[pkolaczk]

Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them. I almost failed the high school entry exams because I dedicated more time to soldering electronic devices and programming computers rather than writing essays about Polish literature or memorizing dates of historical battles. Same thing with the final high school exams - it was a really close call. I felt like they gave me good scores on non-STEM subjects just because I already won some prizes in electronics / physics olympiads and brought some fame to the school, so kida got away with that but... it was stressful anyways.

[hylaride]

Man, you just triggered me. This was also me in school.

I even have a huge interest in history, but I remember my first history exam on World War 1. I was ready to answer questions on its causes, the people, how industrial war changed the nature of fighting, the new countries that formed after the war... First Question: What was the date the Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Second Question: What was the dates each country declared war...

It also took me years to actually sit down and read JRR Tolkien as we read the Hobbit as a class book in grade 8. First question for the test: List the names of the 13 dwarves that attended the party at Bilbo's house (1 point each for a test out of 30 IIRC).

[jjkaczor]

Holy crap - I have read the Hobbit many times (and LoTR a few less) and I would never have taken the time to commit 13-character names to memory - most of them simply were not that memorable.

[duskwuff]

The rhyming sets are a bit of a crutch, at least (Fili + Kili, Óin + Glóin, Bifur + Bofur + Bombur, etc). But you're right - most of the dwarves are individually forgettable. Only two are substantially characterized - Thorin the leader, and Bombur the comically fat.

[jjkaczor]

Heh - exactly - the only truly easy character name that has always stuck in my mind was from "Snow Crash", I mean - who can forget "Hiro Protagonist"...?

[DaSHacka]

You hit it right on the head, I think.

Even at my own university, I struggle to maintain a 3.0 GPA while at the same time actively tutoring students for the very courses I'm failing.

The issue isn't knowledge or competency, it's a mix of work ethic and tolerance for menial busywork.

I think some of us just aren't made for the academia grind...

[meristohm]

It's true, and okay, that the academia grind is only for a subset of us. It is not the only meaningful path! I went on to gradschool by rote, and I do not push it on my high-school students or anyone else. It took me about 40 years to find a sense of purpose (having a child was the catalyst). Sadly, the push for STEM seems motivated by capitalists wanting further control of valuable labor, so I'm really chuffed by Bryan's Show HN post- even though open-source can be leveraged by capital, it doesn't have to be. It is a non-walled-garden model, and an example of what we can do collectively. Even if the Linux kernel is largely funded by corporations, it doesn't have to be.

A concern is that a laptop is still not something my community can make with the local resources, and thus the exploitation of land, labor, and money continues.

What would a fair-trade laptop cost?

[H1Supreme]

> Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.

This really resonates with me. I love math now, but absolutely loathed it in high school. The curriculum lacked any sort of way to apply math to real problems. I simply cannot learn things in the abstract like that. It's like learning a programming language without ever building a program.

[hylaride]

Same. I stopped "caring" about math when we started to learn polynomials. Binomials..ok. Trinomials...ok. But then it just became repetitive when the class was just adding more terms to the functions that over the semester I ended up spending most of the class daydreaming.