Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.
I almost failed the high school entry exams because I dedicated more time to soldering electronic devices and programming computers rather than writing essays about Polish literature or memorizing dates of historical battles. Same thing with the final high school exams - it was a really close call. I felt like they gave me good scores on non-STEM subjects just because I already won some prizes in electronics / physics olympiads and brought some fame to the school, so kida got away with that but... it was stressful anyways.
Man, you just triggered me. This was also me in school.
I even have a huge interest in history, but I remember my first history exam on World War 1. I was ready to answer questions on its causes, the people, how industrial war changed the nature of fighting, the new countries that formed after the war... First Question: What was the date the Serbian nationalist Gavrillo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Second Question: What was the dates each country declared war...
It also took me years to actually sit down and read JRR Tolkien as we read the Hobbit as a class book in grade 8. First question for the test: List the names of the 13 dwarves that attended the party at Bilbo's house (1 point each for a test out of 30 IIRC).
Holy crap - I have read the Hobbit many times (and LoTR a few less) and I would never have taken the time to commit 13-character names to memory - most of them simply were not that memorable.
The rhyming sets are a bit of a crutch, at least (Fili + Kili, Óin + Glóin, Bifur + Bofur + Bombur, etc). But you're right - most of the dwarves are individually forgettable. Only two are substantially characterized - Thorin the leader, and Bombur the comically fat.
Heh - exactly - the only truly easy character name that has always stuck in my mind was from "Snow Crash", I mean - who can forget "Hiro Protagonist"...?
But doesn't your global liberal democratic society want you to be trained and proficient in productive tasks which might only appear boring through a superficial lens or perspective? Or is this world's education entirely motivated by the selfish desire for pleasure and leisure? Rather than being founded to serve hard work ethic principles and effective programs that maybe can help build decent societies?
It's true, and okay, that the academia grind is only for a subset of us. It is not the only meaningful path! I went on to gradschool by rote, and I do not push it on my high-school students or anyone else. It took me about 40 years to find a sense of purpose (having a child was the catalyst).
Sadly, the push for STEM seems motivated by capitalists wanting further control of valuable labor, so I'm really chuffed by Bryan's Show HN post- even though open-source can be leveraged by capital, it doesn't have to be. It is a non-walled-garden model, and an example of what we can do collectively. Even if the Linux kernel is largely funded by corporations, it doesn't have to be.
A concern is that a laptop is still not something my community can make with the local resources, and thus the exploitation of land, labor, and money continues.
> Unless they are forced to learn things that are uninteresting to them.
This really resonates with me. I love math now, but absolutely loathed it in high school. The curriculum lacked any sort of way to apply math to real problems. I simply cannot learn things in the abstract like that. It's like learning a programming language without ever building a program.
Same. I stopped "caring" about math when we started to learn polynomials. Binomials..ok. Trinomials...ok. But then it just became repetitive when the class was just adding more terms to the functions that over the semester I ended up spending most of the class daydreaming.
I disagree; I did similar projects like this in high school (not exactly like this; his is a true achievement). I did very well grade-wise and had a high GPA but I bombed the SAT because I didn’t understand that you didn’t lose the same number of points for questions you skipped. So the ones I didn’t have time to answer I just randomly selected, which resulted in a poor score.
I found out later:
1. How SAT scoring works
2. That you shouldn’t take the last SAT of the year since then you cannot retake it
3. I probably should’ve taken the ACT instead
I wish they’d prepared us in school for this, but they were too busy training us for standardized state testing since that determined their own budget.
Could I have gotten into MIT? Unsure; back at 18 I didn’t know MIT existed and this was early Internet times. It would have been nice if my high school mentioned it as an option.
In my case at least, doing projects like this and getting good grades didn’t automatically turn into attending any college I wanted. Either way, I ended up with a great career.
Anyways, kudos to the person who made this project!
Thankfully, the SAT no longer deducts points for wrong answers. But I agree, there's a big difference between testing and doing really great work.
I'm somewhat on the other end of this, where I excelled in school, graduated valedictorian, but didn't gain any meaningful experience with projects and such and had poor leadership skills all around.
I’ve known few exemplars like this one. But at least 2. One made a flight simulator for 737 in the backyard that was used regularly by airline pilots to train. The other made a complete discrete FM stereo transmitter, mounted his own radio later. He was 16, and it was the early 90. So all from books.
Both guys brutally failed in the first year in the University. They dis not like theory, they wanted to make.
Unless you aren't fit for traditional academic learning models.
I spent most of my young adulthood working on projects (not nearly as insanely technical as this! but) similar to this. But I dropped out of high school, didn't go to college, because none of them would teach me in a way, or a pace, that fit my learning disability or mental models. Luckily I had the drive to teach myself, and built a successful two-decade career, despite my parents and teachers telling me I'd fail and become homeless.
High school kids have insane potential, and can achieve truly amazing things. But often people disregard them and don't set them up for success. So many companies could hire really great engineers, even from high school, if they could just find the motivated ones and put them in a mentorship/apprenticeship program that aligned with their interests and ways of learning.
You really don’t want to see my pre-university grades.
I was on a mission, and I can’t do two things at once. So school was about efficiency. I got great grades wherever that took low effort. That only went so far.
After graduation, nowhere I wanted to be would have looked at me.
It took me a couple years after high school to find the right university, but my personal projects paid off.
Looking back, it was a gamble. But you don’t really choose those kinds of paths.
I dunno. I only succeeded as a kid academically because of literally my IQ not because I had grit learnt from my projects. I pathologically hated being told what to do so the determination to do my own projects did not translate into anything assigned to me.
Going from how many gifted children end up underperforming because they are made to do stupid things & then getting labeled as difficult or slow: a lot more then you'd think.
Being talented and gifted is generally not appreciated, not even in academia. Many of the most talented people never finish their education because academia is more about playing the game & having the grit (or lack of backbone?) to deal with the bullshit and do what you are told.
And tbf, the best engineers I know are not necessarily the most talented ones, but those that developed the grit to push through the bs.
