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Comment by johnold | Hacker News Reader

As a high school teacher(14-18 year olds) who actually spends a lot of time trying to interact with students and get to know them, I keep hearing this kind of statement:

There is no room for mistakes.

Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…

And then you combine this with many adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you? Just work harder, or just not caring about their mental health.

They see this never ending cycle of

turn the assignments in and then go to sports practice(where again the competition is at such a high level) and also, get a job, because they want or need money.

Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Something has to give.

This is really disturbing to me.

How are they doing living up to this? Many are living up to it but the cost is substantial, and the others that have no hope of being this are giving up.

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I'm a senior in university now, but it did really feel like this when I was in high-school. And it still feels like this in university, though I'm now much more capable of reasoning of whether it's true or if I just feel that it's true.

I think this is a consistent theme throughout the entirety of the United States. There's so little leeway. Fail a class -> you might have to go into an extra 20k of debt. Lose your job -> Homeless, foodless, insuranceless.

Something will eventually give.

Flunking out today doesn't mean being drafted into the Army. That may come back, especially in Europe. It's shaping up to be a long war.

Flunking out wouldn't mean getting drafted into the army in the US anyway, the waiting list to join has been setting records for a few years now[0]

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/us-army-waiting-list-record-...

It's even worse if you look at what types of recruits they target https://newrepublic.com/article/156131/military-views-poor-k... (https://archive.ph/9lYDQ) (2020)

> This week, Anthony Clark, an Air Force veteran and Democratic congressional candidate in Illinois, noted how deeply embedded this trend is in American military service, detailing how he, his brother, father, and grandfather were all drafted or enlisted because “poverty is the draft.”

Flunking out of college did mean getting drafted during the Vietnam and Korea wars.

...which were 50+ years ago. Much of the world was very different back then.

In some ways the world is very much the same; just more of it.

(2010)

I don’t see any evidence it’s shaping up to be a long war. Russia has effectively abandoned their western front. They’re focusing on the east and somewhat the south.

The Russian army’s performance has been pathetic and wouldn’t last long at all vs. nato. Nukes are a thing, but not a long war thing.

they likely achieve their goals though, taking the east and crippling the country to a point it's not extremely relevant

there's the whole 'western unity' thing but it won't last very long and doesn't severely change the equation

> they likely achieve their goals though

Ah yes, massive equipment and personnel losses, reminding the world that Putin is a flagrant liar, spurring movement off national gas, and making clear exactly how formidable the Russian military isn't. All while not actually taking strategic points in the east one month in.

Really nailed it.

Unfortunately Russia can just launch rockets and shells from within their own borders and completely level Ukrainian cities... Even if they lose most of their army they still can 'win' by using tactics no other nation would deem acceptable. And that's likely what they'll do as long as they feel the west won't directly intervene.

The Ukranians can fire back? Such as at Belgorod? Besides, even rocket artillery range is only about 30km. Kyiv is now out of range of everything except airstrikes, and Russian air power is of limited effectiveness as they never achieved air superiority.

It is quite possible the Ukranians will retake everything taken in the recent offensive. The question is then whether they will also attempt to retake Donetsk, Luhansk, and Crimea.

It probably will be a long war if they do.

Why stop at reclaiming former Ukrainian areas defined post USSR collapse?

It would be beneficial to the world to see a Novo Ukraine, a wealthy country committed to peace and modeled with a federalist system, taught by the mobocratic failures of the last 30 years, stretching from eastern Europe to Siberia.

Belgorod was a helicopter strike. Very much at the location.

Otherwise yeah. Kyiv is fine short of a nuclear strike.

This isn't true. There is evidence they are regrouping and the approval rating of Putin in Russia is increasing.

There is no evidence they are regrouping. There is strong evidence of vehicles being trained back out of Ukraine via Belorussian rail. To attack kyiv again would be starting from scratch.

Putin’s approval rating is irrelevant.

Russia has managed to lose the battle of kyiv, and among other blundering failures, has repeatedly failed to establish air superiority. The extent to which they would be utterly slaughtered given actual western air support is hard to exaggerate.

