Why adults still dream about school
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
I don't think that's the case, but more that kids are being put in these "high stakes" situations without the mental capacity to handle them. Turning in an assignment late, underpreparing or waking up late for an exam, getting a B+ instead of an A, fumbling during a presentation – these are all insignificant and completely artificial problems in the grand scheme of life. However when you are a student going through them it feels like the end of the world, and that memory sticks.
The only person I have ever known to have cried over grades was someone who cried over getting a B+ instead of an A. I know many more people who got D's instead of C's -- they didn't care.
But it’s fairly hard to truly mess it up.
But overall school and college was a great experience - the tests and assignments sucked, but what I remember is the great friends that I made, the interesting people that I met and all the personal exploration that I did.
No regrets that I took my sweet time to finish undergrad, in the grand scheme of life it was not time wasted, but time well spent.
Adulting does not offer the same opportunities - so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it.
That never happened, but I did drop a couple classes before the withdrawal deadline to fix the workload. It feels so real though.
Or I don’t have a HS diploma even though I graduated college and have had a job for 20 years.
You earned your degree, and your subconscious needs to needs to acknowledge it.
Why would you be drug down by this question? Perhaps there is a deeper reason.
“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready. Dig deep, and it will ever flow." -Marcus Aurelius
This one is a recurring dream for me and sometimes the context is middle or high school which makes even less sense.
A more recurrent dream for me is finding myself in the backseat of an empty, moving car, able to reach the steering wheel, but unable to control the brakes.
I wonder what this means. It is unnerving.
It really sucks lol
Sometimes I'm alone in the car. Other times there is someone else in the front but they are incapacitated, or unwilling to bring the car back under control. I'm usually alone, though.
On a few occasions I was able to climb into the front seat, but of course then the brakes either did nothing or were so ineffectual that trying to use them to slow down only distracted me and made matters worse.
(1) do you have a feeling that you have control of your own life? Maybe it feels that you are in a prison where "your hand is forced" and you cannot take own decisions, have to play the bad hand you received
(2) are you doing something risky, like working in a failing start up? Or a company thay is going towards bankruptcy?
Once you actually live that experience, it (or versions of it) will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life.
Here's one from the early 20th century: https://nautil.us/read-the-lost-dream-journal-of-the-man-who...
There were indeed dreaming of school:
> I am an assistant professor. Suddenly I receive express orders from the dean to teach osteology at the very last minute. Anxiety, anguish * * * when going over the bones in my memory. I enumerate those of the hand: scaphoids, capitate, and I did not know any more. Meanwhile the class awaits me, the students yell. I ask to myself how I will lecture about bones if I have almost forgotten them? Growing anguish and I awaken with a sense of well-being, upon realizing that I am not a professor, I am old and no one is directing me.
I have no idea where that dream came from or why I had it. I have never had a "didn't study" dream before, university was a relatively stress free time for me compared to my earlier years
I guess I'm brimming with enough (over)confidence to avoid the "didn't study" dreams or the "sitting in the back seat of an empty car" dreams, but I occasionally dream I signed up for some class and then didn't bother to attend it, wasting my time and snubbing the teacher.. "ah shoot, sorry guys"
School is supposedly the best experience in life, and simultaneously the most frequent source of nightmares decades later. What a curious coincidence!
Depends on the perspective, I guess. I was working in several different places, and sometimes I had hard time. Even working in the worst places, I felt better than in school.
I hated elementary school, because kids were cruel (some time I came back to home with chocking marks) and teachers decided to just not see bullying. Or decided to give me a hard time, too. When someone destroyed my textbook by writing on it while I was not at the desk, I got note to the parents because supposedly I told someone to do that.
I kinda liked liceum because finally people were more mature. But man, long term, it was very exhausting. The lesson schedule looked like it was set randomly. For example, in second class, being 16-17 yo, Thursdays I had lessons from 9 AM to 6 PM, and the next day I was starting at 7 AM. I was tired all the time and had no time for social interactions.
Please note that the following paragraph is not personal. It applies to the entire phenomenon. For me, it is annoying when grown-ups tell children that it is the best time in their life. When I was a kid, I felt fear a lot. As a teenager, I was depressed and tired all the time. And, you know, if it is the best time in my life, why should I care about my future at all? It is going to be terrible anyway...
Everyone has its own perspective. Maybe you had great time in school. Maybe for my mother, school years actually are the best years of her life. But telling young people that they are living the best time in their lives, and it will be only worse later, is... unfair.
I hated school. I hated the inadequacy of lesson - some were obviously way too easy for me, while others way too hard. The number of lesson hours per week per subject didn't align with my interests nor the difficulty of the subject. The amount of wasted time was staggering. For example, it so happened that I didn't attend high-school for half a year in my fourth semester. I had enough scores in some subjects to pass, but for a few I didn't, and was given a few weeks to prepare for oral exams. I managed to learn half a year worth of biology, history, and chemistry in 3 weeks, and passed the exams. It was a Pyrrhic victory - I passed to the next grade, but at the same time I realized that I'm wasting (6 months - a few weeks) each semester. I started questioning the meaning of going to school; I realized that I could learn faster on my own, then realized that I would have learned a whole lot more if I could learn with a mentor who'd have my best interests in mind. I also realized that no teacher has an interest in working with someone like me, and that the system is actively hostile to all the non-standard approaches and needs. By the next year, I was diagnosed with depression and missed the whole year while trying to come to grips with that harsh reality.
Later on, I was locked in a constant harassment from an English teacher (a second language here). I learned English in private lessons and on the Internet and I was good at it. That was unacceptable for her. I was to sit quietly in the corner and when I tried to participate in the lesson, I was branded her enemy. The unfair treatment was to the point where I barely graduated, yet I got 97% score on the matriculation exam. I had an urge to find her and throw the results in her face, but I knew I would never recover the lost time and expended psychological effort to persevere.
If I could do it all again, I would focus all I had on breaking out of the system. That system very obviously wasn't made for people like me, but I felt helpless, knowing there's no alternative. It was wrong. The alternatives are always there, even if deliberately hidden as to not "encourage abnormal behavior". I could have tried harder to get away from the system that damaged my health and gave me next to nothing in exchange. And if I couldn't find an alternative, I would have changed my attitude at least: look, Mr. teacher, you're being paid to teach me, and I'm not being paid to learn. So, Mr. teacher, act like I'm a paying customer, please. Because otherwise, Mr. teacher, I'll go through all possible means to fuck you up, cheerfully and as a hobby. Just as you've been doing to me all this time.
