Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by timr | Hacker News Reader

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"Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work?"

I don't grant your premise. There's busywork in everything, and I never found high school to be worse than anything that has come later in life. We've all got to wait in the same line at the supermarket.

When I read nerd complaints about formal education, I get the feeling that the prevailing sentiment is one of entitlement: "if I have to do anything I don't like to do, then the system is broken." Smart kids seem to have this sense of entitlement worse than many people -- probably because they're so easily bored.

Trouble is, you're always going to have to live and work with people who are slower than you are. You can skip out on high school in an attempt to avoid it, take college classes early, rush into graduate school, whatever. Eventually, however, you run smack into the wall of society, and you've got to work within its framework. The ability to persevere through busywork is an extremely valuable skill in that context.

It would be pointless for you to spend the next six weeks doing 3rd grade homework assignments. Back in 9th grade my geometry teacher graded homework assignments which I never did. The class was obvious and I got the highest grade on the midterm without studying or doing any homework. But, I still got a B because he felt busywork was important. Next year I had an English teacher who constantly gave out stupid vocabulary assignments to help our SAT scores. She saw my perfect score on the verbal section of the PSAT's that year, but she still gave me zero's on those vocab assignments.

So I learned how important busy work was without actually doing it. In life looking for ways to avoid busy work has helped my advance. Teaching people that they need to waste their time stops being useful when you start measuring people on their performance not how they got there. The real reason teachers grade easy assignments is to let people who work hard, but have no idea what there doing pass.

PS: IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives. If doing well in high school correlated with doing well in life people might start caring about their performance.

In the situations you described, there are a couple of ways to respond:

1) Do the work. It's easy, so you'll do it quickly and get a high grade. Then you can ask for more challenging work (or just do something more interesting).

2) Don't do the work. Instead, complain about the inanity of the class and the idiocy of the teacher. You'll get a bad grade, and a bad reputation, too.

There are times to recognize busywork for what it is and eliminate it (i.e. where you benefit other people by eliminating it), and times to just suck it up and do it (i.e. where you can't change it and/or don't benefit enough other people by trying). Part of the art of being successful is knowing how to discriminate between the two scenarios, and how to respond accordingly (i.e. diplomatically).

The problem with student complaints about high school curricula, is that they clearly land in category two. Your bad experience with 9th grade geometry doesn't mean that the learning 9th grade geometry is wrong -- it means that you had a bad 9th grad geometry teacher, or that you brushed him the wrong way, or some combination of the two. And in that situation, you can suck it up, and do the work you need to do to get an A, or you can complain and get a bad grade.

Life is full of these situations. Complaining about the unfairness of the situation is not the correct response.

Don't forget the most important and IMO best option: 3) Do just enough busy work to get a decent grade, and don't whine about it too much.

That's my method. If I have a 100% in CS, what's the point of doing all the pointless busywork? Just relax for a month until your grade drops to a 92%, then you have to start working a bit.

That's the first option I listed: do the work quickly, then do something else. I never said that the goal was to get perfect grades in everything; the goal is not to be a martyr in the name of improving the system.

I was in a similar situation. I took college calculus in 8th grade, and linear algebra and discrete math in 9th. I was still a high school student, though, and my high school expected me to spend ridiculous amounts of time on math I'd learned years earlier. Ditto for science, English and history. My choice was

3) Do the minimum required to stay eligible for sports as an underclassman and then drop out once I was old enough to do so legally.

I've never regretted the decision since.

"IMO busywork is why few high school valedictorians do anything interesting or meaningful with their lives."

Citation needed.

Is it really true that valedictorians perform worse than students with lower class rank, by any objective metric?

Just the first link I found on Google but: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v4/N2/ARNOLD.ht...

It's not that they do poorly but they are under represented when compared to others of similar intelligence when you look at CEO's and other top positions.

PS: Find the number of US precedents that where valedictorians in high school.

I'm sorry, I don't normally care about misspelling here and there, but it's really hard to take a post seriously when it spells "Presidents" and "were" wrong in a span of three words....

If the point of school is to teach kids to deal with the busywork of real life, why not just have kids work 30-40 hours a week? Same result, except the kids could earn real money.

Because it's obviously not the only point.

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