21 ms·

Escaping High School

195 points by ivank 3y ago

akshrtkaiwhjert 3y ago
Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and agree with most of what this post says in isolation, but unfortunately I think it misses the point in a broader context. This advice works when children/students have plenty of support from above. It can be counterproductive when they don't. It's preaching to the comfortable upper-middle-class choir. These days I live in silicon valley and my wife's family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they've attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don't know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you're born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. "Getting your friends together and busking" sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don't win any form of competition. So I don't consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.
thenerdhead 3y ago
Sorry but there is no way to min/max life. We all do not get the same amount of time and opportunities. This reads as a verbose and pompous perspective on what one should do around high school age to "succeed" and has absolutely no reflection on the people who actually succeed. A-type people will continue to overachieve and write these types of posts, but their definition of "success" is just different.
bell-cot 3y ago
Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew very fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.) For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.
- Tade0 3y ago
  Right after getting his master's degree my friend's father stood before a choice: accept a desk job paying X a month, or make X per job installing and repairing A/C units. That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    A family member just paid $500 for someone to come replace a $35 capacitor on their central AC compressor, after I explained how they could do it themselves in 5 minutes.
    - Tade0 3y ago
      And this is the kind of stuff that made my friend an owner of two apartments before the age of 40.
    - joenot443 3y ago
      I think the vast majority of people go their entire lives without doing any kind of circuit level repair work. It's just not a skill most folks acquire. I can't think of anyone in my extended family who could replace a capacitor, half of them wouldn't even know what that means.
      - lotsofpulp 3y ago
        A central AC compressor capacitor is plug and play. https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-dual-round-run-capacitor-mar14288/_/R-4493119 https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-du... Turn off circuit breaker, unscrew ~4 screws on the cover of the compressor unit, take a picture of how old one is connected, unplug it, connect new one matching up the symbols or letters, confirm with the picture you took, screw the cover back on, and switch the circuit breaker back on. Watch any of the available 5,000 YouTube videos if unsure.
Macha 3y ago
From the opening: > college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life Many colleges, especially the prestigious ones, would explicitly deny that as their goal as being too vocational is dismissed for reasons of class history
- bell-cot 3y ago
  True-ish. OTOH, they're also busy "selling" their diplomas as uber-valuable tickets to financial and social success in life - for which their applicants, students, and families thereof should be willing to pay any price, bear any financial burden...
hardware2win 3y ago
Pretty decent collection of reasonable advices Especially this: Make sure you aren’t just doing a glorified version of trying to earn good grades. So many people failed on this, mostly because of parents. Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. Just small nitpick to #1 Learning just in time =/= learning via practice Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not. I'd add something about living your own life (career, relations, hobby) instead of being "locked" by your friends. Dont go to X school just because your friends go there. Friendships decrease/end too. You may barely see them 5 years later due to... life
- Tade0 3y ago
  > Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. I have this archetype which I constructed over the years, that I named "34-year-old Patrice". By just looking at him, you wouldn't be able to tell that 34yo Patrice dropped out of high school, took some odd jobs in his youth which eventually got him into trouble, so he did time. At age 26 he got out and started turning his life around and despite all this hardship is currently a functional member of society and in some regards even more successful than his peers. Point being, life is more complex than just taking and passing tests. I feel like more teenagers should be told this as early as possible.
- ameister14 3y ago
  >Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.
  - hardware2win 3y ago
    In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades. Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency. At best they show effort (or "caring" parents) >Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :) This way everything is up to your score, not school name or cool prof who inflates grades
A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
It is a decent list, but it probably should be qualified that for a good portion of the population, general education is likely not a bad thing. I love that the article emphasizes practical knowledge, but as I am trying to remember my younger years, I think I rarely thought about any of it in those terms.
BirAdam 3y ago
Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5. If I could wave a wand and changing things, I’d restructure civilization to expect children to be present everywhere with their parents or other family members, learning by being part of civilization as every young adult currently does.
- op00to 3y ago
  I’m confused. Are you suggesting children should be working?
  - A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
    As I read the parent's point, I think he is advocating for kids seeing their parents work more often. As it is, kids in US don't experience the reality often. More than that, parents shield them from the reality as long as it is possible, because the reality mostly sucks. I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't honestly say that I learned anything useful ( I could have, but did not ).
    - Mezzie 3y ago
      They probably expect the kids to be involved/help, but that depends a lot on the parents' jobs. Like I was of some help to my dad in elementary school (helped him with basic IT/networking/data stuff), but my mom worked with biohazards that had very good reason for not wanting children around so any time we had to go to mom's work we were locked in a break room for hours.
      - op00to 3y ago
tureu92 3y ago
[flagged]
light_hue_1 3y ago
Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged. > Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don't have time for alternative highschool guides. That's why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago. I've had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family. People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide. > It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes It's exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you're going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they're massively overworked and underpaid. They don't have time for this nonsense. > Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work. Seeing the author's reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn't talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I'm bad conditions is not charming.
- pandorable 3y ago