Maybe you mistook my perspective for hubris - but it is what childhood should be - innocent and pure and if it's not, then society is failing.
I did not take your post as a form of hubris. What I meant when I wrote about perspective is that personal experiences shape our assessment of reality. I agree that childhood should be innocent and pure. But sometimes, it is not.
When I have a particularly bad day as an adult, I often think back to being a child (or worse, teenager) in school forced to follow arbitrary rules by tired adults who were more interested in making sure nobody wore a baseball cap than keeping kids safe from anaphylactic allergic reactions.
When I think back to my school days and how anxious, stressed, unheard, and restricted I felt almost 100% of the time, I usually feel immediately better.
I remember being 16 in high school, and during the school day I couldn't just take a walk, because that would be truancy to skip class.
I couldn't just take a walk at night because our municipality instituted a curfew past I don't know, 10pm or something for those under 18, and a police car actively patrolled my neighborhood for violations.
I lived 18 years like that. Allowed to make no choices about where I went to school or at what time.
So now, as an adult, sometimes I just exit my apartment and walk down a city street when I feel like it, and it feels extremely empowering.
Taking a mental health day and not showing up to work, or better yet, handing in my resignation, also feel extremely empowering.
From my perspective, being a child sucked. I hated almost every moment of it, despite being reasonably popular in high school, having a close circle of friends, and never worrying about my grades.
Being an adult is amazing by comparison and I would never want to go back.
But I also understand that to some degree, that's a result of the freedom that comes with a high salary and an in-demand skillset that allow me to leave jobs and take days off with little risk. Many adults don't have that opportunity, and I totally understand how in some cases they could see their childhood as having been better due to a lack of responsibilities.
I get these exact nightmares. I wonder how common is this.
My friend called me as I was about to go to the gym and asked where I was, with a very concerned voice. It turned out that I was supposed to be at an exam. I rushed home, changed clothes and went like crazy to school. Luckily they let me in as the last one of the day - of course I had not prepared in the slightest - but did absolutely fine :)
Because my high school Biology course (A Levels in the UK) was divided into modules assessed throughout two years I came to the last exam pretty sure that I didn't have to score many marks to get the grade I was aiming for.
I ended up in a weird situation where my instinct was to prepare really well but, in practice, I should skimp on revision for Biology and concentrate on subjects that weighted the end-of-year exams higher.
The strategy worked out - I hit what I was aiming for in Biology and in the other subjects. But that whole very tactical approach so went against my character that, to this day, anxiety dreams manifest about not having done the work for that specific exam. Often they're further exaggerated (e.g. I've simply forgotten to go to any lessons all year, etc) but it focuses around that event.
I find it weird that my subconscious prefers that over arguably even more stressful (and sometimes less successful!) exams at university. Maybe I was just more equipped to deal with it by then.
I had to leave school to learn, and now that I’m a computer programmer, I feel apprehension that I might have to go back to school to four years to pretend to learn topics I learned independently just to assuage the school systems ego enough that they will give me an accreditation. The idea of going back to school makes me tense up at this point. Adulthood is so much less traumatizing because it feels like you have so much more choice to avoid abuse, and you can choose to confront abusive situations on your own schedule. You’re valued for so many more reasons than your ability to tolerate abuse and produce good test scores.
What? That's so far from the truth. If you fail in school you just get to try again. You may not get into Stanford but realistically your life can still be great no matter how many times you fail.
I do not agree with this at all.
Has anyone ever asked about my GED? No. Lol. Has lacking a college degree held me back? No (though there are definitely fields where it would have).
One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting out which bits of "received wisdom" actually deserve that label versus being cached now-bullshit that your parents and teachers don't know is obsolete. My parents were right about a lot of interpersonal stuff, but dead wrong about whether I needed to go to college in order to obtain good jobs.
As for the commenter's point on people caring or not caring about the GED/CHSPE; apart from needing it for my initial community college admission immediately after getting it, it never came up for me at all, despite teachers insisting for years that getting a diploma that way would ruin us. I don't even remember any the details of it, or where the documentation is: there's little point in having anything pre-university on a CV.
This actually never stops I think.
I never studied for anything, never did any homework, and to enter university in Germany I just needed good enough grades to pass high school (Gymnasium). GPA was irrelevant.
Of course, I don't wake up with any cold sweat over it.
Do you mean 3rd grade?
But having said that I imagine it could feel pretty different depending on what expectations you set for yourself, or more importantly - what expectations your parents set for you. If you've got mum and dad looming over your shoulder 24/7 pushing you for more so you can be a doctor/lawyer/CEO/whatever then you're probably going to feel pretty differently about the whole situation.
One of my favorite engineers dropped out of college because the university (UC) demanded an English proficiency test for the diploma after completing 4 years of of school.
Now they have 40+ patents and confounded 3 biotech companies with 9 digit exits.
Friends from the old days ironically refer to them as Dr.<Name> because they are the smartest person they know.
Sort of a community bestowed honorary doctorate.
There was way more stress later on.
For me, both elementary and high school were easy. I would do a minimal amount of work, show up to the exam and get maximum marks. Exams weren't especially stressful.
As a stereotypical school nerd, PE was stressful though - I do remember lots of anxiety being asked to jump the vaulting horse, do somersaults, handstands, and that kind of things I wasn't able to do.
And yet, I regularly dream about not having passed some non-PE high-school subject and having to retake the exam and/or go to class (even when these subjects were easy for me) and don't dream about PE.
I'd honestly not be surprised if the whole "dreams about school" thing turns out to be world-wide low grade PTSD.
Consequently, I never have dreams about exams. However, I do have dreams that I have to go back to school as an adult for some reason (usually because I missed some classes or exams or something and I have to do them now). The dreams are also never about the actual classrooms but just hanging around in the school with the teenagers and feeling weird about it.
Guess it's also compensated by the number of dreams where there are car problems and parking tickets of all kinds.
ok, that tracks because I don't look back on that as peak-anxiety, and I don't have dreams about being back in school. But I do have dreams about peak anxiety events that I will not be sharing here.
I usually learned the most out of take-home exams. You’d usually need to study and brush up on things, but then having a week to thoroughly work out everything was always a great learning experience. It is a way of the professor saying “you should know this and if not, know how to figure it out”. It was an actually good test of your knowledge and skill and didn’t rely on being able to spit something out in one or two hours in a stressful environment.
