Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jackowayed | Hacker News Reader

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As a high school student, I can tell you that what kids (or at least I) REALLY don't have passion for is tedious, boring work and classes that are boring.

Some teachers give far more homework than is necessary to learn the material. I understand that not all learn as fast as I, but it really can get ridiculous and become a waste of time, which makes kids not just hate the homework but school in general. I like my calc class so much more this year because it's like many college classes--the homework is optional. I get A's on the tests w/o doing the homework, so why should I do homework?

Teachers need to make the material more interesting by applying it to the real world more. So many times in my calc class I've heard "Why do I care about whether this series converges?" and the like. Teachers need to come up with interesting ways to teach and show how it's actually used so that the students will care.

I like learning infinitely more when I'm building apps at home than at school, and it's not just because I like coding more than other stuff. I see it's use. The use of learning about lamdas is so that I can make x work so that this app will do what I want it to do.

> "so why should I do homework?"

Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have. It's not just about the tests.

> "Why do I care about whether this series converges?"

You can abstract anything to the point of irrelevance. Don't. Try to learn something from it. You're developing problem-solving skills, not merely finding the sum of a series.

"Because the ability to just suck it up & get things done even when you don't enjoy every minute of it is a very important trait to have."

I think that this is true, but after four years of working hard at a demanding high school I was actually substantially less able to "suck it up and get things done." I don't know if that's because high school burnt me out or because I changed mentally during high school or something else, but it makes me a lot less willing to accept that forcing people to work hard on boring shit makes them more likely to work hard on other boring shit in the future.

The ability to avoid pointless work in favor of things that matter is probably my most helpful learned trait.

Agreed, that is a very important skill. But it's not always possible to avoid the grunt work ... even running your own business, someone still has to take out the trash (metaphorically), and the buck stops with you.

I've run into this a lot doing data analysis. Sometimes it takes 20-30 minutes to manually clean up the data (or more often, if it's structured enough, write a script to do it), but other people often overestimate the amount of work required, and decide that the grunt work isn't worth it. But it lets me make better conclusions from the data, so it's usually worth the effort.

" But it's not always possible to avoid the grunt work ... even running your own business, someone still has to take out the trash (metaphorically), and the buck stops with you."

An enviable skill is to be able to see past the grunt work to the value down the road.

The ability to not suck it up when you think it's definetely pointless is a great ability to have. It's what pushes some of us to choose challenging jobs or to go and create our own company.

There are sometimes when you have to do work that you don't like and you just have to suck it up and do it, but it's much easier and rewarding when this job is useful (example, researching a lot to finally decide which type of structure you'll incorporate with.

I actually have little issue w/ learning abstract concepts like rewriting functions as series. But my classmates often cite that as a reason they shouldn't bother putting in the time to really learn it.

I'm saying that a good way for teachers to engage students more is to show them examples that actually have some reflection on the real world, so that they can't say "this is totally useless. I won't bother learning it."

Teachers teaching well, making you realize the beauty and power of a converging series is what worked for me. If the teachers enjoys what they're teaching, it's infectious and makes you want to learn as well.

Not only that, but you should do homework because it forces you to learn the material through spaced repetition, which will create more access cues for your long-term memory.

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