When I was in school my aim was to learn as much as I could while still getting decent grades. I sacrificed perfect grades in my pursuit of learning.
Now I recognize I have an unusually high curiosity, but back then I found it bizarrely Orwellian how much emphasis my classmates put on grades. I didn’t mind that they weren’t at school to learn. I hated how school got in the way of my actual learning because it was designed with the assumption that students aren’t there to learn. I’ve always had a hard time communicating this frustration.
If you merely read good books on medieval history, most of the stuff you learned wouldn’t be on the test. It’s not good books you want to read, but the lecture notes and assigned reading in this class.
This explains why I did worst at the broadest subjects like foreign languages. I prefer to learn this way but going to school forced me to read the assigned reading over the most educational material. I enjoyed my degree in physics and mathematics because the good books finally converged with the assigned reading.
In some classes, your professor will have had some sort of political axe to grind, and if so you’ll have to grind it too. The need for this varies. In classes in math or the hard sciences or engineering it’s rarely necessary, but at the other end of the spectrum there are classes where you couldn’t get a good grade without it.
This is why I took as few liberal arts classes as I could in college. I got marked down in a philosophy paper for endorsing the idea that ancient philosophers’ ought to test their claims against experiment and real-world evidence.
I liked learning, and I really enjoyed some of the papers and programs I wrote in college. But did I ever, after turning in a paper in some class, sit down and write another just for fun?
It was years after graduating college before I could write for fun. I didn’t even write essays in college. This was damage from high school.
If the final exam consisted of a long conversation with the professor, you could prepare for it by reading good books on medieval history. A lot of the hackability of tests in schools is due to the fact that the same test has to be given to large numbers of students.
This essay hits close to home. It feels personal.
When I was in school my aim was to learn as much as I could while still getting decent grades. I sacrificed perfect grades in my pursuit of learning.
Now I recognize I have an unusually high curiosity, but back then I found it bizarrely Orwellian how much emphasis my classmates put on grades. I didn’t mind that they weren’t at school to learn. I hated how school got in the way of my actual learning because it was designed with the assumption that students aren’t there to learn. I’ve always had a hard time communicating this frustration.
This explains why I did worst at the broadest subjects like foreign languages. I prefer to learn this way but going to school forced me to read the assigned reading over the most educational material. I enjoyed my degree in physics and mathematics because the good books finally converged with the assigned reading.
This is why I took as few liberal arts classes as I could in college. I got marked down in a philosophy paper for endorsing the idea that ancient philosophers’ ought to test their claims against experiment and real-world evidence.
It was years after graduating college before I could write for fun. I didn’t even write essays in college. This was damage from high school.
I think this is insightful and generalizable.