Post-secondary or grade school.
Math. I sucked at math since 3rd grade and that shit was a struggle all the way through college. I’m lucky i can even count, I swear to God. Had to pass THREE remedial math courses just to be allowed to take the course that counted for actual credit towards my degree. Lately I’ve been contemplating going back to college for a second degree, but I realized I’d have to take shit like pre-calculus for the degrees I’m looking at and I just don’t think I could do it. My brain is such a letdown.
Right there with you. Suffered with fractions in 4th grade, did okay from there until trig in high school (sophomore year?), then failed hard in calc 1 over the course of 5 undergrad tries. Finally got it, but damn, my brain could not handle the theoretical stuff. Maybe methods have changed in 20+ years, but that shit sits with you.
Any writing. Grammar, punctuation, and spelling were always easy, but I never knew what to write.
Also, I often skipped homework and believe that I was right to do so. Even though I’ve been out of school since 2008 and have no children, I still maintain that the school has zero right to assign anything to be done outside of school.
The hardest part for me was the way the criteria for success changed between high school and college.
I aced high school because high school requires one to be smart. But I barely scraped by in college because college requires self-organization and discipline.
Nobody really sat me down and raised the flag on how bad my habits were, before college. The message I always got was about how “gifted” I was and how the world would be my oyster because I’m so smart.
The only person really striving to teach me discipline in high school was my track and cross country coach. For that I’m eternally grateful, because it could have been a lot worse.
But most of my adult life has been spent struggling to develop consistent output, struggling to keep promises, struggling to show up consistently.
Don’t know if that’s gotten better since I was a kid, but if I could change one thing it would be to do a lot more to train kids to fit into a structure where others are relying on them to deliver things on time. To keep working when things get hard, and not to rest too heavily on being “smart” as a plan for future success.
Smart is like 1% of success. The rest is conscientiousness.
The 80km walk, in the snow and burning sun, bare feet on broken glass, uphill in both direction. - My dad
Switching from 5th grade at a little red schoolhouse, where the only homework assignments were reading and projects/presentations to 6th grade at a college prep middle/highschool with homework assignments every day.
Gym class. Why that exists in class format absolutely stumps me.
I thought so too, until i got to know someone who never had any decent physical education. It’s scary to see the lack of coordination and balance some adults can have.
Was it because of the lack of coordination or was that because of the lack of physical education? I know people like me who had that but never got anything out of it.
At the start of my freshman year, they hadn’t finished building the “new” gym, which was to be used for the gym classes, so the cheerleaders could practice in the old, big gym.
So the cheerleaders practice on one side of the old gym, and a bunch of horny teen idiots on the other. Dear God the shit they would say, unapologetic and just the worst; “i can see your pu$$y! Bitch just did the splits and left a hickey on the floor!”
Beyond “Hur dur”, this was straight up verbal assault. A few days after the worst of these comments, we were told to go to a portable classroom where we learned health crap out of a book, then i went up four flights of stairs to the actual health class.
No idea where the hell i was going with that, other than it seemed to be a way to tire us out, until the comments landed us in class, then it seemed just a way to keep us occupied until the gym teacher could follow her true, Lesbian Passion ®, girls volleyball coach.
That would happen to me just by waiting for the bus.
How dumb it all is. Seriously. The highly regimented structure of curricula and examination is a shitty way to learn. It’s optimised for making teaching and grading easier. And also teaching young people to be obedient facile production line workers.
But intellectually and academically, it always seemed obviously bad and boring to me. And I’ve since gotten to understand a number of academic topics relatively well to know how true this is. Proper understanding, intellectually, and skill in application, are things that are far more organic and purpose driven than the shitty curricula that pencil pushing educators spit out as though the human mind were an excel spread sheet.
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Two people in my immediate family tried nursing school. One basically finished it, then didn’t want to take the cert exam. The other one has dropped out twice. I’ve heard the stories of how brutal it can be.