I think you’re right that no adult experiences moments like you get in school exams. Almost never are you required to know some relatively arbitrary thing or solve some problem within an hour or teo. There are crunches and moments of needing to fix something quickly and important presentations, but in every case you are presented with something you already know about or have day to day experience with. And failure is usually not some drastic adjustment of your future. If the professor is not good, which is the norm, then exams are a bit of a toss up.
At my current company, the security positions are focuses like that and actually test people, the Dev interviews are two leetcode questions and a conversation to make sure you arn't a complete dunce. I havn't met a single dumb person on the other side of the fence, but I have met alot of dumb devs here.
Project-based learning can't be managed with 40:1 student teacher ratios. The best learning has always come from projects and apprenticeship/mentorship style systems, but even managing that with 3 classes with a 10:1 student teacher ratio becomes hard. This should make sense, almost all the economic evidence is that parent characteristics are hands down the largest factors in what a kid's future income will be (mentorship).
Cheating is rampant which is why take-home exams rarely exist.
The reality is the world would be far better off with 3 times as many teacher, but you can't keep teachers wages as high as they are with 3 times the supply.
Now I'm older I understand what stress is and I do feel like my actions (or inaction) could ruin the rest of my life. There have been several key moments in my adult life that I can pinpoint as high stakes and peak anxiety. Yet I still have the school dreams. I had one just last night, in fact.
Comparatively most adults have incredible comfortable lives. Besides going to work they can basically do whatever they want. There is no pressure to strive for anything. It's baffling to me how people can lay such high pressure on their children but let themselves go in their own life.
> My kids however are leisurely creatures
How so? They are forced every weekday under duress of the law to go to a place they didn't choose to be. If they don't perform in their forced labor they are put into more forced labor. They have to listen to you and you probably very often take away their agency to do what they desire. Kids do have more "free" time, but that time is not actually free. But the way the can spend is very narrow. But more time does not equal better.
You grew up middle or upper class and the person you’re responding to didn’t, or had no or very bad relations with their family such that they didn’t or couldn’t help.
Don’t forget that school is the most orderly environment lots of children experience, the one where they’re most likely to be around educated people, intellectual stimulation, the least violent, the one where they’re reliably fed. Without the pretense that it’s about education that would be hard to keep up.
The reason why most adults are not very motivated when it comes to learning is because school has killed their learn drive. The recurring dreams may very well be a sign of a traumatic experience.
You can read more here: https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Learn_drive
Instead of putting pressure, parents should take away this very crippling aspect of today's schools by telling their children that grades are not so important and that the often required cramming does more harm than good.
If a child's learn drive survives school it will surpass many of its peers futher down the road.
Work is much more stressful and high stakes. There's no real structure, no contract or performance guide (like a syllabus), and I need this job to support my family. Getting another job would be very difficult.
To me that seems like a very fortunate life experience.
And then promptly waltz upstairs with my coffee, sit in front my computer, read the news and (mostly) happily write program on computers all day, while playing with my border collies and walking through my hobby vineyard in my spare time.
School sucked for me, and I kinda... turned out despite it... but I somehow have to get my kids through it.
Apart from a few countries you can.
The science around teenagers needing more sleep, and doing better in life/school/everything if they start their day later, seems well-established at this point.
Additionally, there's plenty of known-better ways to learn beyond the rote-memorization-and-standardized-test system that's still de rigueur.
Are there no schools out there that put these things together and make an attempt at something better, especially for high-performing kids? What if school started at (say) 10-ish, and it gradually became more and more self-directed as kids headed towards graduation? What if it also mixed in all the latest cutting-edge research about how kids learn math/science/languages/etc? What if it also got creative with the curriculum and mixed in all the topics that people always say should be in schools, like "how to do your taxes" and whatnot?
I remember getting to college and being wildly unprepared for everything. School before then was devastatingly boring and fostered very little independence. Then college came along, and it was both brutally difficult and had almost no guardrails of any kind.
It was quite a transition, and it makes me wonder why there aren't more varieties/experiments around radically different approaches to schooling. At minimum, for high-performing kids, you'd think the modern world would have something.
As to the why things are the way they are, people don't wanna do better because it's inconvenient.
In the current US system, it's hard to justify focusing additional resources on students that are already performing well.
As another commenter noted, it's the privileged kids who get opportunities like that. Which is a real shame because it's an environment that lifts those who need more flexibility and personal support.
I don't have anything to do with it (yet?) but our sister institution is Alpha School - https://alpha.school
They're trying to change schooling to be more efficient, engaging, and self directed.
My understanding is they're far from alone, and there's a lot of interest in overhauling traditional schooling at the moment.
I mean, there's been interest in overhauling traditional schooling since forever. However, a significant up-tick in (temporary?) home-schooling during the pandemic really got parents thinking about education methodologies.
I know that my own children don't master subjects that way and it also doesn't mirror adult work.
Schools that are up to date on this and follow advice exist, but are expensive and rare - which also attract parents who do not need to sit at a desk or stand in front of a CNC machine at 8:30am. Gordonstoun/Schloss Salem comes to mind.
College wise, what I recall was a lot of freshmen who just couldn't be assed to wake up for class or do homework without parents on their case. Especially with the dorm basically being a 24/7 LAN party, and I recall one dude who just watched like, every DVD ever. The coursework itself in freshman year was comparatively breezey.
For school before then, I suppose it depends on your definition of boring and independence. IEPs for gifted kids can put you into advanced classes of all kinds. It's still very much on rails, so I'd liken the independence to a choose your own adventure book. And, sure you can do AP English instead of normal english but you have to read like, Bronte and Hurston, so the boring is only far off.
You answered your own question here. Most “high performing” kids will lose interest in one of the foundational branches of math and will decide instead to read fantasy or build a potato cannon.
Without the structure stressing the stuff that is truly important despite it not seeming like it at the time, the vast majority will land in college needing to take remedial high school courses in math and science.
Why?
When she was at home during COVID, her mental health suffered greatly, and remote learning simply did not work for her. Daily structure is important, and so is social interaction. And we cannot provide that for her at home.
My (teen) daughter I referred to is in a specialist arts high school program on a media&visual arts track. It's unique for our whole province, and required an audition (portfolio in her case) to get into. But she does have to maintain a reasonable report card in other subjects to stay in that program or risk getting dumped out into the local 'regular' high school. By and large she's motivated by that, but it is anxiety inducing.
The 7:15am departure time reflects this situation. She has to take a (school board provided) cab all the way across the city for 8:40am bell time. It's a garbage start time for teens, but I don't make the decisions.
