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Comment by vacri | Hacker News Reader

People wonder why high school aged students are unruly, unpleasant, and filled with deep negative emotions (anger, disdain, need-to-rebel)

They don't wonder it at all; it's not some mystery solved by sitting in a classroom. Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions. Items 1 and 3 are common in the working world, and there's a few jobs out there as a 2 as well (particularly if you focus on the 'lack of autonomy' part), yet we don't see the same kinds of behaviour from those workers.

Adolescence is a time where you're finally becoming an adult, finding where the boundaries are, and putting your own flavour on life. There's a certain amount of experimentation with that, and it's entirely normal to have more unruliness amongst adolescents.

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I do sit a lot during my day job, but I can tell you that my sitting conditions are vastly more preferable than those of the typical high school student. I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

In high school, I sat in chairs that often felt like they were going to fall apart, and my butt was numb or in pain half the time and sometimes my back too. The desk rarely was big enough to accommodate even just a book and a sheet of paper side by side, which was incredibly infuriating to me. Classrooms were typically horrifyingly dreary. And just getting up to stretch or walk around often wasn't an option.

Echoing all of this plus I'm left handed and every desk in every class I ever sat in was geared for right handed students.

http://thumbs.dreamstime.com/x/student-desk-844709.jpg

I went to high school in the south (Mississippi) and north (Washington state); I can tell you the latter was much more accommodating to lefties than the former.

> south (Mississippi) and north (Washington state)

The whole concept of "North vs. South" is an anachronism from a time when most of middle-/western-America wasn't part of the picture. Washington state, while north of Mississippi, is part of the Pacific Northwest, not part of the "North." You'd be in for a rough time if you would expect (e.g.) Washington (state), North Dakota, Ohio, and Rhode Island to all have some sort of a normalized "Northern experience."

True. This was in the 80s/90s, maybe its better now, but Mississippi was like a third world country even compared to Tennessee, Kentucky, or some parts of Arkansa, while Washington definitely has better schools than next-door libertarian Idaho.

On another note, no one is left handed in China, so I've had problems in Beijing with the inevitable right handed desk at work.

Or rather, they suppress all their lefties.

> I sit in an $800+ chair, with a desk with more space than I need, next to a huge window. I can get up anytime I want and go for a walk or break.

Truly a representative case!

It's pretty representative of tons of professional workers I know from many industries and extremely typical in technology companies. Most high quality office chairs are pretty expensive; the Aeron chair that is used at so many tech companies is easily in that price range, depending on where you buy it (and in what quantity).

Maybe the only thing that's slightly unusual is the window.

If your company is not providing comfortable working spaces, then there are plenty of competitors which are.

The real point, though, is that high school classrooms are often downright uncomfortable and unaccommodating. I'd rather stand all day than have to sit at those desks again for long periods of time. (And that'd be a lot healthier, too.)

So your rejoinder to my point is "professionals have nice working conditions"? If so, perhaps go visit a call centre. I've worked in one where the floor staff had less than a meter of desk space each. Or clerks in a crappy government department. Or try being a taxi driver. Professionals also have a nice salary that keeps their interest; rarely is it below median wage. These shitty places don't have a lot of acting out, and in my experience, most of those who do act out are either still in adolescence or not long out of it.

Seriously, the reason why the adolescent demographic shows 'anger, disdain, and need-to-rebel' is not going to be solved by giving them aeron chairs and free reign to use the toilet. Crappy chairs in high school don't help, but to imply that they're the cause of adolescent acting out? It makes me wonder how far removed from your own adolescent experience you are, not to mention how many other demographics you're thinking of.

Call centers are the archetype of a bad work situation. If you are aiming for classes to meet that standard, you are aiming very low.

I didn't say they were good. I said that they don't cause the problems we associate with adolescents in adult staff: ie: it's not the bloody chairs that cause adolescent acting out. Saying "I don't act out. I have an expensive chair" is not a counterpoint.

You really don't think sticking somebody in an uncomfortable chair for 7-8 hours a day, giving them a desk that's too small to even accommodate the work they're expected to do, telling them to basically shut up all day, and getting on to them for even getting up to take a 3 minute stretch-walk is going to have any impact at all on adolescent behavior?

There are reasons that all these things are done, of course. But pretending that they don't have an impact is just silly. There are huge costs to structuring classrooms like this.

I recently spent all day in such circumstances and it really reminded me of how oppressive the conditions in high school felt. By the end of the seminar, I was just flat-out tired and frustrated and I wasn't listening to anything the speaker was saying. I just wanted out.

Honestly, if decent chairs are too expensive, then we'd be better off throwing the chairs away completely. Have students stand. Just use standing desks that don't have to be shaped so that you can get in or out of the seat easily, thereby sacrificing half of the working surface. This solves the problem of not being able to afford reasonable chairs and it's far healthier for everybody as well.

To quote myself: "Crappy chairs in high school don't help". I'm not 'pretending they don't have an impact'. Mind you, I'm also not pretending that $800+ office chairs are the norm for adult [office] workers, and that it's those chairs that underly the difference between adult and adolescent behaviour.

