T w e n t y S i d e d

Eleventh grade. My junior year of high school. On one hand, I’m really looking forward to getting out of this madhouse and its bureaucratic idiocy. On the other hand, I’m terrified of what will happen next. What if I can’t get a job with computers? People keep telling me it’s impossible to enter the field without a degree. I don’t want a degree. I want to go and do something useful. I want to write software and make stuff happen. I can’t bear the idea of more school.

I’m at a new building. In contrast to the Intermediate Building, the high school is a sprawling campus. There are huge windows everywhere, and the most expedient way to get someplace is usually by going outside. It feels more like an institution of learning and less like a dungeon. In keeping with our custom over the last four years, David and I hang out in the library in the mornings.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 23: Vo-Tech”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

To their delight, the other students have discovered that our history teacher can be effortlessly sidetracked. She encourages a lot of in-class discussion, and doesn’t seem to have any inclination to direct it or keep it pinned to any particular topic. Almost as soon as her lecture begins, someone sidetracks her into school gossip, celebrity gossip, movies, and other fragments of pop culture. From there it follows the logic of free association or channel surfing. Then as the class time runs out she’ll remember that she’s supposed to be teaching and assign us pages to read from the textbook.

Television network ABC produces a TV mini-series about the Soviet Union seizing control of the United States titled Amerika. (Which is obviously just a cheap attempt to take advantage of the popularity of the movie Red Dawn.) I’m not watching the series, but our teacher is, and she won’t shut up about it. She spends a good bit of the class recapping the latest episode and chattering with the other students about the characters and forming theories about what might happen next. This isn’t part of anything we’re studying, it’s just something she’s into and wants to talk about.

This is a setback for me, since I usually depend on lectures for my learning. I can’t read the pages in class, because I don’t know what pages she’ll assign. Besides, it’s too noisy for studious reading with all the chatter. I have to sit through this long gossip session between her and a few key students, and then she tells the rest of us what we’ll need to learn for on the test. So we end up doing the actual learning on our own time. What really annoys me is that the other kids sidetrack her on purpose. They think this is funny.

That’s me, kneeling. Patrick is standing. Little Ruthie is adorable.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 22: UFOs and Moldova”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

“Just make sure to do all the work, and you will pass my class.”

My heart sinks. I hate when teachers say this. It means the bulk of our grade will come from doing things, not from knowing things. It’s the first day of tenth grade, I’m sixteen years old, and I’m hearing this a lot today. Some teachers even go so far as to grade the notes we take in class. This is infuriating to me. In the past I saw school as this perfectly arbitrary trial of mysterious activities. Now I see it as a house of incompetents. Our goal is ostensibly to learn things, but the system of rewards and incentives is often completely divorced from this idea, and sometimes even runs counter to it.

If we think of grades as “pay”, then we aren’t being paid to learn. We’re being paid to turn out volumes of worthless forgettable busy work.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Autoblography Part 21: Homework”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.