She is a very bright and talented artist. Her post-high school situation will be a financial struggle, I'm sure, but likely also quite rewarding and creative. Just need to get there.
For my EE120 review session when we staggered in, the GSI consoled us saying if it meant anything, we’d done as much in one semester as he’d done in two and a half at his school and he was a Berkeley grad student which is insanely competitive to get into in its own right.
For awhile after my daughter was born those were replaced by one where I had another infant I was supposed to be caring for that I had totally forgotten about, but thankfully, those didn't persist as she grew and my brain went back to the livestock version.
They (along with some other STEM programs) used first and second year calculus and physics courses to select who they would admit. So you needed to be within some top percentile of the students in those courses at the end of your second year or else you would need to transfer schools or choose a different major.
On top of this, the course registration system was similar to trying to get a PS5 on launch day. If you didn’t get your courses registered without time conflicts within 5 minutes of opening well, better luck next quarter. And then if you didn’t get the course you needed this quarter then you were at risk of having to overload yourself the following quarter to get back on track.
One strategy to mitigate the registration crunch was to sign up for more courses than you actually intended to take. You had a grace period of I think a week during which you could drop a course with no consequence (and folks on the wait list could take your place). This mechanic is the source of my recurring nightmares. In my dreams, I forget to drop the extra course in my schedule, and I only realize it after the second midterm.
Thank god CS is direct to major now (I think it started in 2019?) so there isn’t that second year thing now.
If you have any tips I’d love to hear em!
I can give some tips I wish I had known when I started. No guarantees any of this stuff still applies since it's 20 year old info, but I suspect some of it may still be good ...
- Aim to spend 2 hours studying or doing coursework in the library / lab for every hour you're in the class. So if a class is 5 credits it will take you 15 hours a week, 3 in lecture, 2 in section, and 10 studying or in office hours.
- For upper level math or CS courses, these are often only 3 credits because there's no section, but you still need to spend at least 15 hours a week on them (so 4 hours of work for every hour of lecture)
- Put the study hours in your calendar and stick to them even if you don't feel like you need them. If that means you get work done before it's due, that's great, now you can take it to office hours with your TA or prof and get a free check on your work before you need to submit it to be graded.
- Buy a paper notebook for each course at the start of the quarter. Attend all of the lectures and sections and write everything down the instructor presents in writing and also anything they say that might be important. It doesn't matter that the prof posts slides, notes, recordings or whatever on the website, write the material down anyway by hand because it forces you to pay attention and it helps you internalize the information. Use the notebook as your first stop when you have questions doing your coursework or reviewing for tests.
- I've heard registering for courses is still tough. You get a freebie your first quarter as an incoming student, but 2-3 weeks before the second quarter start looking at the course guide and plan what you want to register for. Approach it like you're a coach preparing for the NFL draft. You need to put down the courses you must have, and the ones you'd like to have, and your contingencies if things don't go to plan. Also pay attention to the instructors, ask around for students who have taken the courses you're planning to to get feedback on who teaches well and grades well and who doesn't -- if the course you need isn't being taught by the instructor you want, you may want to try to take it a different quarter if you can.
- Make an appointment with an advisor to get advice on your course schedule. Since you're in the CS dept, you can make an appointment with their counselors.
- On course registration day, wake up early and do your best to get the courses you want with the best schedule you can. If you can't get a course you can try showing up on the first day anyway and get on the wait list or email your advisor and ask for help.
- Do NOT try to take too much in one quarter. Try to do no more than 2 hard and 1 medium or 2 hard and 2 easy courses. Nobody will stop you if you take 5 hard 3 credit math or CS classes (assuming you have the prereqs) because it's only 15 credits, but by my thinking that's 75 hours a week of work. It's unsustainable and sounds insane but you will almost surely meet or hear about people who try it. Don't be one of them.
- If you tested out of your foreign language reqs, great. Don't try to do more than you have to, unless you're really serious about the language and want to double major in it or something. I tested out of Spanish and I should have left it that, but I stupidly spent a year taking Japanese which I didn't need and just took up a lot of mental bandwidth. If you want to pick up another language, go to language school over a summer or something, don't spend your university time on it.
- Make friends. Leave your dorm room door open as much as you can if you live in the dorms. Hang out in the CS lab as much as you can.
- Hit the gym for an hour a day. UW has a great gym with tons of fun stuff and classes. You must exercise to perform your best in school. Seriously, put it on your calendar and stick to it.
- Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
>- Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
These things go together, and it's unfortunate that, no matter how much faculty advise students not to take on enormous course loads, so many of them insist on trying anyway. It's not just a matter of sustainability: you often won't learn as much as you would be able to learn by taking a few classes and being passionate about them. You simply won't have time. Good university courses are not situations where there is a fixed checklist of things to learn, or ceiling of perfection that you can spend a fixed amount of time reaching and then gain no more. As an undergraduate, the faculty at the physics department I was in would even give relatively easy research and independent study units to those of us they trusted would use the decreased number of courses (but same number of units) per term to think more about physics.
And yes, being known to the faculty as a promising undergraduate is useful. Their doors will be open for scholarly discussions and academic advice at a far more informal level. They can often give better, more specific advice on courses and plans, and can push administratively to make those plans possible. They can point you to topics and resources beyond your classes, and help you understand them. Departmental requirements that don't make sense for you individually can often be substituted or waived. And if you're interested in graduate school, research experience and strong faculty recommendations are all but required.
Getting this sort of reputation in a department usually involves going above and beyond in courses not by doing what is expected perfectly, but by doing things that aren't expected, and that takes passion and time (and choosing classes and professors where it is possible).
> For upper level math or CS courses, these are often only 3 credits because there's no section, but you still need to spend at least 15 hours a week on them (so 4 hours of work for every hour of lecture)
This confused me at first. In my orientation session (14 hours long over 2 days…) they never talked about this! At community college basically all classes were 5 credits so it was weird to see many hard classes only be 3 or 4. Sounds like they aren’t going to be any less difficult… Quite annoying!
> Pick a couple CS courses a year that you're going to go hard on. Set aside extra time for them, maybe double, do your very best work, and go above and beyond on assignments. Profs will remember their best student in a course and this can open doors for you.
I’ll give this a shot for sure! There are quite a few classes that I’m interested in taking and it’s probably worth putting in a extra effort on the stuff that’s actually important to me.
