Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I guess I had an happy childhood and my schooling was fine. I went to a local primary school, close enough to home that I could walk to school every day (including walking back home for lunch). My mother was working part time while I was in primary school, so she could be home on most days for my lunch and when I came back from school. In 6th grade I had the option to take a special program of intensive english, but opted not to because I figured my english was already way above average for my age (I was close to bilingual then, thanks to exposure to english language media). For secondary school I followed in the footstep of my brother and went to an elite International Bachelorate affiliated magnet school. I did fairly well in my first year there, but after my grades went steadily down as I figured out I was able to just coast by with no effort. I stopped doing homework past what I was absolutely forced to, stopped studying for exams, barely paid attention in class. I'd read my textbooks and that's pretty much it. By the end I was barely passing. Teachers didn't seem to mind because I was passing, when they checked up on me it seemed as if I didn't need help and I wasn't bothering anyone. My parents were concerned by my grades, but again, I wasn't a problem child or teen in any way. I'd say my teachers were for the most part very competent. I always managed to find peer groups to hang out with; in the first year of high school with people coming from different cities and with fixed groups through every class, I ended up hanging out with a quite random group of people, but as things settled, I found myself hanging out with groups that were neither losers nor winners in the social hierarchy. It's important to note that due to this being a "gifted" kid school, the social hierarchy was a bit different; everyone was a form of nerd to begin with, even the "jocks".
Anyway, as that ended and I went to college, I quickly found that I was overprepared by that school for college, exams and classes that people from "normal" schools found tough in college were at a level I had already done in high school. This had a perverse effect in that it lowered the effort I was willing to put in even more, to the point where I wasn't showing up to classes any more, I was even missing exams and ended up just dropped out of college. Turned out that was a good decision, I managed to build myself a career out of the IT skills I had build in my free time, when I was supposed to be studying.
Our biographies sound eerily similar, I also took the IB, gave up on college, built a career partly out of programming. I tried harder in highschool though, and IT isn't quite what I do.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link