  Hi, author of the post here - thanks for chiming in! Was hoping to hear from someone who had worked in or gone to a school like this. This part of the essay was admittedly the most guesswork-heavy; I included it because that seemed better than the alternative of not mentioning economic disparities at all, or of telling kids at poor schools they're resigned to doom. I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious to hear more about your experience and thoughts on what strategies work best for teenagers in economically/socially/geographically disadvantaged situations. Do you follow the post-school life trajectories of any former students? Do any manage to achieve upward mobility (this could look like the "homeless to Harvard" human interest story you hear every year, but it could also look like someone who goes from a childhood of abuse or abject poverty to a relatively stable blue-collar job and is safer and happier as an adult than as a child)? What advice would you give to a fourteen-year-old student? This isn't to say that there aren't massive obstacles in their way (especially for the ones who have to devote all their time to securing basic needs like food/shelter/sleep), or that their circumstances are their fault, or that systemic change wouldn't be a more powerful lever. What I'm wondering is, assuming you're a kid in this situation and you don't have a hand on the lever of institutional power, is there anything you can do beyond the standard "stay in school" advice to improve your circumstances, even if the improvement is just from "very bad" to "kind of bad"? > People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide. What careers do the students you know typically aspire to? Or are they usually resigned to the prospect of an unfulfilling job?
Tade0 3y ago
> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority. High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of that when there's trust and mutual respect in place.
- Pigalowda 3y ago
  I’m going to disagree with you here. For most kids in high school regulars courses it is absolutely day care. And that’s the majority of students. Honors, AP, IB are not daycare.
  - caddemon 3y ago
    Even top public test high schools like Stuyvesant in NYC have an attitude towards their students as if it is daycare. Just look how they acted when teachers were calling out sick en masse during Omicron. They cancelled many classes but forced all students to come in anyway and sit in a cramped gymnasium "study hall". I'd agree that for these students HS shouldn't be a daycare, but that doesn't mean it isn't the prevailing attitude amongst current administrators. Piling on a bunch of extra memorization work doesn't mean they're treating students as independent thinkers.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    This is the sort of approach that's utterly foreign to me. When people in my class started turning 18 teachers reminded us that compulsory education doesn't apply to them any more, so they're free to leave at any time - with appropriate consequences regarding their chances of passing, but nothing else.
    - Pigalowda 3y ago
      They still almost certainly live at home and I imagine there’s an expectation from their parents to finish high school. There’s definitely a big line between being a crappy student doing the bare minimum vs dropping out.
tallanvor 3y ago
"Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories." This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education. How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles, and are stuck balancing what's important with the crap forced on them by legislatures, parents, and (hopefully) well-meaning people like the author.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it? Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. Compounding that, most people went through the education system as students, so they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works. Usually their advice on how to fix the system is geared toward fixing the frustrations they personally felt as a student. In reality, most people are only exposed to the education system as consumers, and therefore know next to nothing about how it actually works. Doesn't stop them from spouting off what they think they know on internet forums and blogs though. They enjoy pointing out what they see as problems, and are happy to offer quick fixes born in ignorance that have either already been tried and don't work, or don't solve the problem for reasons obvious to people currently working on it. Or better yet, the supposed problem isn't one at all, but a boogeyman that politicians are currently pushing to scare voters. If you want to fix education, get into the mix and actually help. Sitting on the sidelines complaining isn't helping anyone. If your perspective about the education system is along the lines of "people who can't, teach", as seems to be in vogue these days, then you're really part of the problem.
  - fn-mote 3y ago
    > Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it? I read this and was expecting /s but apparently not. Please address something concrete! In the US, there are significant problems with the educational system. It's ok to write a theoretical piece thinking about ways to do things differently. The author has some good ideas that do not deserve to be dismissed lightly. They can even be applied within an existing educational system. Examples that I think should resonate on HN: - 1C: Produce Instead Of Consuming - 1D: Do Real Things, Not Fake Things
fn-mote 3y ago
tl;dr - only read the intro > by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could; 1. This presuppoess that "smart" is the essential ingredient for success. How about maturity/self-discipline? There is no way a 14 year old has the maturity of an 18 year old to deal with learning or doing difficult things. 2. IME a very significant problem that teens have learning is the "fixed mindset". When they are unable to do something right away, especially if they observe their peers can, most don't know how to put in the work to improve. In fact, they behave as if they cannot improve. Concealing one's inability to do something is very common. The author does bring this up in "4F" but I don't feel like it addresses the problem very well. It postulates an ideal student who will connect with someone who is more motivated than them, but then not just ride their coattails. I don't even see that in the business world.
LorenzoGood 3y ago
As a 16 year old, thank you.
tristor 3y ago
Interestingly, the advice in this article pretty much aligns with what I did, although I can't claim I did what I did with any grand strategic vision. I mostly blew off high school doing the bare minimum necessary to graduate, while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects, and volunteering on open source. I went to college, but ultimately dropped out, with my most valuable time at community college where I was able to get tech certifications as part of my classwork. It's been more than 20 years since I left high school and I've had a very good career and life despite having no degrees and a piss-poor high school GPA, because ultimately none of that actually matters in the real world. All that matters is who you know and whether you can do the job. If you know people who will give you a chance and you can actually succeed at the job, you'll do fine. Learning actual skills that other people care about and value is far more important than being able to regurgitate bullshit for a test to get a piece of paper that's meaningless. My only real regret is that I didn't just drop out of high school and get my GED so I could focus more time on my side-projects at the time.
- squarepizza 3y ago
  > while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects Sounds like quite a privilege.
  - tristor 3y ago
    > Sounds like quite a privilege. Cool. And? Yep, I was privileged to have a computer at home and family members who worked at a university so I could get a dial-up SLIP Internet connection and access to Usenet and IRC. So what. How is that even a remotely useful response to my comment?
    - rovolo 3y ago
      The article is explicitly advice for students. It matches the path your life took, but would your advice to drop out and get a GED be good advice for someone without your privilege?
Scubabear68 3y ago
This is an interesting article, but I think it is heavily skewed toward the author’s goals in life and who they innately are. A guide for a more introverted person, or sports-oriented person, or highly social person would be vastly different. In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK. It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life. The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.
