commotiocordis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
commotiocordis) wrote2006-09-06 12:46 am
commotiocordis) wrote2006-09-06 12:46 am
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(no subject)
I've been seriously considering graduating early. (Actually, what I really was considering was dropping out of standard schooling and just doing it all myself, but I realized that if I wait until after the end of the Christmas semester, I could actually just graduate.) Before, I didn't even think about it. But the reason I was staying was pretty much to get the IB diploma, which I've since realized that I have virtually no chance of getting, as I'd have to postpone taking at least two of the tests for classes I'm taking this year until the end of next year, one of them being history, which is not my forte.
I always have these 'I hate school' things early in the year, but never before have I felt that the actual schooling was just getting in the way of doing the homework that we've been assigned. Nobody's really teaching anything, it's just homework, which I'd rather they just emailed to me or something and didn't waste my time sitting in class.
I've always been somewhat of a non-traditional student, and for some reason this year the schooling system is really clashing with me.
I've become disillusioned with the whole thing. No one believes that a student can be intrinsically motivated to learn anymore, and those of us that actually are motivated as such are getting taught out of it and/or screwed over. Example: my grades aren't the best, mostly because I tend not to care about them. I learn what I need to learn, and once I've got it, I'm not going to do the extra homework. I know the material just as well as the person who's getting an A, but I'm only getting a B or B- because I don't believe in forcing myself through the extra busywork. (I know that I really need to, but a lot of it is a 'when am I ever going to use this' thing, and some of it is the fact that I'm taking all 7 hours filled with AP and IB classes, and if I tried to do everything for every class, I'd burn out even faster than I do with my system now.) And because of this, people a lot less smart than I am are going to get into better colleges, even though I beat their SAT scores when I took the test in 7th grade.
I really wish I could just take classes with no thought to what kind of grade I need to get, because I think I'd enjoy them a lot more. Because even though I 'don't care about grades', I have been trained to do so, and as such have the same anxiety as anybody else over them. And probably worse, as I'm basically in this program in my city for the exceptionally gifted (their phrase, not mine), and everybody expects these PEGS kids to get straight As because they're freaking geniuses, and then they look at me over here, and I'm not doing the work (because as I did all last year, I can look at the book for 5 minutes before a math test and learn it all, usually without doing any examples or anything) and I feel like everybody's measuring me up to them when I'm not the perfectionists that they all are (actually, I'm what I consider to be the worse kind of perfectionist: the procrastination kind. I leave everything to the last minute so that in case I don't do well, I can blame it on the fact that I had only 45 minutes of sleep or I started it at 3am the night before. It's a fear of failure thing, one which bites me in the ass more often than not.), and I have a different learning style than most of them. So basically, though I'm probably quite a bit smarter than some of them, I do worse in school, which makes me look not as smart.
Anyway. Nobody's going to read all the way through this anyway, it was really just me bitching about why I don't do well in school. Coming up next, me bitching about the first episode of House.
I always have these 'I hate school' things early in the year, but never before have I felt that the actual schooling was just getting in the way of doing the homework that we've been assigned. Nobody's really teaching anything, it's just homework, which I'd rather they just emailed to me or something and didn't waste my time sitting in class.
I've always been somewhat of a non-traditional student, and for some reason this year the schooling system is really clashing with me.
I've become disillusioned with the whole thing. No one believes that a student can be intrinsically motivated to learn anymore, and those of us that actually are motivated as such are getting taught out of it and/or screwed over. Example: my grades aren't the best, mostly because I tend not to care about them. I learn what I need to learn, and once I've got it, I'm not going to do the extra homework. I know the material just as well as the person who's getting an A, but I'm only getting a B or B- because I don't believe in forcing myself through the extra busywork. (I know that I really need to, but a lot of it is a 'when am I ever going to use this' thing, and some of it is the fact that I'm taking all 7 hours filled with AP and IB classes, and if I tried to do everything for every class, I'd burn out even faster than I do with my system now.) And because of this, people a lot less smart than I am are going to get into better colleges, even though I beat their SAT scores when I took the test in 7th grade.
I really wish I could just take classes with no thought to what kind of grade I need to get, because I think I'd enjoy them a lot more. Because even though I 'don't care about grades', I have been trained to do so, and as such have the same anxiety as anybody else over them. And probably worse, as I'm basically in this program in my city for the exceptionally gifted (their phrase, not mine), and everybody expects these PEGS kids to get straight As because they're freaking geniuses, and then they look at me over here, and I'm not doing the work (because as I did all last year, I can look at the book for 5 minutes before a math test and learn it all, usually without doing any examples or anything) and I feel like everybody's measuring me up to them when I'm not the perfectionists that they all are (actually, I'm what I consider to be the worse kind of perfectionist: the procrastination kind. I leave everything to the last minute so that in case I don't do well, I can blame it on the fact that I had only 45 minutes of sleep or I started it at 3am the night before. It's a fear of failure thing, one which bites me in the ass more often than not.), and I have a different learning style than most of them. So basically, though I'm probably quite a bit smarter than some of them, I do worse in school, which makes me look not as smart.
Anyway. Nobody's going to read all the way through this anyway, it was really just me bitching about why I don't do well in school. Coming up next, me bitching about the first episode of House.
no subject
The problem with grades is they don't reflect learning, they reflect your compliance. You get a good grade if you do everything the teacher tells you to do. Part of what the teacher tells you to do is learn, so good grades require you to have learned. But just because you learned something doesn't give you a good grade, because there are a lot of other things that you have to do, like pointless homework.
So many of the most intelligent schooled people I know get bad grades because they don't care about homework. The others don't care about homework, but do it anyway, and it drives them nuts.