Sunday, April 19, 2009

Tim's cheating and attempts at obtaining an education.

I cheated my way through high school. Why? Because it was easy and few subjects could retain my interest for more than a semester. And if I were placed in that same educational setting, I would do it again. I would start the school year in a enthusiastic and optimistic mind set, I would finish all my home work as soon as I got home, I would study for at least 2 hours at night; but after a month of that I would get bored out of mind and would just copy someone else's work. And once that mentality set in it only got worse, copying a homework assignments and involves little effort, but that lead me to not studying and eventually skipping out on classes. I would often have to cut deals like this with my teachers; "If I pass the final with whatever grade, you'll pass me for the year", some teachers said agreed to the deal, but others dismissed my slacker initiative as a cop out for doing work, which it was. Every school year ended with me trying to learn a year's worth of material in about two weeks. Sometimes it worked, more often than not it didn't. So ended up at summer school quite often.

The actually test and retaining the information was never the problem, whatever state mandated test we had I would usually pass with no problem, it was the test that were given periodically throughout the quarter, say every two weeks that would kill me. It felt like there was never anytime to see how information I was learning was relevant or related, or at least see at it all works together. It was like bam, learn A, test, ok learn B, test; I was like "Whoa, how are A and B related or relevant to one another." I asked every teacher "Why I'm I learning this?", "When am I going to need to know about quadratic equations ever?" So high school was a bust, I graduated at some ungodly low rank, didn't even know we had a rankings system until senior year; I made a feeble attempt to move up but soon realize it was impossible and then actually moved down in the rankings, go figure. I did well on the SAT's even though the first time I took it I forgot to bring a calculator. So I got into college, some how.

Then it all clicked. When I had the opportunity to pick whatever subjects I wanted to learn, I instantly become invested in my education. It was never about trying a bunch of random classes, but about having the opportunity to say "This interest me. I want to learn more about it" and be given the opportunity to do so.

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