- JALTU 3y ago
  Yeah, I do and have done creative things and enjoy the creative output of others immensely. But given the choice, I'd rather ride my bikes, ski, sea kayak, etc. Fortunately creators have created some amazing machines and prosthetics to enable such pursuits.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  I don't think they realize how lost teenagers can be either. Some kids have a driven vision, but a lot don't. They are still going to hang around the same parking lots and it's not because school is getting in the way.
- javier_e06 3y ago
  I agree that the article over generalize several aspects of High School education. High School in most cases is the last chance people will be able to share each other experiences/lives. Afterwards people dive into the compartmentalized world of their careers and social status. Learning is just one part of the whole thing.
jabroni_salad 3y ago
Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools. I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets of just chord sequences and important hits are not sufficient for them. Part of it is just the nature of the Program (wind band is a highly synchronized large group activity and you cant have too much screwing around), but I also think the nature of a wind instrument where you have limited endurance and can only play one note at a time is stunting without proper instruction. Despite having great sense of rhythm and phrasing, I don't think I really understood music until I started getting chord shapes into my hands on the piano and could noodle without worrying about spending my limited endurance. edited to add: And to be clear I do think the music programs are Good and Valuable. It's an excellent group activity and kids will work on something for months for the big concert. I did not have any other single school project with that kind of runtime and that's a valuable experience on its own. tldr if your kid likes music dont let them settle for just wind band. Get them a guitar or a piano too. But it's fine to just like the band for what it is, too.
- squarepizza 3y ago
  Being in Band, one learns Music; being in a band, one learns music. The attrition rate of band students in extracurricular or post-high-school musical endeavors is a bit disappointing. It is similar to the kids forced through piano lessons who quit whenever they have a chance.
- rjsw 3y ago
  My experience playing the clarinet was the same as yours.
- stcroixx 3y ago
  Music education got cut entirely in the East Bay public school district my kids attended. Had to move out of state.
- mtalantikite 3y ago
irrational 3y ago
> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t feel like I really got to peak “raw brainpower” until about 22-23 years old.
sharker8 3y ago
"wear a helmet until you are comfortable with whatever wheels you are riding" sounds like a formula for "die on a bike once you've hit the dunning kruger effect"
jb1991 3y ago
> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.
- maximus-decimus 3y ago
  IQ studies show IQ caps at 25, so... yeah no remotely close.
- sage76 3y ago
  Author is just another grifter peddling pop-psychology/bro-science nonsense like thousands and thousands of others, since it generates like, views and even conversation (like at HN). None of it is worth paying attention to.
- SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
  It seems to overly intellectualize a problem that has a whole spectrum of factors outside of being "smart". Long term thinking, risk/reward, motivations, emotions, hormones, all that stuff is either first forming or in total chaos and it's in no way as simple as smarting your way out of it.
- strivax 3y ago
  AFAIK the human brain matures around mid to late twenties, so you'd probably be right about this from a biological sense too
  - stubybubs 3y ago
    I think the neuroscience here has really gone through the pop-sci wringer. The original research was specifically about impulse control and not anything else. I think there has been some more evidence about pattern recognition etc recently. It's always struck me as funny when people say 25 is when you're fully mature. After this point, you start to experience declines in ability. It's not maturity; it's the moment you start dying.
nvln 3y ago
We are trying to codify this: https://puthir.org https://puthir.org. My son (and our first learner) launched his portfolio (real work, not fake stuff) back in December and he added his new math toy last month. We expect his portfolio (+ his experience, skill and knowledge) to grow over the next couple of years. Here is his Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838.
dmvdoug 3y ago
> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the strategy, as with everything, is to mitigate the impact of your disadvantages while using your advantages to the maximum. I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories. I work in exactly the type of school this describes, with exactly these kids. I’m genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead with advice/theories about their advantages vs. disadvantages despite having no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about. It makes me genuinely angry. This person can take their theories and shove them up their ass, until they bother spending time in my shoes and really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront… just to make it to tomorrow. While navigating being a fucking teenager.
- costanzaDynasty 3y ago
  My life only got better after I quit school at 15. At the end, I had so much outside distraction, that I couldn't put up the front at school anymore. I just needed sometime free from chaos.
  - solarmist 3y ago
    Quitting school wouldn’t have helped me. It would’ve locked my into that life for myself. The chaos I had was mostly at home. School was my calm place.
    - dmvdoug 3y ago
      This is something I hear startlingly often. It's not the majority of kids, by any means, but I've had a number of students who fail classes so they have to go to summer school, just to escape from home.
jrm4 3y ago
This is wonderful, and I say that as someone who did REALLY WELL in high-school. Which is to say, I have no regrets about any of my schooling (I went on to complete law school) -- but if I'd thought about things more in this way, it would have better mentally prepared me for thinking about AFTER that.
squokko 3y ago
I really like the author's advice to do the "real" thing instead of the "kid" thing. This is what kids in more primitive societies do... if the family is subsistence farmers, the kids are helping do economically productive work from the moment they can. Even in farming communities in the US, kids are driving tractors, fixing cars, actually doing real adult work. Important for kids in the knowledge worker segment to do the same.
MuffinFlavored 3y ago
> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead. I'm sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time/resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being "those are non-issues".
- OkayPhysicist 3y ago
  Because teenagers have not yet fully developed the parts of their brain responsible for impulse control. Add into that mess heightened hormone levels screaming to fuck or fight, and you've got a recipe for misbehavior. That can be overcome with good parenting, but you don't have to get a license to pop out a brood.
guy98238710 3y ago
This is for fearless kids. Most kids, I think, would be scared to death by these suggestions. It's an embarrassment minefield. It's better to start experimenting in a more private way in places where you are clearly welcome - student competitions, newbie-friendly websites, publishing stuff quietly without advertising it, reading and lurking, submitting tiny contributions that are clearly wanted, etc. Kids these days do not suffer from scarcity of opportunities. They suffer from lack of confidence. They need to gain confidence through little successes. Sending them out into the world doing things way above their current skill level is going to result in confidence-crushing failures.

