What did you guys think of your mandatory school years?
I got two answers, both about how two HN:ers viewed their mandatory school years. These things are really interesting, especially since I think most people here can identify with these people. I sure can.
I always felt that I didn't learn anything in school. But that is not true, I learned things when I had an intrinsical drive to learn those things. As a kid, I wanted to become an inventor, and I was really interested in science and watched the science program (it was on once a week here in Sweden) with my dad. When they aired the BBC documentary about dinosaurs I was really thrilled. My relatives taped them for me so I could watch them again, I watched them many times. I also liked tinkering with my computer (that had no internet connection, I used my mom's computer to go online). I started out learning how to modify your background and screensaver, then I quickly learned all the advanced features in the control panel and liked playing around with them. I picked up a (really crappy) book about HTML from the library and I was soon creating really crappy websites and hosting them on free hosting sites. I really impressed some people my age when I managed to modify the high score in a game we all enjoyed by finding the file it read the data from. Anyway, that is what I managed to do on my own, and I'm sure you guys have similar stories. At the same time I wasted time in school learning essentially nothing. In my Math classes in mandatory school I didn't even have book, a friend had lost his, so borrowed my book. I literally slept through my classes (I used to stay up late at night and sleep in the boring classes (ages 13-16), sometimes I slept in the school basement when I didn't have a class). I mean, I did NOTHING in my math class, and still passed it and even got a VG+ (B in the American System), I could've done better just spending my time at home. Do you guys have similar experiences? Please tell me about them.