Thanks again! Your comment gave me a lot of insight about college and UW. Hopefully I won’t have too many nightmares about UW :)
Harsh so much that I never want to go back to that kind of treatment, and their abuse after I graduated in trying to drag me back into a graduate program.
I'm going to be a repetitive guy with a Roman I know, so downvote me.
“Dig deep within yourself, for there is a fountain of goodness ever ready. Dig deep, and it will ever flow." -Marcus Aurelius
My spouse has a bachelors in architecture, and definitely experiences these. Sometimes it's a design presentation that is needed but wasn't done at all, etc.
Architecture degrees are immensely stressful to get, and then the licensure process is insane, and then there's no money in it unless you're a partner, but partners don't get to do much of the conceptual design and drawing stuff usually, which is what usually brings people into architecture school and is the bulk of the school work.
If people knew if you wanted to make a good living in architecture, you'd really just be babysitting contractors, trying to get electrical and hvac engineers to live with the consequences that arise because buildings need both light and ventilation, fighting with permitting offices, and stamping other people's drawings, student life could be a lot less stressful; it's not worth spending every night in design studio working when the job sucks.
Computer Engineering was a lot less work for a bachelors, even though it was a lot. Of course, my school had biomedical engineers, they worked their butts off.
Another time, I had a two hour course, but I thought it was a one hour course, and always came an hour late. One day, the teacher finally snapped: “Are you EVER going to get here on time!?!” The answer was no. No way I was sitting through two hours of that. It was my easiest class in university.
Most of my school-related nightmares have stopped at this point in my life, but they generally weren’t much worse than reality.
If you interpret what they said as "I want freedom but explicitly chose not to find it until 10 years later" then sure, that might be a contradiction.
If you interpret it as "I really freedom because it took me 10 years to fully realize what happened to me and want others to avoid the same thing" then it's more clear it's not a contradiction. It wasn't a choice, but rather a path they were sent down unknowingly. That's different than thinking it doesn't matter until then. This was my interpretation of it at least.
In my view, an adult ought to be able to leap at the chance for agency as soon as they emerge from these constraints. Maybe not immediately, but in a year or two at least. Otherwise, it circularily casts doubt on the premise. The argument is that the definition of an adult has to meet a certain standard.
School can be traumatic, and people are allowed to feel bad even if others have it worse, but unless you are severely bullied I see many of the descriptions in this thread as being overly dramatic compared to the crap that people have to deal with in other parts of the world. Hundreds of millions of kids would kill for the chance to be stressed at an American or European school.
Granted, this is not a generous point of view. The only reason I'm making these comments is because I recognize myself so much in the GP's experiences.
“Students are customers” - Hard disagree here. I had a great time in college but the effects of the neoliberalization of the university definitely diminished the experience. Schools are one of the only pre-capitalistic institutions left in society that situate folks in time and tradition. Now they are becoming another money grab.
But my other recurring dream is about being an LDS missionary again. I think that experience in real life was even more stressful than college—definitely more guilt-inducing. In the dream I'm my current self—mid-40s, married, kids, career, atheist—and yet somehow the church has managed to coerce me back into the mission field alongside the 19-year-old true believers.
Almost every other former Mormon missionary I've asked about it reports having similar recurring dreams.
This was more or less my theory already. Our first, foundational experiences of anxiety, or at least specific kinds of anxiety.
I'm curious: was anyone here home schooled during high school and then didn't attend college? Where does your mind go to for the equivalent of the "institutional anxiety" dream scenario?
I eventually got over it. The dreams stopped. Once I got to a certain age, I just accepted I was a stupid-ass kid who made mistakes. Live and learn.
BTW, if you're still in school, don't cheat. Take it from me. I spent more time and effort on cheating than I would have if I just did the work as assigned.
You likely didn't. I've heard this many times from people who cheated or people who take steroids. It's just a rationalization about your shitty past actions.
I have zero remorse. Having to do so much memorization is just not how my brain works. Now employed, I rarely memorize anything but you can bet I can find anything very fast.
I stopped in university mostly because the stakes were higher (you can get expelled for real). I also had to work harder in university because engineering was just so much harder than anything I did before. Also, most classes in uni let you have a sheet of notes instead of wasting time memorizing all those concepts.
BTW I stopped cheating in university in later years, as the classes got more interesting and we were no-longer required to do brutal workloads (the university stuffs first two years of CS degree with a lot of math and physics, to weed out people who are not tough enough I guess).
I always wake up with severe anxiety and have to look around to make sure I'm not living in the barracks.
And I'm either deployed overseas back in combat or getting ready to leave. And I can't find my weapon or parts of my uniform or equipment.
Since I'm making one random reply I might as well mention I used to dream about going to school and not being able to find my class. I think the dream had me skipping all classes (which I did, to go write code instead) for so long that I didn't even know what classes I was supposed to be in or where they were.
Part of my school PTSD is why we (mostly) home schooled our kids.
I was pretty traumatized with parental expectations in school. Starting from high school, to college, to graduate school, I always had the same dream at the start of semesters - I'm incredibly late to the first class to the point I basically miss it. It has a cascading effect where in the dream, I basically feel doomed to be behind all semester. I've never had this dream outside of when I was a student, and that includes a very long hiatus in finishing college.
This is story is one of those things where you read it and the explanation is so obvious, but it never hit you until you see it written out.
But this doesn't give any meaningful answer to the question, just some speculation that anyone could make and which doesn't seem to be backed by any scientific evidence (of course, I'm aware there is probably no such evidence, but they could be more straightforward about the answer to the title question being "we have no idea").
FTL is also used as an abbreviation for "faster than light" in sci/scifi discussions of exotic methods of fast travel.
As for the OP site, it is not even possible to scroll down... it's stuck in the top. Shitty JS.
I told my former teammates about this probably two years ago, and as it turned out, many of them have been having this exact same dream.
When I get really anxious, I've learned to notice it not because of how I feel, but because of what I think about. My mind does two things. It will either distract me with soothing ideas (video games, side gigs) or (like TFA) it will go full anxiety and I'll hyper-focus on anything in the past that made me feel helpless, angry, or afraid.
Anxiety manifests as exam dreams, resurfacing relationship issues suddenly, body image woes, or just constantly checking to see if I have my wallet.
There's a much simpler explanation that works for me. Your mind is trying to explain the signals it's receiving, and it is grasping at straws by surfacing memories that triggered similar signals. It's a byproduct of a correlation engine and that's pretty much it.
I understand the obsession with divining meaning in arbitrary shared experience, but if my 350,000 hrs of use has taught me anything, it's that the mind is an arbitrary, guideless storyteller.