195 points by ivank 3y ago

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and agree with most of what this post says in isolation, but unfortunately I think it misses the point in a broader context. This advice works when children/students have plenty of support from above. It can be counterproductive when they don't. It's preaching to the comfortable upper-middle-class choir. These days I live in silicon valley and my wife's family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they've attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don't know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you're born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. "Getting your friends together and busking" sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don't win any form of competition. So I don't consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.

thenerdhead 3y ago

Sorry but there is no way to min/max life. We all do not get the same amount of time and opportunities. This reads as a verbose and pompous perspective on what one should do around high school age to "succeed" and has absolutely no reflection on the people who actually succeed. A-type people will continue to overachieve and write these types of posts, but their definition of "success" is just different.

bell-cot 3y ago

Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew very fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.) For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than your median graduate's full-time job" is a slam-dunk argument.

Tade0 3y ago
Right after getting his master's degree my friend's father stood before a choice: accept a desk job paying X a month, or make X per job installing and repairing A/C units. That MSc at least helped tremendously with branding - people could lay their trust in that when he was still starting out.
- lotsofpulp 3y ago
  A family member just paid $500 for someone to come replace a $35 capacitor on their central AC compressor, after I explained how they could do it themselves in 5 minutes.
  - Tade0 3y ago
    And this is the kind of stuff that made my friend an owner of two apartments before the age of 40.
  - joenot443 3y ago
    I think the vast majority of people go their entire lives without doing any kind of circuit level repair work. It's just not a skill most folks acquire. I can't think of anyone in my extended family who could replace a capacitor, half of them wouldn't even know what that means.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      A central AC compressor capacitor is plug and play. https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-dual-round-run-capacitor-mar14288/_/R-4493119 https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-du... Turn off circuit breaker, unscrew ~4 screws on the cover of the compressor unit, take a picture of how old one is connected, unplug it, connect new one matching up the symbols or letters, confirm with the picture you took, screw the cover back on, and switch the circuit breaker back on. Watch any of the available 5,000 YouTube videos if unsure.

