[dmur]

From reading the post it seems like her dad made this decision for her, which feels a bit off to me. While the school may not have been serving her needs intellectually, I can see a strong argument for sticking it out socially. Then again, if she was already isolated or had strong friendships outside of school, maybe it's not such a big deal. Would enjoy hearing Katya's side of the story.

[KatyaEames]

I will be making a blog shortly, so then you will be able to hear my side of the story c: My dad wasn't the one who forced me to do it, if anything I pushed him to let me pursue this career in a way I would never be able to do should I stay in high school. As for feeling isolated in school it wasn't so much that as I knew that only a few of my friends were really friends with me, while most were my ;friends' because I saw them five times a week. My friends fully support me in this and we plan on spending many weekends catching up. Plus, social networking is a thing so we can talk to each other from miles away. It's not as if as soon as I left high school I cut off all ties with my friends. "Nope, never mind, we aren't friends anymore cause I'm too good for school. I will now spend all my time being a social recluse and not conversing with anyone. Farewell" That'd be dumb

[VLM]

Three sort of related observations.

From what I remember, I socialized both with people I liked, and people I disliked, a lot more outside the high school building than inside during history class. During lectures and tests I usually zoned out and sometimes worked. She should be better off socially, as long as she doesn't sit on the couch and watch TV all day or whatever. (edited to clearly explain my opinion comes from kids "socializing" with kids results in little more than Lord of the Flies behavior, and hanging out in the real world instead of high school should be incredibly valuable to her)

Another observation is its highly culturally incorrect to say it, but she's missing out on the important work skill of just phoning it in and being patient while appearing to care. Sure, soon as the school bell rings, life can begin and she can boot up her computer. In the real world you're going to spend hours, maybe days, at diversity training and OSHA certs and PCI compliance and ISO9000 and the programming world for decades has been full of silver bullet dev fads that, much like the diet industry, mostly revolve around making the motivational speaker money rather than really "doing" anything. If they actually fixed anything they'd be out of a job, so you do the math there. And sometimes you'll simply have a boring pointless job, that's life. So this is the major malfunction of the plan.

For a couple centuries teens have been famous for doing crazy things, she'll probably turn out just fine even if everything does crash and burn. Its not like she's got 3 little kids and a spouse and mortgage and medical issues and elderly parents relying on her. A good way to learn how to survive and bounce back from failure, and how to avoid failure, is to fail, so weird as it sounds I hope for her future's sake she totally crashes and burns like only a teen can (metaphorically) ... she's young enough to stand back up, get dusted off and patched up (with a little parental help, probably), and learn how NOT to crash and burn when it really counts, later in life, when there's absolutely no one to rely on. Or the short version of the above is she's a teen, doing teen stuff, just like she's supposed to, at least in my opinion as old man parent.

[GolfyMcG]

I believe one of the benefits to this is that she won't learn to "phone it in." Why is it considered a skill to accept the status quo? If she is raised in and develops a life that is magnitudes more productive, perhaps she will impart that attribute on the world. Perhaps she'll start a company which doesn't accept the bureaucracy of the world as a necessity.