There's actually quite a bit of research supporting this, it turns out.
No, there are no good schools.
High schools went downhill when teachers stopped spinning homespun silk
I occasionally feel the calling to go back to school for the sheer joy of learning and mastery. It’s an odd feeling though, because I always hated school, from elementary to undergrad.
Loving higher ed is pretty common. Loving high school, way, way less so.
Wew. I find this remarkable that someone has been in every school of the world and is now posting here to report back on his experience.
All the dreams I have about high school and university (and it’s not so many) involve having fun with the friends I made there.
I kind of have to wonder what other people go through.
If at any point in that chain you fail, you've been led to believe your life will be a failure, there are no social programs to save you. You will work minimum wage for life.
And if you do succeed and get a degree, your reward is $100k in student debt. Which you will have to pay down over the course of 20 years working corpo jobs and barely scraping by, since you need to enrich landlords in the process.
The period from high school to the end of university was probably the most intellectually interesting part of my life. It was like discovering how the world works, finally being free, going some places, meeting some people, experimenting socially, reading books.
Could be an interesting research topic.
So you might be on to something.
You say most countries, but if you forget homeschooling I'd say this is pretty much 100% of systemic education on the planet right now.
So similar to the stories in the article
I don't think I've ever had a dream like that. I have dreamed I was back hanging out with my friends again, or exploring a weird sub-basement under the school, but nothing like what people are describing.
During the dream the mind starts to realize something is wsrong, like "it is Ssunday why am I at school" , but sometimes the thought is "I did not prepared in years for this subject, in fact I was sure I finished the university, but then if I am here it means I still need to pass one more exam because I did not finished, then you get stressed out that something went wrong with the birocracy or you forgot to do some exam or sign something and you don't have finished"
My opinion is that there is no encoded way your subconscions is telling you are stressed about something, I remember in my high school years , my eye sight was getting worse slowly and I had many dreams where I am getting blind or my eyes are glued and can't opened them, pretty direct manifestation of the fears and anxiety without any metaphors with hidden meaning.
https://sci-hub.se/https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1961.110...
The only consistent thing I can say is that if the dream situation occurs in real life, then my feelings and emotional response to the situation will likely be the same. That's been the sole valid anchor for me.
Anxiety about "authority figure" is a little odd, for example, relating to my school dream of having to vacate my hostel room and realising I lost the key..a friend comes up with "I think I have it" and upon checking the keybunch, it doesn't have my room's key. I'm not panicking but don't want the room door to be smashed down when I'm not around. I have something old and precious inside I need to grab.
But for me, it is speaking up to the teacher (telling him he is wrong), or confidently not caring about what the teacher is ordering the class to do.
Or event confidently deciding not to go to school today.
I can earn a living with my programming skills, I have 0 reasons to endure school bullshit anymore.
By all rights, I should have nightmares from those years but all of mine come from more recent events or entirely fictional ones.
The good dreams are usually out of the stories I write.
It’s not that surprising that a situation you dealt with frequently in your teenage years is still there. I usually bluff my way through high school dream situations successfully. Feels good.
But some part of us, call it spirit if you like, still recognises and observes what is going on. Perhaps it tries to nudge us back towards authenticity and away from the entrained, domesticated behaviour, that will have us coding our own future dystopia.
Now I have recurring dreams about having one class that I haven’t studied for at all and there are 6-8 weeks left in the semester. Long enough that I could study at the expense of literally all of my waking time, but short enough that there is real anxiety I might fail this class and not be able to graduate.
At least now I know having these dreams now is evidence of waking anxiety that I have to manage.
I’m married and we’ve been together for 10 years. I regularly have dreams featuring my wife’s sister as she was in my grade and I see her pretty often now. My wife’s name/persona will only very occasionally be in my dreams, but never her face. I didn’t know her back then. I also have a nearly one year old daughter and she’s been referenced in dreams but not seen.
To be honest, it freaks me out a little. I had a ski accident when I was 12 where I had a concussion, so maybe that did something. Is anyone else out there like me?
Future generations will look back in horror, if we're lucky.
One can hope.
We’re homeschooling which paradoxically ends up with our kids thinking school is some magical place where everything is great and you get to hang out with friends all day.
I went to an American high school and a former commie one (Albania), and I can tell you the American HS was a walk in the park in comparison to the one back home.
My take is that this is a pretty universal occurrence.
On the other hand, many children are born into circumstances so bad school is a welcome relief. Warmth, regular food, some intellectual stimulation, people who don’t hit them, ever. It’s not what you’d want for your child but it beats what lots of children get at home.
High school in particular was by far the most stressful sustained period of time in my life—I've had the odd day or week that might measure up, here and there, but never months in a row (at least you get Summers off). I've very quickly quit jobs that turned out to be a small fraction as stressful as high school was—they're vastly worse than a decent work environment, but still not as bad as high school. It's that bad. And I had a pretty easy high school experience! No intense bullying, no gang violence happening at/around school, none of that stuff.
9-10 hours a day of work (if you're doing all your homework, anyway), plus more if you actually want to be earning any money. Rushed minutes-long passing periods several times every single day. Having to ask to go take a shit if you didn't manage to fit that in to your few moments of semi-free time. About 6 hours per day comprising ~50-minute stretches that are about as draining as sitting in that many meetings of that length in a day (which is quite the fuck draining). Super-early mornings in most places, in the time of the life that's the very worst for that kind of thing, physiologically and psychologically. The sheer weirdness of spending almost all your time with a whole bunch of people about the same age as you.
The number of people you are around and interact with in a day, navigating their emotions and demeanors and all that, teachers and students and administrators, exceeds what I've ever seen at any job by a long shot. That you may at any moment be subject to behavior that would get someone arrested or at least fired from a job in the adult world, but you'll still have to be around the perpetrator for potentially years with no real way to leave yourself.
Immovable extremely short deadlines and unchangeable scope—hope you don't have the odd day where you just don't feel up to it, because the thing they assigned you today is due tomorrow, period. All your work literally thrown in the trash soon after you finish it. Near-zero tolerance for real life getting in the way of the work. Sick? LOL, no, there's not someone to take on a little extra work so you're not doubling up when you get back—it's all on you, have fun with the pile of inane tasks to complete while you still feel kinda shitty. Personal days? "Mental health" days? LOL no.
It's very, very bad. Strict rules and enforcement, weird and toxic social environment, tight and short deadlines completing assignments that serve no external purpose whatsoever covering things you don't care about (sure, that's kinda just how education has to be, at least to some extent, but that doesn't make it not-demoralizing).