At least to the extent of arbitrary Europeans needing to worry about a draft.

>the approval rating of Putin in Russia is increasing

If you lived in Russia would you give an honest answer to those running the polls not knowing if they would report you to the government?

Lol, in Canada it will soon be illegal to give an honest opinion of our own government.

There are homeless shelters and food stamps.

You haven't every been poor in the US have you? If you had then you would know that those services aren't the best and border on the useless.

you know those two are mostly incompatible? snap won't get you ready to eat food and homeless shelters won't give you access to a kitchen.

just as like, a small minor indicator of how poorly you understand these systems and how cruel suggesting this is in that context.

I mean, all these things are true. The middle class is disappearing, and society is quickly bifurcating into a few haves and the rest have-nots. When I was a kid, you could get B’s or C’s and have a good job after high school. Now you’re competing with the smartest of the ~50M other kids your age globally for one of the few tickets out of poverty. And you can bet if you miss that one homework assignment or get that one B, you’re way behind the kids who are doing everything to 100% perfection. I can understand how it is a pressure cooker of stress!

Skilled labor jobs or military service are a great option for people who didn't get excellent grades in high school but are willing to work hard to get a ticket out of poverty. Unfortunately, many educators and parents don't promote those career paths as much as they should.

https://jobs.mikeroweworks.org/

globalization doing it's thing, equalizing to the mean.

> Students cannot miss a homework assignment, fail an exam, not achieve an A, make any kind of faux pax on social media, etc…

As someone close to a high school student, I’m actually surprised how much “make up” is allowed. All missed assignments can be done any time during a semester for no penalty. Two exams can be retaken for a max grade of 80.

When I was in high school there were no retakes at all.

+1. My oldest is in high school now and even in her honors classes there's the ability to turn on some things late and even some re-takes are allowed.

I don't know where these ZERO mistakes-type of mentality is coming from.

These are honors and ap classes. There’s also unlimited turins for higher grades. Each class is 20-50% assignments so if you just turn in your homework you’re kind of guaranteed a B.

I think this is because of hyper competitive college prep where everyone wants to get straight As.

Back in the day, getting a C was fine but getting an A was really hard, most students got Bs or Cs.

Now, getting an A isn’t so hard but a C is seen as a terrible, because most students are getting As.

Lots of schools have policies like yours but they’re not removing the pressure, they’re just shifting what’s “acceptable”. Sometimes they actually make it worse because now near-perfect scores are the norm, and if you mess up there’s no way to do extra somewhere else to bring you back to average.

There were none of these when I was in high school only a few years ago, and they still aren't a thing from the high schoolers I know.

The system is still the same - every day you miss the assignment is one fewer grade, except for some, where you automatically get zero. You cannot retake an exam without cause.

It's just selection bias.

not my experience... is this a board/school policy or a specific teacher?

never seen teaches let exams be retaken

I think it's more common than you would expect. It's a configurable option in many online learning solutions (Canvas, BlackBoard). InQuisitive allows you to keep answering questions until you reach 100% grade, and often represent 10%-30% of a course's entire grade.

Most of my school's core subjects allow retakes for a limited grade (not in AP classes though). Just one data point fwiw

It seems the district or at least the school because it’s every class and was similar in middle school.

It's because, fundamentally, the middle class is shrinking. The barrier for staying in the middle class is getting higher and higher every day. And this is happening before our eyes at a rapid pace over the last 10-20 years.

Who knows what will happen. I think the mass control of people has basically been perfected, so revolution feels really unlikely. Instead we'll see a police state and quality of life continues to go down for the plebs. Throw global warming on top of that and I think 50 years from now is going to be a pretty dire time. Better get that job at Evil Corp.

That's the super high achieving group. I saw that some decades back when I kept a horse at the barn on the Stanford campus and met some of the local teens. These were kids with very high powered parents, and were pressured to keep up. These teens knew the ones who committed suicide at Gunn and Paly high schools.[1]

Notes from then:

- Saw a group of high-schoolers discussing grades. Asked "What's considered a good grade point average today?" Reply, in a bleak voice, "4.5".

