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Comment by youngian | Hacker News Reader

Right on all counts. I wish everyone had these kinds of priorities and that sensible outlook on life.

I wouldn't trade my education at a broke-ass, shoddy, prison-like public city school for any private or suburban school with vaulted ceilings and brand new textbooks and everyone else looking and acting exactly like me.

And sure, there is crime in cities, but it's not like us city dwellers live in constant fear, scampering from one blue telephone to the next. My parents have had one break-in in the almost thirty years they've lived in the city. I've never been mugged or otherwise attacked. But I've met so many suburbanites who have ridiculous ideas about city life - all city dwellers carry around guns/knives, getting shot at is a frequent part of city life, etc.

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"and everyone else looking and acting exactly like me."

Is this ever really the case? It seems thrown out there so much, but I've never observed a case of people all acting the same. Especially in a school.

As someone who went to high school in the suburbs, yes, that was the case.

There were essentially two classes of kids at my high scool: the cool kids and the uncool kids. The cool kids were your standard preppy (American Eagle preppy, not actual New England preppy) football player types. The uncool kids wore black and were in band.

Fun story: I decided to start wearing my hair in liberty spikes one time. Every class period that day, each teacher started off by asking wtf was wrong with me. I almost got sent to the guidance counselor over it.

Oh, and there were no ethnic minorites at my school. When I was a senior in high school, I heard rumor of one black kid just starting the 7th grade, but I never saw him. But no Asians, no Indians (of either kind), no Hispanics. I didn't interact with a non-Christian white person on a regular basis until college.

> Fun story: I decided to start wearing my hair in liberty

> spikes one time. Every class period that day, each teacher

> started off by asking wtf was wrong with me. I almost got

> sent to the guidance counselor over it.

Shock-value styles don't indicate much to most observers, other than that someone is unhappy with the status quo and wants to shake things up in an immature manner. Seriously, what did you expect to accomplish by that? Do you really think your teacher's response was unjustified? I don't see how such behavior demonstrates a real diversity in anything of importance or value.

> Oh, and there were no ethnic minorites at my school.

So unless the people in your school were BORN different, you are judging them as being the "same", and of diminished worthiness with whom to interact?

Seems almost like racism - prejudging people based on the skin into which they were born.

The lack of ethnic minorities is an indicator of cultural and behavioral homogeneity, not the definition of it (i.e. the important question is why weren't there any ethnic minorities there?).

And yeah, the teacher's response was unjustified (precisely because hairstyle is such a trivial thing).

unjustified...

and a terrible teaching practice. How could a teacher expect the student's mind to be ready for learning after being made to feel like a freak of nature? "WTF is wrong with you?! Okay, now turn to the chapter on quadratic equations." Did they think a student could just switch gears and turn off the emotional impact? (I'd be a little afraid of the student who could shrug it off.)

Teachers are supposed to inspire learning not setup barriers to it.

(Most of) my teachers weren't really trying to teach us. They were just there to get a paycheck.

To whit: almost half of my graduating class was reported as valedictorian to the colleges they applied to. Why? Everyone with over a 4.0 was valedictorian. How'd we get over a 4.0? Becuase they added the bonus for honors courses on after doing the division, not before. Get an A and a B in two honors courses? That's ((4 + 3) / 2) + (.25 * 2) = 4.0!

This is why I have such a low opinion of education in general.

Well, first of all, punk rock died before I was even born. In fact, it was happening when my parents and teachers were young adults, and they're totally unaware of any of that. This wasn't "Why is this kid acting out?", this was "who would ever do such a strange thing?" My mother once told me that she was alive in the 70s, and nobody listened to Black Sabbath, the media just likes to pretend that everyone did. People in the suburbs are completely isolated into their own little worlds, and they don't interact with (nor care to) anyone who comes from more than one little town over.

Secondly, lo and behold, I was both immature and unhappy with the status quo! So, I did exactly that. Accomplish something? It wasn't about accomplishment, it was about eliciting that reaction. It was pretty freaking hilarious. People acted like it was the end of the world. They couldn't possibly imagine that anyone would be different from anyone else in any real way. It's not like high school offered any kind of real academic challenge or interesting discussion. I had to do something to make those 8 hours of being babysat a day interesting, until I could get back home and start coding again.

I refer to race because that a pretty visible example of how everyone was the same. I don't believe that anyone is better than anyone else for anything but their accomplishments. Nice troll, though.

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