Macha 3y ago

From the opening: > college isn’t doing a good job of setting you up to succeed in real life Many colleges, especially the prestigious ones, would explicitly deny that as their goal as being too vocational is dismissed for reasons of class history

bell-cot 3y ago
True-ish. OTOH, they're also busy "selling" their diplomas as uber-valuable tickets to financial and social success in life - for which their applicants, students, and families thereof should be willing to pay any price, bear any financial burden...

hardware2win 3y ago

Pretty decent collection of reasonable advices Especially this: Make sure you aren’t just doing a glorified version of trying to earn good grades. So many people failed on this, mostly because of parents. Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. Just small nitpick to #1 Learning just in time =/= learning via practice Learning just in case, the opposite of JIT makes sense too, but is "unpredictably effective" - the stuff you learned may be needed and put you ahead, but may not. I'd add something about living your own life (career, relations, hobby) instead of being "locked" by your friends. Dont go to X school just because your friends go there. Friendships decrease/end too. You may barely see them 5 years later due to... life

Tade0 3y ago
> Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. I have this archetype which I constructed over the years, that I named "34-year-old Patrice". By just looking at him, you wouldn't be able to tell that 34yo Patrice dropped out of high school, took some odd jobs in his youth which eventually got him into trouble, so he did time. At age 26 he got out and started turning his life around and despite all this hardship is currently a functional member of society and in some regards even more successful than his peers. Point being, life is more complex than just taking and passing tests. I feel like more teenagers should be told this as early as possible.
ameister14 3y ago
>Dont put effort just for the sake of grades, they are worthless. They aren't worthless. Grades make it easier and cheaper for you to go to college. Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher paying jobs or grad school. So not worthless, just not the be all and end all.
- hardware2win 3y ago
  In my country higher edu institutions look at final exam scores, not grades. Grades are terrible due to bias, difficulty when it comes to comparing them and lack of transparency. At best they show effort (or "caring" parents) >Good grades in college make it far, far easier to get jobs and can get you in the door to significantly better and higher Thats why there should be fair and transparent exam after college :) This way everything is up to your score, not school name or cool prof who inflates grades

A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago

It is a decent list, but it probably should be qualified that for a good portion of the population, general education is likely not a bad thing. I love that the article emphasizes practical knowledge, but as I am trying to remember my younger years, I think I rarely thought about any of it in those terms.

BirAdam 3y ago

Personally, I’ve always felt that schooling is a waste of time, money, and resources. The default model of civilization is that children are absent from life. This means that kids are missing out on seeing adults interact, so they mature more slowly, and it also means that their life experiences are limited to what happens in a building. Importantly, after 18 years, people in the USA leave school in debt and are no better suited to professional life than when they entered school at 4 or 5. If I could wave a wand and changing things, I’d restructure civilization to expect children to be present everywhere with their parents or other family members, learning by being part of civilization as every young adult currently does.

op00to 3y ago
I’m confused. Are you suggesting children should be working?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 3y ago
  As I read the parent's point, I think he is advocating for kids seeing their parents work more often. As it is, kids in US don't experience the reality often. More than that, parents shield them from the reality as long as it is possible, because the reality mostly sucks. I would think of it as 'take your kids to work', but more often. I am not a big fan. I was coming to my dad's car shop after school and I can't honestly say that I learned anything useful ( I could have, but did not ).
  - Mezzie 3y ago
    They probably expect the kids to be involved/help, but that depends a lot on the parents' jobs. Like I was of some help to my dad in elementary school (helped him with basic IT/networking/data stuff), but my mom worked with biohazards that had very good reason for not wanting children around so any time we had to go to mom's work we were locked in a break room for hours.
    - op00to 3y ago

tureu92 3y ago

[flagged]

light_hue_1 3y ago

Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged. > Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. Oh if only not being extremely privileged was so easy to undo. When you work a lot of jobs to keep your family together you don't have time for alternative highschool guides. That's why people talk about companies being founded in garages and not on the street in Chicago. I've had students who never got a good night of sleep in their lives. Or students with abusive family. People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide. > It might be easier to talk teachers into letting you off the busywork for their classes It's exactly the opposite. The idea that something is busywork and you tell a teacher you're going to do something else instead is privilege. Those teachers they're massively overworked and underpaid. They don't have time for this nonsense. > Your charm advantage gets increased a little bit in this situation; if you reach out to an adult doing some sort of interesting work. Seeing the author's reaction to being contacted by a student who doesn't talk they way they do, might have a tattoo, might dress very differently, would be interesting. No. Being poor and I'm bad conditions is not charming.

