal in 2005 claiming "it's coming back" lacking of value. "Software isn't going to the internet" sorta lacking...
I even had to "snap back" for some courses like my elective electronics course. The prof really cared, and wanted to give you a solid understanding of the basics. He even threw out a poor test class-wide and redid a week of instruction once because, "mathematically that was on me, I'm sorry." Somehow it was way easier for me to put forth 100% effort in his class where I couldn't be bothered elsewhere. He gave me an actual reason to be there/care.
Overall I got burnt out on education, dropped out for a dev career that led to people calling me all sorts of "engineer" titles and learned in the school of the hard-knocks. Frankly, I sincerely feel apologetic to my past professors because I was dead-weight in their classroom just going through the minimal motions to GTFO to my real job which actually paid bills vs. putting me into debt. Just like the students failing the same test three times over: I could sincerely not have cared less... When a prof said I should chose between school and work expecting me to obviously choose school, I laughed in her face and dropped out the next day on general principal. I had a mom home going through chemo, my dad was long dead, my brother was an alcoholic, and I had bills.
Definitely playing devil's advocate here, but... I imagine so many of these kids, for some reason or another, are burnt-out on education just like I was/am. I was just lucky by the time I was burnt out that I "had an out".