I don't love the comparison to prison but it really is one of the closer analogs from the "real world", or maybe notoriously-bad careers/jobs (Amazon warehouses?) that employ people with few other options, though in my experience even most low-wage, low-skill jobs aren't anywhere near as bad as high school (but I've also not worked in the notoriously-bad ones).
My high school dreams (well, nightmares) finally mostly stopped... in my early 30s. Mostly. That's a hell of an effect. And again, my experience was surely in the top half, at least, as high school experiences go.
I think it has more to do with school being the first place you have those pseudo-professional experiences of "Ahhhh! I blew it! I didn't work hard enough!" So your brain is like, "I think I have this one in the archive somewhere."
It's hard wired evolved response to surviving life-threatening experiences, such as being attacked by a predator. The brain processes those experiences over and over to help avoid them in real life in the future.
We don't get attacked by predators anymore, but we have the same brains circuits as animals who did. So the process just plays out on whatever unpleasant life experience it can grab onto.
Maybe this dream is due to the fact that I missed at least half of all my classes because of basketball at the rec center.
Walking into class for the last course I need to graduate. Oh, didn't remember the final exam was today. I didn't even study for it. In fact, I don't think I even ever picked up the textbook. I get handed the test and I don't understand a single question. I'm going to fail and have to stay in school for another semester. Plus, apparently, I forgot to put on clothes when I left the house. I'm in class completely naked. Not again!
One of my regular dreams, along with the one where I get fired and go back to the manual labor job.
I find myself in my old high school and stuff has changed and is really confusing. I end up being compelled to go to classes and somehow have a schedule foisted on me that's too complex to be readable. I feel anxiety that the other students will notice my graying hair!
I'm always in the middle of a test that I didn't study for. There's a nebulous higher stakes component to it beyond just failing. I can't read the questions for some reason, but I feel the topic of the test, and it's different every time. Some nights it's high school, others college, but now mostly licensure-related since I guess that was the last time I actually took a test.
but i also have vivid memories of being only months old and laying in the crib...
but I cant recall what I had for lunch yesterday
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my dream trigger is if I attempt to use a phone in dream or read a pricetag, or attempt to clean up a mess...
Still today, 30 years later, I get these dreams. Usually when I have a big work or life challenge coming up. And the nightmares still boost my confidence (though the nightmares themselves suck).
I also spent about a decade in the U.S. Air Force, and even though I’ve been out 15 years now I still dream that I’ve forgotten my uniform hat, and separately that I get called back in and am fearful because I still have only the previous generation of uniform style, which was phased out years ago.
I finally realized it was just a carry over from years of being a real procrastinator when it came to getting my school work done and the gnawing panic I would get knowing I had a lot of work and little time to do it.
It was weird that after recognizing the source that feeling dissipated pretty quickly and I really embraced being free of it all
I guess since I never worried about any of that crap in school, I’m not haunted by it.
After my 3rd job out of school, I stopped having those dreams.
The dreams I have are from the same age range, but are about making sure I get all those entitled Moms their Furbies before Christmas Eve while working at Toys R Us.
It isn't about school.
School and high school are the formative years of your life where you are essentially building who you will be as a person. College is generally your first taste of independence.
Do people who go to college as mature students have the same dreams?
i wonder if this is a consequence of the modern system or just inbuilt to us as a species.
I had a great time at school. Never learned for tests or exams, always good (enough) grades, never got bullied, lots of parties and girls and later on drugs.
I'd say I dream about this twice a year, being out of college for 11 years now.
A couple games have riffed on this:
You often have to do a TON of reading and synthesis in H or SS fields. Mind-boggling reading lists aren't uncommon. If you're lucky the prose is a friendly style. If not... well, you know that feeling of trying to take in a math text quickly? It's not quite that bad, but it's related, lots of unfamiliar phrasing and terminology that you have to work out the connections between and condense semantics from. And then... you may not have well-defined problems. Essay questions/assignments amount to "come up with some thesis and supporting arguments that show familiarity with the material and the ability to generate interesting insight." Do "interesting" and "shows familiarity with the material" sound like uncomfortably subjective assessments? Why yes. Yes they are. Good luck! Also measuring things and experiments are hard. You can be reasonably dull in the natural sciences and still gather a useful amount of empirical observation; in the social sciences or humanities you're going to have to be pretty clever to get good empirical observations at all.
OTOH I would agree that CS and Math often have an additional level of conceptual difficulty, especially the more abstract the corner of the field you're working with, from "you'll definitely need some well-chosen concrete examples as introductory points and probably a bunch of graduated problem sets leading to the eventual brain-twisting revelation" to "you don't understand this, you just get used to it."
I'm considering a grad program that blends the two, so maybe I'll change my mind when I'm done.
Here I hope to give some examples for some lessons that might help others. Some of what I give are opinions where some people might differ.
I consider the US system of formal education K-12, college, and graduate school through Master's based on classes, tests, and grades. Ph.D. is related but often quite different. I can't comment on schools of law or medicine.
(1) Racket?
This formal education does a lot of good in the sense that the US would be a lot worse off if the whole system were abolished.
Still, a lot about this system is too close to being a racket, a lot of misleading the students, a lot of serious harm done to some of the students, and good for the schools.
(2) Remember?
Yes, I remember school! I don't have bad dreams but can't forget.
Some that I can't forget are the girls! Uh, maybe these days it is politically incorrect to mention, but I was a boy, now am a man, there has been no ambiguity, and I very much do remember the girls. Often they tried hard to be be pretty and otherwise feminine and were very successful.
E.g., in 9th grade algebra class, I looked over to the right along the wall and saw some of the girls, perfect posture, very well dressed, immaculate, perfect decorum, etc. They struggled with the course, but I found it easy; so at times I tried to help them, but they didn't want my help!
When I was 14, I met a girl of 12, and we tried to be boyfriend/girlfriend. About 18 months later we had a misunderstanding, that we handled poorly, and broke up.
But she was the prettiest human female I ever saw in person or otherwise. I downloaded her high school graduation picture from Facebook and keep it in the UR corner of my computer screen. Can't forget her.
A few years ago, a women explained to me, at that age, 12 and early teens, girls are the prettiest they ever get -- seems true for the girls I in was in class with in grades 6-12. Can't forget.
But there is a lot I'd prefer to forget:
From nearly all the teachers nearly all the time, I got a lot of contempt.