pandorable 3y ago
Hi, author of the post here - thanks for chiming in! Was hoping to hear from someone who had worked in or gone to a school like this. This part of the essay was admittedly the most guesswork-heavy; I included it because that seemed better than the alternative of not mentioning economic disparities at all, or of telling kids at poor schools they're resigned to doom. I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious to hear more about your experience and thoughts on what strategies work best for teenagers in economically/socially/geographically disadvantaged situations. Do you follow the post-school life trajectories of any former students? Do any manage to achieve upward mobility (this could look like the "homeless to Harvard" human interest story you hear every year, but it could also look like someone who goes from a childhood of abuse or abject poverty to a relatively stable blue-collar job and is safer and happier as an adult than as a child)? What advice would you give to a fourteen-year-old student? This isn't to say that there aren't massive obstacles in their way (especially for the ones who have to devote all their time to securing basic needs like food/shelter/sleep), or that their circumstances are their fault, or that systemic change wouldn't be a more powerful lever. What I'm wondering is, assuming you're a kid in this situation and you don't have a hand on the lever of institutional power, is there anything you can do beyond the standard "stay in school" advice to improve your circumstances, even if the improvement is just from "very bad" to "kind of bad"? > People who don't come from privileged backgrounds also cannot see themselves doing a lot of the careers related to this guide. What careers do the students you know typically aspire to? Or are they usually resigned to the prospect of an unfulfilling job?

Tade0 3y ago

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead Perhaps we should start with putting some trust in the people who are close to the age of majority. High school is not daycare in any shape or form. Highschoolers can largely fend for themselves. Of course they get ideas, but you consistently see less of that when there's trust and mutual respect in place.

Pigalowda 3y ago
I’m going to disagree with you here. For most kids in high school regulars courses it is absolutely day care. And that’s the majority of students. Honors, AP, IB are not daycare.
- caddemon 3y ago
  Even top public test high schools like Stuyvesant in NYC have an attitude towards their students as if it is daycare. Just look how they acted when teachers were calling out sick en masse during Omicron. They cancelled many classes but forced all students to come in anyway and sit in a cramped gymnasium "study hall". I'd agree that for these students HS shouldn't be a daycare, but that doesn't mean it isn't the prevailing attitude amongst current administrators. Piling on a bunch of extra memorization work doesn't mean they're treating students as independent thinkers.
- Tade0 3y ago
  This is the sort of approach that's utterly foreign to me. When people in my class started turning 18 teachers reminded us that compulsory education doesn't apply to them any more, so they're free to leave at any time - with appropriate consequences regarding their chances of passing, but nothing else.
  - Pigalowda 3y ago
    They still almost certainly live at home and I imagine there’s an expectation from their parents to finish high school. There’s definitely a big line between being a crappy student doing the bare minimum vs dropping out.

tallanvor 3y ago

"Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence ... I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories." This pretty much says it all right here. The author comes from an incredibly privileged background and clearly believes they are smarter than people who have spent their lives studying education. How we educate children isn't a perfect system, but educators really are trying to teach important information to all students, including figuring out ways to reach children with very different learning styles, and are stuck balancing what's important with the crap forced on them by legislatures, parents, and (hopefully) well-meaning people like the author.

ModernMech 3y ago
Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it? Parents love to think that because they have had one child (or maybe a couple), they know how to educate children writ large. Compounding that, most people went through the education system as students, so they believe they have insider knowledge as to how the system works. Usually their advice on how to fix the system is geared toward fixing the frustrations they personally felt as a student. In reality, most people are only exposed to the education system as consumers, and therefore know next to nothing about how it actually works. Doesn't stop them from spouting off what they think they know on internet forums and blogs though. They enjoy pointing out what they see as problems, and are happy to offer quick fixes born in ignorance that have either already been tried and don't work, or don't solve the problem for reasons obvious to people currently working on it. Or better yet, the supposed problem isn't one at all, but a boogeyman that politicians are currently pushing to scare voters. If you want to fix education, get into the mix and actually help. Sitting on the sidelines complaining isn't helping anyone. If your perspective about the education system is along the lines of "people who can't, teach", as seems to be in vogue these days, then you're really part of the problem.
- fn-mote 3y ago
  > Yes, don't we all hate it when people come into our job and tell us how to do it? I read this and was expecting /s but apparently not. Please address something concrete! In the US, there are significant problems with the educational system. It's ok to write a theoretical piece thinking about ways to do things differently. The author has some good ideas that do not deserve to be dismissed lightly. They can even be applied within an existing educational system. Examples that I think should resonate on HN: - 1C: Produce Instead Of Consuming - 1D: Do Real Things, Not Fake Things

fn-mote 3y ago

tl;dr - only read the intro > by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. So you’ve got a four-year chunk during which you’re smart enough to learn anything a novice adult version of you could; 1. This presuppoess that "smart" is the essential ingredient for success. How about maturity/self-discipline? There is no way a 14 year old has the maturity of an 18 year old to deal with learning or doing difficult things. 2. IME a very significant problem that teens have learning is the "fixed mindset". When they are unable to do something right away, especially if they observe their peers can, most don't know how to put in the work to improve. In fact, they behave as if they cannot improve. Concealing one's inability to do something is very common. The author does bring this up in "4F" but I don't feel like it addresses the problem very well. It postulates an ideal student who will connect with someone who is more motivated than them, but then not just ride their coattails. I don't even see that in the business world.

