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I think I found school tolerable, or even fun, because I was able to figure out the proper way to exercise agency within the confines of the system. As an anal
by CarVac 5y ago
I think I found school tolerable, or even fun, because I was able to figure out the proper way to exercise agency within the confines of the system.
As an analogy, as a kid when I played with Lego or K'NEX, my favorite thing to do was not assemble kits but instead come up with my own designs from the parts therein. Working within the system, but being a creator rather than a consumer.
At school, I wasn't just trying to learn the material they wanted me to know, I was also trying to reverse-engineer the tasks asked of me to figure out what the teachers most wanted.
- BLKNSLVR 5y agoDestined for Systems Analysis or Money Laundering.
- aidenn0 5y agoI exercised my agency by annoying my teachers. That tended to lead to me having much lower grades in subjectively graded classes. It was a lot of fun, but I cringe sometimes in retrospect. Here's one example: Slashdot posted a link to a place that would let you search all graduate thesis papers at about the same time I was starting an English class taught by a grad student instructor. I looked up the instructor's Master's thesis and found it was on <Literature Period X>. While the instructor was passing out the syllabus, I said loudly to the person next to me "I hope we don't have to read anything from <Literature Period X>." The instructor just froze and stared at me mouth agape for about 30 seconds. By 4 weeks into that class, the instructor informed me that regardless of my performance, I was not going to get a grade higher than a D. I did in fact end up with a D.
- bruce343434 5y agoQuite the fragile instructor...
- inglor_cz 5y agoLOL. If someone looked up my thesis and did the same to me, I would have laughed with sincerity. In the "I crossed that killing field so that you don't have to" way.