- Teen shows up at the barn with her arm in a sling. Asked "What happened, did you get dumped?" (Meaning, off a horse.) "No, I fell off the cheerleader pyramid. And now I'm letting the swim team down."

- One of the less bright ones, worried that she can't keep up, saying how hard it was. "Less bright" here means "can't get into Stanford/Harvard, will do fine at a lower tier college.

This is real, but it's not the typical teen experience.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/12/the-sil...

> adults in their lives telling them, I got into UCLA, why can’t you

Not just adults. This is a difference even compared to students who graduated in 2019, which would include siblings and other near-peers. We're in the middle of the college selection process for the HS class of 2022 right now. Many colleges are getting record numbers of applications, because of all the deferrals and transfers from the last two years. That intensifies the competition for this year's kids, leading to a lot of waitlisting and outright denials even from schools that would have been fairly safe bets any other year. Just about every kid has had to lower their sights an extra notch, and some who didn't apply to enough safeties are facing unexpected gap years.

> Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Some aren't? Between extracurriculars and homework loads for the more advanced classes, any kid who hopes to get into a first- or even second-tier college doesn't have much time to socialize or play games etc. any earlier.

Don't forget affirmative action (sorry, reverse racism). If you are Asian (or for some schools, male), the standards are substantially higher than if you are black or Latino.

I know if I ever have kids, I'm probably going to tell them it's okay to even drop out of high school.

None of it really matters, you can drop out of high school, go backpacking in Europe, and as long as you find a way to support yourself, no one has a right to judge you.

You definitely don't need to get into college. In the last 30 years or so, we've turned everyone into maniacs. Back in the day, if you just graduated high school that was something to be proud of.

Now, no, you need to get straight A's, no, you need to take a foreign language. If you're not able to pass a foreign language class, maybe you're messed up in the head, maybe we can give you some dangerous stimulants to fix you.

Again, none of it matters, I make significantly more money than most of the rest of my family and I'm one of the least educated. I was making more than what they make now with their fancy masters degrees, before I even finished my BA.

The only thing that really matters is finding peace with yourself, and again as long as you can support yourself. Nobody really cares. Of course. Someone's going to be smarter on paper, someone's going to get into a better school, someone's going to have a bigger house. But if you're constantly trying to compete with every other person, you're going to find, no matter how well you do, you'll devalue your own accomplishments.

I mean it really does matter. You got lucky. Compare yourself with the millions of people working at restaurants with no health insurance and nothing they own worth any value. That's the norm, not your experience.

The problem is there is a huge income gap between the people with degrees and good jobs and people with just high school educations. Much of that is due to offshoring / NAFTA / etc.

"We have got to stop sending jobs overseas. It's pretty simple: If you're paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, ... have no health care—that's the most expensive single element in making a car— have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south."

-Ross Perot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_sucking_sound

BTW, that dollar amount is double in todays dollars vs 1992 when that debate happened. Imagine if we had millions of jobs for people without college degrees paying $28 an hour with health care. That's a stark contrast with the $15 minimum wage people are clawing to get with massive resistance. Something as simple as NAFTA causing so much destruction 30 years after the fact is amazing. Imagine kids where both parents didn't have to work to make ends meet. Imagine kids where their parent's weren't exhausted from working all the time and could spend more quality time with them. Imagine kids who could have a future where they didn't have to attend college and the pressure that comes with it. imagine kids who can get regular health checkups without breaking the bank. The cascade effects are immense. But hey, look on the bright side, PROFITS!

>I mean it really does matter. You got lucky. Compare yourself with the millions of people working at restaurants with no health insurance and nothing they own worth any value. That's the norm, not your experience.

I've met plenty of people with various fancy degrees working those jobs. I recall in my early twenties I met an alumni from one of my dream schools. He was making roughly as much as I was without a degree.

If you go insane in your pursuit of academic excellence, you'll be rendered unable to work.

Plus, theirs no rule saying a high school dropout can't attend community college later. This is much better option for most people.

