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On the US education system
May. 4th, 2017 01:51 pmIn my experience of college, it involved being forced to pay for a fuckton of stupid, pointless classes to learn information I'd already learned in high school or earlier. Which of course they do because the public school system in the US is such a flaming pile of shit that our average students are struggling with classes that students in other countries learned back in middle school or elementary school, and most of our gifted students would be considered average in other countries.
But unlike most people, I actually enjoyed learning and did a lot of it on my own, and also I very quickly realized that schools in the US were utter shit. I already knew how to read and write by the time I entered kindergarten, thanks to Sesame Street among other programs, and was constantly years ahead of everyone else. If it hadn't been for my difficulties learning math and the fact I'm probably on the ADD spectrum, I suspect I would've been bumped ahead several years in school. As it was, I was constantly bored.
As to my math deficiencies, I blame the way they taught that shit in school, because I've since come across shortcuts and ways of looking at things from a friend who knows math (and some online sources of how they do things in other countries) that made me realize that I could've been at least average at math if I'd known these things when I was a kid, and quite possibly above average. But thanks to their shitty math teaching, I'm below average in math and rely on calculators and Wolfram Alpha for that stuff. (But at least the way they taught math back then was theoretically comprehensible, as opposed to the utterly ridiculous, dada-esque bullshit that is modern "common core math.")
And as someone who'd long since seen through the public school system as being utterly unable to actually teach me anything I hadn't already learned on my own far faster and more efficiently, it wasn't a hard decision to drop out of college once I realized it was basically remedial high school, even if it was so expensive it took me years to pay off the loans for the one year of college I took. Utter fucking waste of time and money, that was. I'd have been better off buying books on the subjects I needed and learning from them.
Knowing what I know now, I should've gone to a vocational school and only learned the shit that was actually relevant to the career I wanted. I mean honestly, if our education system is so shitty that college has to rehash the same shit covered in middle school and high school as a fucking REQUIREMENT because the average high school graduate has a fifth-grade education equivalent at best, maybe it's time to scrap that system and replace it with something that actually works.
But unlike most people, I actually enjoyed learning and did a lot of it on my own, and also I very quickly realized that schools in the US were utter shit. I already knew how to read and write by the time I entered kindergarten, thanks to Sesame Street among other programs, and was constantly years ahead of everyone else. If it hadn't been for my difficulties learning math and the fact I'm probably on the ADD spectrum, I suspect I would've been bumped ahead several years in school. As it was, I was constantly bored.
As to my math deficiencies, I blame the way they taught that shit in school, because I've since come across shortcuts and ways of looking at things from a friend who knows math (and some online sources of how they do things in other countries) that made me realize that I could've been at least average at math if I'd known these things when I was a kid, and quite possibly above average. But thanks to their shitty math teaching, I'm below average in math and rely on calculators and Wolfram Alpha for that stuff. (But at least the way they taught math back then was theoretically comprehensible, as opposed to the utterly ridiculous, dada-esque bullshit that is modern "common core math.")
And as someone who'd long since seen through the public school system as being utterly unable to actually teach me anything I hadn't already learned on my own far faster and more efficiently, it wasn't a hard decision to drop out of college once I realized it was basically remedial high school, even if it was so expensive it took me years to pay off the loans for the one year of college I took. Utter fucking waste of time and money, that was. I'd have been better off buying books on the subjects I needed and learning from them.
Knowing what I know now, I should've gone to a vocational school and only learned the shit that was actually relevant to the career I wanted. I mean honestly, if our education system is so shitty that college has to rehash the same shit covered in middle school and high school as a fucking REQUIREMENT because the average high school graduate has a fifth-grade education equivalent at best, maybe it's time to scrap that system and replace it with something that actually works.