LorenzoGood 3y ago

As a 16 year old, thank you.

tristor 3y ago

Interestingly, the advice in this article pretty much aligns with what I did, although I can't claim I did what I did with any grand strategic vision. I mostly blew off high school doing the bare minimum necessary to graduate, while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects, and volunteering on open source. I went to college, but ultimately dropped out, with my most valuable time at community college where I was able to get tech certifications as part of my classwork. It's been more than 20 years since I left high school and I've had a very good career and life despite having no degrees and a piss-poor high school GPA, because ultimately none of that actually matters in the real world. All that matters is who you know and whether you can do the job. If you know people who will give you a chance and you can actually succeed at the job, you'll do fine. Learning actual skills that other people care about and value is far more important than being able to regurgitate bullshit for a test to get a piece of paper that's meaningless. My only real regret is that I didn't just drop out of high school and get my GED so I could focus more time on my side-projects at the time.

squarepizza 3y ago
> while spending as much time as possible in-person and online with adults who worked in tech and would mentor me, working on side projects Sounds like quite a privilege.
- tristor 3y ago
  > Sounds like quite a privilege. Cool. And? Yep, I was privileged to have a computer at home and family members who worked at a university so I could get a dial-up SLIP Internet connection and access to Usenet and IRC. So what. How is that even a remotely useful response to my comment?
  - rovolo 3y ago
    The article is explicitly advice for students. It matches the path your life took, but would your advice to drop out and get a GED be good advice for someone without your privilege?

Scubabear68 3y ago

This is an interesting article, but I think it is heavily skewed toward the author’s goals in life and who they innately are. A guide for a more introverted person, or sports-oriented person, or highly social person would be vastly different. In particular, I think the author makes the mistake of believing everyone must be a creator. The reality is most people aren’t good at it, don’t like it and don’t pursue it. And that is OK. It also underestimates how young 14 really is, and how much still needs to be learned in general, not just in school but in life. The difference between 14 and 18 is a vast chasm.

JALTU 3y ago
Yeah, I do and have done creative things and enjoy the creative output of others immensely. But given the choice, I'd rather ride my bikes, ski, sea kayak, etc. Fortunately creators have created some amazing machines and prosthetics to enable such pursuits.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
I don't think they realize how lost teenagers can be either. Some kids have a driven vision, but a lot don't. They are still going to hang around the same parking lots and it's not because school is getting in the way.
javier_e06 3y ago
I agree that the article over generalize several aspects of High School education. High School in most cases is the last chance people will be able to share each other experiences/lives. Afterwards people dive into the compartmentalized world of their careers and social status. Learning is just one part of the whole thing.

jabroni_salad 3y ago

Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools. I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets of just chord sequences and important hits are not sufficient for them. Part of it is just the nature of the Program (wind band is a highly synchronized large group activity and you cant have too much screwing around), but I also think the nature of a wind instrument where you have limited endurance and can only play one note at a time is stunting without proper instruction. Despite having great sense of rhythm and phrasing, I don't think I really understood music until I started getting chord shapes into my hands on the piano and could noodle without worrying about spending my limited endurance. edited to add: And to be clear I do think the music programs are Good and Valuable. It's an excellent group activity and kids will work on something for months for the big concert. I did not have any other single school project with that kind of runtime and that's a valuable experience on its own. tldr if your kid likes music dont let them settle for just wind band. Get them a guitar or a piano too. But it's fine to just like the band for what it is, too.

squarepizza 3y ago
Being in Band, one learns Music; being in a band, one learns music. The attrition rate of band students in extracurricular or post-high-school musical endeavors is a bit disappointing. It is similar to the kids forced through piano lessons who quit whenever they have a chance.
rjsw 3y ago
My experience playing the clarinet was the same as yours.
stcroixx 3y ago
Music education got cut entirely in the East Bay public school district my kids attended. Had to move out of state.
mtalantikite 3y ago

irrational 3y ago

> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. This doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t feel like I really got to peak “raw brainpower” until about 22-23 years old.