The alternative is losing your mind trying to get into that elite top ten college

>I've met plenty of people with various fancy degrees working those jobs. I recall in my early twenties I met an alumni from one of my dream schools. He was making roughly as much as I was without a degree.

Sure, you got lucky and he probably picked a less than lucrative degree, or wasn't as lucky. There is certainly overlap, but the statistics show that there is a large wealth gap between people with a college degree and people without. Bill Gates was a college drop out and he has billions, but is that the norm? Absolutely not.

>Plus, theirs no rule saying a high school dropout can't attend community college later. This is much better option for most people.

Yes, but I thought we were talking about the prospects of high school drop outs vs people with college degrees. You're kinda moving he goal posts a bit I think. I think dropping out of high school, getting a GED and then attending college is essentially the same thing as the "normal" college route.

>The alternative is losing your mind trying to get into that elite top ten college

That's a false dichotomy. You don't have to get into an elite top ten college to have a future, statistically speaking. The main income gap is between people with a college degree and people without. I do agree with you that people who aspire to get into an elite college can easily burnout and go mad, but that's not what I'm comparing here. I also know not all college degrees or even institutions are equal. Some are absolute shit, but the majority of accredited institutions are good enough. Degrees, not so much though. Some degrees are an absolute pyramid scheme. It's tough to navigate for someone with experience with it, much less an immediate family without a college degree.

Not everyone is even capable of attending college. That's just what it is.

You can get into a trade, etc.

And if you don't like trades you can always go back to community college.

In the early 2000s you had an all out attack on tradesmenship. High schools use to offer classes in woodworking, automotive repair, and even metal working.

All of a sudden it was decided these jobs were 'dirty'. How dare some students have different aptitudes!

Life is long. You can try to become an electrician apprentice, decide you don't like it and attend community college after that

Relatedly, the delaying actions on "fight for $15" is darkly genius. It puts off implementing it, of course, but also every month of inflation eats away at the "$15" number. Wikipedia says the campaign was started in 2012, so today it should be $18.78.

The number in the slogan stays the same, but reality slips out from under it. The democrats are about to lose the midterms, so if it doesn't get done in the next few months, they'll be another six years of inflation from even getting another swing at the ball.

I actually don't think rasing the minimum wage is a solution to poverty.

Back in LA I was only making 10$ an hour, which was enough for a 600$ apartment. We need more 600$ apartments, if you make 15$ an hour but rent is 1200$ you lost money.

While making this 10$ an hour I worked alongside many brilliant folks, a few had masters degrees. They had to manage student loans as well off 10$ an hour.

While this got muddled a bit, my point is there's more than one life path.

If you're not able to attend college, maybe your just not a good fit for it, you can still find a great career.

Likewise, you can get into a top school and still squander your life. Mental health here is a big issue, the pressure to do well can leave you permanently disabled.

College sorta serves as a filter, someone who attends an elite school is much more likely to be intrinsically motivated. But it serves no one to pressure people who just aren't college bound into attending anyway. It's just a great way to make someone nuts.

“Something has to give.”

The pandemic was the last straw… I thought. I’m disturbed to see that the world is going right back to 'the way things were'. Folks take the idea that you have to work for a living, and have dialed it up to eleven…thousand!

As best as I understand: hard work is not rewarded, it’s exploited. A natural resource to be drilled, pumped, and burned out.

Many are going to bed after midnight every night.

Tell them to look at their Screen Time or Digital Life applications: https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/26/why-technology-will-never... and ask about their weekly time usage. It's often over four hours a day. I commonly see six and seven hours a day.

That observation doesn't obviate some of the other points—there seems to be an "excellent sheep" problem: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/11/30/briefly-noted-excellent-s... most people who claim to be busy, but show many hours a day on their phones, will privately admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."

It's like you're completely ignoring the fact that phones and apps are designed to be addictive.

Growing up in a world where tech companies have been given free reign to psychologically manipulate users to increase screen time is yet another pressure facing that generation, it shouldn't be thrown in their face.

> admit that perhaps there's something else going on than purely being "busy."

