[numbchuckskills]

1. You aren't interested in school because you're not making your time at school interesting.

2. You are naive. Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges. Nothing that goes on there is a waste of time.

3. Start acting like a Gr. 10 student.

[lisper]

I think a very important point is in danger of being buried in glibness here:

> Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges. Nothing that goes on there is a waste of time.

Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life, and will become more so in the future as the world gets more crowded and less wealthy. There's an old aphorism: it's not what you know, it's who you know. It took me twenty years to learn the hard way that this aphorism contains more than a grain of truth. It is, in fact, the whole ballgame. If you're smart but no one can stand to work with you, you will lose. Contrariwise, if you're dim but people love you you will do fine.

So if you don't want to waste the next two years, here's a project for you: figure out a way to get 100 of your peers working on something -- anything -- together. It doesn't have to make a profit (though that would be good), it doesn't have to make the world a better place (though that would be good too), but it should not be actively destructive (that makes it too easy) and every one of those 100 people has to be doing it because they want to. They all have to be enthusiastic about it. Note that what I'm suggesting is different from becoming "popular", though becoming popular might be helpful (or it might not). You have to actually organize these people into doing some kind of productive activity. Just inviting 100 people to a beer bash doesn't count.

If you achieve that you will have just had the most useful two years of your life. Good luck.

[billybob]

"Being able to effectively interact with other people is an extremely important skill in life..."

Absolutely. High school is a great time to learn to get along with, and like, all sorts of people. You have your whole life to study and learn. But knowing how to get along with people is more important than any other skill you can learn.

Beware developing an "I'm smarter than everyone around me" attitude like most geeks have. It limits us, both in success and in happiness.

[wallflower]

> Contrariwise, if you're dim but people love you you will do fine.

Well said. I have started to meet many people who aren't super smart but they get things done because they don't paralyze themselves by analyzing why things won't work and just get things started. And by corollary, their confidence makes other people believe they can do it (even if they don't know how they will do it)

Recommended essay to ponder: "I ain't good but I got guts"

http://iggychaos.blogspot.com/2006/02/i-aint-good-but-i-got-...

[tokenadult]

figure out a way to get 100 of your peers working on something -- anything -- together.

This suggestion caught my eye. My oldest son appears to be a bit older than the submitter of this thread, now in eleventh grade. For him, "eleventh grade" has been mostly dual-enrollment studies at our state flagship university, with a seventeen-credit course load there this semester, and an additional distance learning class from the EPGY Online High School at Stanford University.

His peer collaboration project has been a website

http://impishidea.com/

about literary criticism of best-selling fantasy genre novels read by today's young people. He has gradually found a group of local and online friends who are appalled by the literary characteristics of today's best-sellers such as the Inheritance and Twilight series, and runs the website as webmaster and forum moderator, with help from a lot of his friends, to elevate the tastes of readers and to discuss better writing. Computer programming in the service of good literature is how he combines his interests.

I have utterly no idea how my son's activities will look to a college admission committee. (He should have his first admission result in about a half year's time as I type this.) And, no, he doesn't feel all day every day that he is doing just what he would like best. Part of the stress of being an adolescent is moving from dependence on the birth family to being able to independently support a family in the next generation. My son tries to keep his eye on the prize of getting to make more and more of his own decisions as he grows up.

[apsec112]

This is, to be perfectly blunt, utter nonsense of the highest degree.

- You can't make something interesting when your time is controlled minute-by-minute. If you were stuck in India for the next four years, you could find some way to make it interesting because you have freedom. You simply can't make, say, prison interesting if it's not already, because everything is so rigidly controlled.

- High school is NOT there to socialize you; it's there to keep you in one place all day so that your parents don't have to babysit you (see http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html, http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/underground/). High school society bears very little resemblance to adult societies in the real world. For one thing, you can't pack up and leave if you don't like it. For another, your friends are chosen by accidents of age and geography, and not by you. For yet another, adults (some adults, anyway) spend the day doing things; most of the work that high schoolers do is simply thrown in the garbage at the end of the year.

- High school can't possibly be a filter for anything, because everyone is forced to attend; the "filter" isn't a filter if it lets everyone (or nearly everyone) through. Prep schools are filters for colleges, but they filter based on how much money your parents make and not based on how smart you are.

- The vast, vast majority of adults, by the time they're 25, have forgotten 90% (or more) of the stuff they've supposedly "learned" in high school; it necessarily follows that most of the "learning" is a complete waste of time, as you can't possibly make use of information if you don't know what it is.

- Why in Cthulhu's name should anyone want to act like a high school student? Most high school students accomplish nothing of any importance. Most high school students will do incredibly dangerous and stupid stunts if their friends ask them to. Most high school students waste enormous amounts of time on stuff that is neither fun nor important. See http://bygpub.com/books/tg2rw/chap3excerpt.htm for more on this.

[boryas]

I think you are being too extreme here.

'For another, your friends are chosen by accidents of age and geography, and not by you.'

this seems patently false to me, you hang out with the people who energize and care about you whether you are 16 or 25...

I mean, yes it's true that high school is boring and has many flaws, but it really doesn't take up that much time, and you can get a lot out of it. Classes can be boring and stifling, but I would argue that going to college without at least calculus isn't the best idea if you plan to have a lot of time to learn all the cool math you want/need.

Also, as some previous posters mentioned, until you're kicking everyone's ass and winning math/programming competitions, I don't think it's fair to say that school is too easy

[apsec112]

"this seems patently false to me, you hang out with the people who energize and care about you whether you are 16 or 25..."

The sample of such people is MUCH smaller in high school than it is in the real world (easily five orders of magnitude smaller).

"but it really doesn't take up that much time,"

Four years full-time is a lot, especially when you're young. The average job lasts less than three years.

"but I would argue that going to college without at least calculus isn't the best idea if you plan to have a lot of time to learn all the cool math you want/need."

Agreed, but you don't need high school for calculus, and high schools usually do a terrible job of teaching it (how many people know what a derivative is five years later?)

[boryas]

I guess I have a pretty skewed view of high school because I went to a fairly good one, where at least the math/science classes were worthwhile. When I was talking about how much time it takes up, I meant on a day-to-day basis. It's something like 8:00AM to 3:00PM, and another maybe two hours for homework (max, its usually much less) and then the rest of the time is yours to play sports, do programming, read, work, etc...

All I'm saying is that though high school clearly isn't perfect, I have trouble agreeing with the apocalyptic pictures some people paint.

[pfedor]

Highschool is a mechanism to socialize you and a filter for colleges.

That's what they kept telling me. I don't believe it. I for one acquired little social skills in high school and orders of magnitude more since I started working.

I think people just can't bring themselves to admit that high school is a net loss. It is not easy to admit you've wasted many years of your life. At the same time, most intellectually honest people can't really say it with straight face any more that high school has anything to do with education. So they cling to secondary made up reasons like the one about social skills.

[kajecounterhack]

I've had the blessing of both at the same time. I've learned different things from school and work -- it all ends up shaping who you are. In a work environment, people are forced to cooperate with you. In a school environment, you are forced to cooperate with people and take initiative. Communication in a workplace is easier but you'll learn to be all-businessness. It's in school that you learn to make friendships and the art of small-talk.

I'm in 12th grade by the way, and 11th and 12th have been my biggest growth years in terms of interpersonal ability.