When I was in HS I recognized it as a waste. I didn't really learn much. The people around me didn't care and it mostly felt like day care. It all was mostly busy work. The only way to get a "challenging" education was to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as joining Key Club, marching band, AP everything, extracurricular this and that, all of it just a way of padding a college resume. Now those are things you will never use in real life. I did not want any of that.
So I dropped out early and went straight to college. No one cares what you did in high school. No one ever asks.
I don't know what kind of HS teaches about Keats but It did not appear in my enriched English classes (between normal and honors); 5 paragraph essays did, though. The few highlights of high school were the calculus class I had to fight tooth and nail to get into and of course programming. But I didn't just want to learn more about programming I also wanted to learn more about automata, AI, security and so on.
I also do appreciate the finer arts. I went to New Mexico Tech and learned a great deal of engineering but also humanities. It was only then that it was presented in a rigorus manner. What do you think will appeal to "nerds" like us? Memorizing a list of kings and dates? Or learning about the strategics and logistics of geo-politics?
As for your "life is full of hardships" quip, as if that tells me anything, that's a great story. It really is.
You're talking to someone who not only went to a public high school (and not a particularly great one), but had to fight to take college courses, as well as the few AP classes the school offered. I was just as bored as you writing five-paragraph essays; I winced my way through such winning courses as "Home Economics" and "Typing", as well as a chemistry class where everything was taught as a fact to be memorized, without context or theory. When I went to college, I was convinced that I hated biology, because in high school it had been taught as a simple matter of memorizing nomenclature (I went on to get PhD in biochemistry, so I guess I was wrong about that).
So yeah, high school sucked for me sometimes, too. But I think the difference is this:
"The only way to get a "challenging" education was to jump through a bunch of hoops, such as joining Key Club, marching band, AP everything, extracurricular this and that, all of it just a way of padding a college resume."
Ya know what? I did a lot of that stuff because I enjoyed it. I didn't pad my resume by playing in the band; I absolutely loved to play (still do). And I took the AP classes because I learned more. I'll give you that Key Club kind of sucked, but then again, I never really joined -- I was too busy with the debate team and the newspaper. And my knowledge of Keats? Occasionally useful on trivia nights down at the bar.
You can see these things as hoops, or you can see them as opportunities. I'd rather know the guy who does the latter.
I guess then you are one of the few who liked things like debate team, key club, the school newspaper, or other clubs. I didn't. I would wager that a large number of people don't, either. Yet we're forced to sit through it and be told that if we don't like it we are being arrogant or that it is bad.
I'm sorry if I just can't see the value of spending hours and hours of my youth putting together the school newspaper that no one reads, or the joys of blowing on an instrument that no one likes listening to but if you do, that's fantastic. I don't think you're bad or different for liking them.
But I don't like them or cared to spend time on them. And that doesn't make me a bad arrogant person. It just means I had different goals.
I kind of wish I would have tried theater or band in High School, just for the experience and interaction with other people. Just to do something I normally wouldn't.
Typing was a pretty important course for me. It's painful watching those around me who can't touch type. Though, I'm guessing in this IM world, most kids today don't even have to take a Touch Typing course - they learn it through osmosis. But, back in the day - Knowing how to type was invaluable.
Though, I must admit, we really could have skipped the day of learning how to fold a formal letter in three folds, what the platen was, the carriage shift, etc...
'I winced my way through such winning courses as "Home Economics" and "Typing"'
Others have already addressed Typing, including the Mighty Steve Yegge, so I won't dwell on that.
Home Economics just requires the right attitude. Like me and my friends would move everything from one drawer to another when the teacher wasn't looking, just to mess with her head. We would experiment and sneak ingredients into dishes that the recipe did not call for. We would beg for the right to make the Kool Aid (insert Steve Jobs joke here). The teacher was mostly a good sport, maybe because we were a bunch of guys being good sports about taking in a Home Ec class and having fun with it (in our admittedly immature way) instead of whining and complaining about it.
So I dropped out early and went straight to college. No one cares what you did in high school. No one ever asks.
I don't know what kind of HS teaches about Keats but It did not appear in my enriched English classes (between normal and honors); 5 paragraph essays did, though. The few highlights of high school were the calculus class I had to fight tooth and nail to get into and of course programming. But I didn't just want to learn more about programming I also wanted to learn more about automata, AI, security and so on.
I also do appreciate the finer arts. I went to New Mexico Tech and learned a great deal of engineering but also humanities. It was only then that it was presented in a rigorus manner. What do you think will appeal to "nerds" like us? Memorizing a list of kings and dates? Or learning about the strategics and logistics of geo-politics?
As for your "life is full of hardships" quip, as if that tells me anything, that's a great story. It really is.