- Snapchat is essential to some youth friendships nowadays, unfortunately,

- People dwell in dopamine hits, notably because their social life is broken. It’s a self-reinforcing problem, true, but initially their social life was broken. You don’t get into drugs when all is good, or at least you can resist.

Second link is broken.

School pupils having even 8 hours a day of screen time would not even remotely surprising during the pandemic — what else are they going to be doing? My (UK) school day routine was get up at 07:30, breakfast, leave the house at about 08:00 either for the bus or just (once I realised I could do the 3-ish mile walk fast enough) go direct on foot, 09:00-15:30 was the actual school day.

Initially I got home by 16:15, then watched a lot of TV; later, the school got an ISDN line and I stayed until 16:30 — memories of downloading and printing pictures from an artist called The Werewolf and getting home at 17:30 — but again followed by TV. Possibly video games on a Commodore 64, followed by a BBC model B, followed by a Performa 5200.

Actual homework? Bus, lunchtime, whenever; I had no interest in the tasks we had to do.

Of course, now I’m a “responsible adult” or something. Screen Time is reporting 6h 28m average per day over the last week, yet despite that, this is what I get done in a typical week:

• Normal office job

• 49 Duolingo lessons covering German, Esperanto, Greek, Dutch, Spanish, and Arabic

• 7-14k XP on Clozemaster (for learning German)

• Daily practice in at least one other German language app

• A complete audiobook

• A bunch of educational, technical, or popsci podcasts, YouTube vids, WWDC, etc.

• 7 quizzes from Brilliant.org

• I cook almost all the meals in our household

Lol literally our whole world revolves around things that don’t matter think about it our whole World revolves around things that won’t benefit us in the next life , just a bunch of people wasting their energy and time doing something another human came up with, and of course knowing how long the devil been around he’s pretty good at his job and if you look at the scripture you would know how he tried to trick the humans before us and a lot of information that most people won’t know because their so busy beeping tricked by the devil for example Solomon temple back in his time they also had technology but not as advanced if you knew what technology really was somethings will start to make sense and if you run the thought of how pretty much everything things we do in our lives was designed in a complex system by the devil and his helpers but wait you don’t want know the real truth it’s madder then anything you watched or Your small Little human brain could possibly imagine and oh covid omg wtf why so desperately did they want at least 70% of the world vaccinated and how did everyone go along that blows my mind more then anything I just told you lol I’ll predict the future so easy everything revolves around ISREAL lol too much

I am glad this is not the case in Europe (with the exception of the UK). Here we do not only look to performance and pride and you need to win everything. Individual development is very important. Hope it will remain like that.

> Individual development is very important.

Not sure if you’ve misread the thread - the whole problem is too much importance on individual development and the pressure this brings.

This is a funny reply because “individual development” isn’t something you schedule in European eyes. You just hang around with friends and learn to be a good person, and specifically not a tight wound asshole.

Nobody does anything like learn an instrument or play a sport in Europe? That's what we're talking about.

They do, but the point is that you don't have to be better than everybody else at it to get into university. You just do it for yourself.

I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational system comes only from what I read, but it's my understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important part of college admissions, which is different from Europe.

> I'm not the in US, so my knowledge of the educational system comes only from what I read, but it's my understanding that "extracurriculars" are an important part of college admissions, which is different from Europe.

That's really only a thing for the private universities and those don't make up a large percentage

> That's really only a thing for the private universities and those don't make up a large percentage

That's not true in my experience. In my state and surrounding states, most of the large state schools care a great deal about extracurriculars.

> the point is that you don't have to be better than everybody else

The person I was replying to was saying how they're 'very important' in Europe though.

I think it's a question of "important for what" and how society goes about teaching kids those things. As in:

In Europe, it's important that kids learn self-development, so we let them do it. And they do it by hanging out with friends, learning an instrument, etc. They're not pushed to do those things because colleges don't take these into account for admissions.

In the US, it's important that kids learn self-development, so we have them learn an instrument, or participate in sports. They are pushed to do those things because colleges take those into account for admissions.

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