sharker8 3y ago

"wear a helmet until you are comfortable with whatever wheels you are riding" sounds like a formula for "die on a bike once you've hit the dunning kruger effect"

jb1991 3y ago

> And by the time you’re in your mid-teens, you’re probably as smart as you’re going to be – not as worldly or wise as you will be later, but the raw brainpower is mostly there. I strongly disagree with this. I don't know if it is genuinely true in a biological sense, but in my life experience it is not even close to true. There are lots of things I do that are so far beyond my abilities as a teenager. It could be due to other factors, but my gut suggests those other factors are much more important than this comment about mere brain power leads us to believe.

maximus-decimus 3y ago
IQ studies show IQ caps at 25, so... yeah no remotely close.
sage76 3y ago
Author is just another grifter peddling pop-psychology/bro-science nonsense like thousands and thousands of others, since it generates like, views and even conversation (like at HN). None of it is worth paying attention to.
SketchySeaBeast 3y ago
It seems to overly intellectualize a problem that has a whole spectrum of factors outside of being "smart". Long term thinking, risk/reward, motivations, emotions, hormones, all that stuff is either first forming or in total chaos and it's in no way as simple as smarting your way out of it.
strivax 3y ago
AFAIK the human brain matures around mid to late twenties, so you'd probably be right about this from a biological sense too
- stubybubs 3y ago
  I think the neuroscience here has really gone through the pop-sci wringer. The original research was specifically about impulse control and not anything else. I think there has been some more evidence about pattern recognition etc recently. It's always struck me as funny when people say 25 is when you're fully mature. After this point, you start to experience declines in ability. It's not maturity; it's the moment you start dying.

nvln 3y ago

We are trying to codify this: https://puthir.org https://puthir.org. My son (and our first learner) launched his portfolio (real work, not fake stuff) back in December and he added his new math toy last month. We expect his portfolio (+ his experience, skill and knowledge) to grow over the next couple of years. Here is his Show HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36603838.

dmvdoug 3y ago

> Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. The disadvantages of this case are obvious, but there are a few advantages too; the strategy, as with everything, is to mitigate the impact of your disadvantages while using your advantages to the maximum. I don’t know enough to say what the best tactics are for these cases, but I have a few theories. I work in exactly the type of school this describes, with exactly these kids. I’m genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead with advice/theories about their advantages vs. disadvantages despite having no clue whatsoever what they’re talking about. It makes me genuinely angry. This person can take their theories and shove them up their ass, until they bother spending time in my shoes and really coming face-to-face with the profound systemic and otherwise deep long-term issues kids in this environment have to confront… just to make it to tomorrow. While navigating being a fucking teenager.

costanzaDynasty 3y ago
My life only got better after I quit school at 15. At the end, I had so much outside distraction, that I couldn't put up the front at school anymore. I just needed sometime free from chaos.
- solarmist 3y ago
  Quitting school wouldn’t have helped me. It would’ve locked my into that life for myself. The chaos I had was mostly at home. School was my calm place.
  - dmvdoug 3y ago
    This is something I hear startlingly often. It's not the majority of kids, by any means, but I've had a number of students who fail classes so they have to go to summer school, just to escape from home.

jrm4 3y ago

This is wonderful, and I say that as someone who did REALLY WELL in high-school. Which is to say, I have no regrets about any of my schooling (I went on to complete law school) -- but if I'd thought about things more in this way, it would have better mentally prepared me for thinking about AFTER that.

squokko 3y ago

I really like the author's advice to do the "real" thing instead of the "kid" thing. This is what kids in more primitive societies do... if the family is subsistence farmers, the kids are helping do economically productive work from the moment they can. Even in farming communities in the US, kids are driving tractors, fixing cars, actually doing real adult work. Important for kids in the knowledge worker segment to do the same.

MuffinFlavored 3y ago

> As a bare minimum, high school is supposed to give kids somewhere to go while their parents are at work and keep them from ending up pregnant, in jail, or dead. I'm sure the tone of the article was meant to be light-hearted + silly + joke-y overall but this is actually interesting to me... Why is that the default? Why do some (most) parents need to actively invest time/resources to make sure their kids do not end up pregnant, in jail, or dead instead of the default being "those are non-issues".

OkayPhysicist 3y ago
Because teenagers have not yet fully developed the parts of their brain responsible for impulse control. Add into that mess heightened hormone levels screaming to fuck or fight, and you've got a recipe for misbehavior. That can be overcome with good parenting, but you don't have to get a license to pop out a brood.

guy98238710 3y ago

This is for fearless kids. Most kids, I think, would be scared to death by these suggestions. It's an embarrassment minefield. It's better to start experimenting in a more private way in places where you are clearly welcome - student competitions, newbie-friendly websites, publishing stuff quietly without advertising it, reading and lurking, submitting tiny contributions that are clearly wanted, etc. Kids these days do not suffer from scarcity of opportunities. They suffer from lack of confidence. They need to gain confidence through little successes. Sending them out into the world doing things way above their current skill level is going to result in confidence-crushing failures.