In nursing school right now. Pleased to say I’m having the opposite experience - I’m the guy that’s always asking questions, running study groups, and debating the prof after tests to try to get questions thrown out and boost everyone’s grade. So… pretty much everyone in the program, student and staff, knew my name and face from day 1… and I’ve had an awesome relationship so far with all of them.
It’s been difficult, but very gratifying and at times even fun.
Your instructors were shit.
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They have a great relationship with the other students too, most of which are women. They’re legit decent people - I’m pretty happy with this program.
I do see sexism at work though - I’m a surgical tech, and I’ve noticed a lot of docs are WAY more forgiving to my fuckups than to my female peers. It’s so fucking awkward to be on the receiving end of favoritism. …and yeah, anytime something needs to be lifted, I’m the mule by default.
Foreign languages. Never got a handle on it.
Now, with Google Translate and AI I don’t have to!
Sitting still and not being bored senseless. I was a hyperactive kid with adhd, having to sit anywhere for more than 10 minutes was the bane of my existence.
I don’t think my adhd ever came out as restlessness.
I always tried really hard to keep track of what was going on but the dumbest thing would cause me to zone out . When I was done zoning out I was so lost that I would just give up and continue daydreaming.
I don’t know if my energy levels had anything to do with adhd or if it was just a unrelated companion, but I’ve always been that way. Sugar was banned in my house I think because my mother thought I’d implode if I got my mitts on any. I couldn’t even sit long enough to watch a whole movie from start to finish until I was in my 30’s.
Adhd didn’t exist back then.
Lucky you
I loved math and was good at it until we got to integrals. I could do algebra, geometry, trigonometry, probability, and derivates…and loved all of them. But my brain went splat against integrals.
I barely passed Calculus levels 3 and 4. Honestly, I should have failed them. The professor wasn’t very good, he knew this, and he took pity on me. But it was ultimately my own fault.
It was kind of humiliating. I’d always done really well at math, and even tutored other students. Then I just hit a fucking wall with integrals. At that point, I fully understood how other students who struggled with math had felt all along. I had been empathetic to them. But now I suddenly knew what it was like.
I sometimes wonder if a virus or some other unknown medical situation broke that part of my brain. It kind of felt like it. Or maybe it was just beyond my natural abilities, period.
I never understood integrals either! I don’t know if we covered it in a math class in high school but I got to college and took physics and encountered it. I was like “What in the fuck is this shit?!” I take that back. I think I did encounter it briefly in high school physics but the teacher was like, “don’t worry if you don’t get it right now, you’ll figure it out.” My fucking ass! That was college physics from like week 2!!!
I tried to figure it out from the text book and that didn’t work. I went and bought a math book to try to figure it out, that obviously didn’t work. This was before YouTube and the internet getting big on any kind of instruction so it was just like," well fuck me I guess I’ll fail."
What I should have done was gone to the teacher for help. They always said their hours when they were open but I never thought they would have time for me. I know better now. They would have been happy to help me but ignorance and probably low self esteem and all.
Still don’t understand that integral shit. I eventually went back to school but become an English major instead of that shit.
I hate it, because I like reading and watching videos about physics…but when they throw formulas up there I can’t read them. I can read music. I can read code. But I can’t read advanced math.
I hated school as a kid and went back as an adult. The experience is a whole other level and actually really nice.
Not being able to take a “mental health” day off, in both high school and college. In high school my parents wouldn’t let me (though I don’t fault them for that), and in college it was hard to keep up if I even missed one lecture. As an adult with a job , if I need a day to decompress, I can decide to take off tomorrow and nobody can tell me no. In school it was hard to keep on going with the tank on empty.
I found school incredibly inefficient. There were subjects in which I did so well that the standard curriculum left me feeling uninspired and bored because I wasn’t being challenged enough. In other subjects, the class moved too fast and I got left behind.
Also, physical education was often neglected in secondary and post-secondary in favor of more academic subjects. Given the cardiovascular disease epidemic, I think that was a mistake. How can you have a healthy mind without a healthy body?
