Post-secondary or grade school.
Not day dreaming or doodling in class, and doing homework.
Dealing with dumb people, fuck… that was awful.
Grade 12. Absolute waste of time. Like… “I taught myself HTML/JS/CSS, instead of listening” levels of a waste of time.
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.
Personally, I really liked school. Even high school. It would have been easier if I’d had more mental health resources, but I learned a ton and had a lot of freedom in terms of electives. I was taking college-level history courses as a senior in high school and absolutely ate it up.
The only nuisance was that I am a good singer and my parents forced me to skip a writing course and advanced biology my senior year because someone the chamber choir had selected instead of me decided to quit, and I wasn’t assertive enough at the time to tell my parents no when the choir director called my mom and convinced her to make me do it, so my last semester I performed with the chamber choir and absolutely fucking hated every second of it. (Though I did put my foot down on weekend travel competitions, so at least I didn’t have to give up weekends for that shit.)
My only other regret is of the time-travel variety. A former schoolmate was high up in the RNC when Trump was elected, and I wish I could go back in time and intervene somehow.
The pledge of allegiance in US schools
Art and music class in middle school. Literally useless. Fortunately, we no longer do such useless classes in high school. I pretty much lived my life through middle school without friends, so I hated the art class even more because we sometimes got grouped together to make some “art”.
Oh my God, I was so happy when we finally got art class in grade 7. It was elective, though, you didn’t have to take it. I think art and music are part of education - they are such human skills, and tech you to think in a different way.
Group projects are nonsense though, on that we agree. I hated them so much, and have no problem at all working together with people as an adult. If your grade is individual your work should be too.
I didn’t struggle academically in grade school at all, with the exception of mathematics. And by that, I just mean that I had to put in a moderate amount of effort to learn it.
But when I started college/university in a new city, I was alone, wholly unprepared, and paralyzed by severe (and untreated) anxiety, depression, and ADHD. I didn’t know how to make friends by myself. The thought of having to interact with my dorm mates would send me into a panic.
Not to mention, I was not only having a crisis of sexuality, but I also convinced myself that I was an ugly, gross loser whom no one would ever want to be with sexually or romantically. (Jesus.)
I took a break for a semester because I was very suicidal. I started therapy again/taking Zoloft—the latter of which saved my life—and went back for another semester. But I knew, even before going back, that it just wasn’t for me. It really didn’t help that I already knew college in the US is a scam.
So yeah, I ended up dropping out. I have a lot of mixed feelings about it, now.
Not getting to have “schooling”. I was “homeschooled”, in that my parents kept all 8 of us kids at home and didn’t bother to provide much in the way of education beyond reading and basic math. The lack of real education I was able to overcome, but the gross lack of any socialization has left me struggling with poor social competency to this day.
Having undiagnosed autism and parents not believing in it. I fucking hated school
I grew up in a time when autism was diagnosable, but only if you were in the extreme end of the spectrum. I don’t even know if Asperger’s was a thing.
Many, many days of my adult life I’ve wondered if I’m on the (lighter) end of the spectrum. There’s still at least a two year waiting period to find out. So many “clues” I can point to from my childhood, but they could also just be coincidences.
It was diagnosable… But my parents didn’t bother to get me diagnosed… my brother is 100x worse than me and they still deny it.
I was diagnosed a few months after school ended. Same year as well. Parent still refused to believe it.
I was diagnosed a decade after I graduated and was married. My wife suggested for me to go since she saw the signs.
Sounds like you have a caring wife, I’m happy to read this.
Yes indeed : 3
I got diagnosed at age 30. Literally nobody (except for the other autistics I know) believes it.
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.
Was bullied constantly by other people in high school. Caused a lot of trauma I’m still trying to solve…
Getting off work in time to make it to class.
Getting up on time
Well right now it’s that my prof speaks excruciatingly slow and makes sure to read the entirety of each slide of the PowerPoint.
This class is already boring. He doesn’t need to make it worse.
I’m usually just trying to stay awake.