In math and science, occasionally I would fight back, take a problem others were struggling with and solve it. And I had some significant victories -- on the standardized tests of aptitude and accomplishment, in math and science I was one of the best students in the school, but mostly the contempt continued.
Once for fun I attacked how to inscribe a square in a semi-circle. My approach seemed novel so I wanted to check. The teacher said "You can't do that.". Later I discovered that she was wrong, that I had reinvented similitude. Can't forget. I learned a lesson: In K-12 and college, some of the teachers are actually not very good with their subject.
The social situation was a mystery to me: It was very competitive, with maybe even a pecking order. I had no idea what was going on; I was no good at the game if only because I had no idea there was a game.
Some of the boys took athletics quite seriously, but I saw no reason to do that.
Some of the pecking order depended on academic performance and, as I look back, maybe I was doing well at that (but didn't know it).
Then for the girls, eventually it dawned on me that for the girls my age, I likely was not going to be very successful socially because I was fighting Mother Nature, Darwin, and likely the parents of the girls. Instead, once the girls started being interested in boys, they were more interested in boys 2-4 years older than they were.
But there is a cliche: The boys are interested in things and the girls, in people. So, in the social pecking order game, the girls will dominate.
I wish someone had explained to me that game and other issues and lessons of socialization.
(3) Tests and Grades.
My father was an expert in education, had his Master's in it, yes, had a teaching certificate for grade school, and had a career in high end education theory and practice for the US Navy. But, for my grades, he didn't care! So, at home I was getting no big push to make A's. Lesson: If he didn't care much about grades, maybe they were not very important.
In the 4th grade, we had a spelling test, and I missed "pneumonia". When I saw how the correct spelling was so far from being either intuitive or phonetic, I still wanted to learn the important material but gave up on spelling and grades.
So, I learned the arithmetic but didn't bother with the tedious, redundant exercises in a big workbook. The teacher sent a message home that I would complete the workbook or she would fail me. Dad gave me a little arithmetic test and concluded that, yes, I was plenty good at the arithmetic. Then he looked at the workbook, and together we used a calculator to fill in all the results. So, again I got contempt for grades.
I never got over my contempt for grades. In particular, I never lost sleep, got an anxiety disorder, or had bad dreams about grades.
My summary: Knowledge can be really important. Formal education can be one way to get some parts of the important knowledge. But courses, credits, and grades are usually a bit distant from being directly helpful later in school or in practice.
In some situations, a perfect or nearly perfect grade point average can be helpful. In nearly all academic situations, getting such a grade point average is very stressful. There is considerable question if such grades are worth the stress.
Short of perfect or near perfect grades, possibly surprisingly grades don't count for much, either for or against the student.
In particular, possibly surprisingly, in the best US research universities, for a Ph.D., there is some contempt for the idea that a Ph.D. will be awarded for high grades in courses.
There is something of a secret concern, cliche: Some student has been making grades of A from the first grade on, has done really well at doing what she (the main concern is for girls!) was told, but can't do original research. This concern is likely more from some profs being arrogant about their research than they are with actual experience with such students.
Some universities make a point of stating that there is no coursework requirement for a Ph.D. Instead of grades, a usual hurdle is the qualifying exams. And important beyond all else is publishable original research.
Or, in short, once submit a paper for publication, no one checks your grade point average. And once the paper is accepted, no one cares about your grade point average.
In grad school, I got contempt from the faculty. Then I took an unsolved problem in an old subject and got a nice solution. The work was clearly publishable. The contempt went away. Then no one cared about my grades, when I made A's and when I didn't.
In general there are ways other than course grades to show aptitude and accomplishment, and usually these other ways can make up for grades of B, C.
K-12 can give, each year, for each subject, a standardized achievement test. A student who does really well on one those tests should have a reason to complain if they are also given a low grade in the subject.
E.g., there are the SAT and GRE exams. And over a wide range of possibilities, at times actual practical achievement can count a lot more than grades.
When I was a prof teaching an applied math course, I had a little approach: I would hand out some exercises, work them in class, state that the tests would be like the exercises, and advise the students "If you can do well on these exercises, then you should do well on the test."
But exercises on the tests would be fairly easy -- making an A was not difficult.
Then the rest of the class would be for more advanced material. Students could take it seriously or not as they wished. And some of the students did take the more advanced material seriously: It was good working with them, fun for me, productive for them, with no stress about grades.
So I think this dictum applies: When a title asks "Why" first ask "If".
BTW, given the current state of psychology, 50%+ of psychology is culture-specific. (See "How emotions are made")
I tried at least 5 times to finish college. I honestly gave it "the old college try" over, and over, and over again. I really wanted to please my father with that piece of paper in my hand. But that path just wasn't for me.
Elementary school and high school were marvelous, formative experiences for me. The schools were truly safe, secure environments where the Catholic faculty and staff respected me and upheld my human dignity, no matter what. I was never hurt or mistreated by the Irish sisters, nor by the priests and religious, or lay teachers. Now contrast that with my home life where I was subjected to endless shame, emotional trauma, and humiliation. I basically wanted to escape to school and stay there forever.
Unfortunately this came apart at the seams in college, because guess what? My parents had always been the ones pushing and cajoling me through homework and projects and tests and perfect attendance. Without my dual-helicopter parents doing all the work for me, I was doomed to failure, over and over in college. So I dropped out again and again. It wasn't for lack of trying.
Years ago, I did have "school flashback" dreams. I was naked in class. I forgot to study for a final exam. I was being teased or bullied by classmates. Yeah, it was all on replay for years, but I worked past that.
I took a final swing at earning a degree and I got halfway to an Associate's. But truthfully, I did finish what I started, because I earned three professional certifications and landed a fantastic steady job. So in the end, my college days weren't wasted, despite all the credits I'll leave on the table.
I'm grateful for the faculty, staff, and admins who always treated me with utmost respect, kindness, and reminded me of my innate human dignity, and through them I was able to discern a vocation as an educator in my own right.
I don't know anyone who ever dreams about school (non-US obviously)
My friends are all in their 50s, and they all tell me they still have nightmares about school back in China. Not sure if school in China is still like that, though.
I finished high-school 25 years ago.
I was very sleep-deprived at university and once fell asleep after pulling an all-nighter for a Saturday morning exam, only to wake up on Sunday evening, with another exam looming Monday morning. Another time I overslept and was 2 hours late for a 3-hour exam. So, my dreams actually have roots in reality.
Funnily enough, I thought this was a Korean thing...