Are you aware that adolescents who don't go to school - like home-schooled kids, early drop-outs, kids in developing countries with no access to high school - that those adolescents still act out?

Or that adolescents have had a long history of being featured in stories as not behaving 'appropriately' (such as Romeo and Juliet), well before the advent of modern high school?

You're just attacking strawmen. Where did I say the cost of the chair is the determining factor? Where did I say that improving high school conditions would just universally eradicate bad behavior in adolescents? You've made up all this. Go re-read my first post which offended you so and see if you can find any of that in there.

You were upset to some degree that I mentioned an $800 chair and you seemingly won't let go of that even in the face of the broader context of what I clearly meant. All I ever said is that really bad classroom conditions do play a role. You agree with that even, but are still fighting back against an imaginary opponent.

And in my experience, yes, even call centers have more comfortable seats and desks than the typical high school classroom. I certainly didn't always have a full square meter of desk space in high school.

And yet, in a pyramid shaped economic structure, there probably are 100 call center employees for every dotcom programmer, making it extremely representative of "real world office conditions".

Up-thread there was a comparison from office workers to high school students. Do you really think that the "average office worker" has a chair (in the price-range of an Aeron), an office with a view, and a flexible schedule?

As a paper pusher during college, I had a $400ish chair, a desk with more than enough space to spread out the documents I was working with and the keyboard I was using, and could get up and take a quick break whenever I felt like it, just to stretch my legs, go to the bathroom without asking, grab a quick bit of food, or whatever. I could snack at my desk as I saw fit. While they preferred I not take personal calls at work, it was similarly acceptable to momentarily step out to answer important calls. They were more concerned I moved a bunch of papers than I sat obediently at my desk every second of every day. The only difference is that I wasn't sat next to a window, but across a cubicle farm from one, but I could clearly see out a bank of windows if I lifted my head a bit from my desk.

So yes, I actually think that it's fairly representative of the experience of US office workers when compared to high-schoolers, which are given a much smaller work area in much worse conditions with considerably less freedom to deal with the reality of every day life.

Most of these comments follow a similar pattern:

  <Single Anecdote>

  Therefore, I believe that my experiences are
  fairly representative the entire population.

Pretty sure the average worker can get up from his/her chair and stretch whenever he wants. A luxury high-schooler do not have.

You can replace $800 chair with $200 chair, maybe a cubicle vs. an open office and no windows as a typical medium case insurance company / call center office worker. And if your at a place where the rent is cheap, your cubicle is probably bigger than his desk too.

Still much better than a lot of student classrooms.

> Adolescents, as a demographic, have always been known to be raging pits of hormones with mood swings and strong passions.

The adolescents in middle ages were treated as adults and they have behaved so. There was also no equivalent to modern schooling back then.

Adolescents, as a demographic, have only been around for about 100 years.

this is a bit condescending to teens to write them off as that. Biologically we are not programmed to sit in a classroom, teenage girls are programmed by evolution to do something not too dissimilar to HS (show off their new found sexuality and attract a mate), boys on the other hand are better suited to hitting stuff with sticks. That's exactly the kind of mate you want if you're a teenage girl, someone who can go off and bring nice big juicy protein sources for all those babies that are coming soon enough after flaunting their newly grown hips and breasts that signal sexual maturation.

About the only times that boys get to be what evolution programmed them for is during war time. When boys race their cars and do crazy shit we think of it as delinquent behaviour, but those are the exact same skills that made for the best pilots.

Algebra and Shakespeare didn't feature much in evolution's "plan". Even Shakespeare would rather have been shagging Queen Elizabeth than writing Elizabethan soap operas, but he needed to put food on his table... And let's not forget where Richard Feynman did some of his best work - in a strip club. The modern world sadly is something that will take us a long time to biologically catch up to.

Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'. It's merely the name for a process, like 'the water cycle' or 'the bessemer process'. Evolution can result in things, like any process, but it doesn't design, and it's wrong to characterise it this way.

This being said, if you're looking to the behaviour of primitives, the male-heavy roles were not 'war', but 'hunt'. And no, we're not all driven by sex - some of us are driven heavily, others driven lightly, and others still are asexual. And even those who are heavily driven by sex find time for other things in their life.

Anyway, it's ironic that you ping me for 'writing them off' (I don't see where I do that, seriously), but then turn around and say that they're only doing what 'evolution planned for them' - particularly your stated role for what teenage girls should be doing.

> Evolution is not sentient, and doesn't 'design' or 'plan' or 'program'.

Literally true but the effect is "as though" it designs or plans. See eg "Why evolution is true" or any evolution text book eg "Evolution" by Douglas Futuyma.

As for war versus hunting, the levels of violence in hunter-gatherer societies were astronomical with death rates from violence typically in the 30-50% range. So yes 'war' though not usually on a very large scale.

There were some exceptions. For example San people (formerly known as the Bushmen of the South African desert) had as weapons bows and arrows with slow-acting poisons. A full-on war would result in everyone getting killed (mutually assured destruction). So they tended to avoid doing that.

The effect isn't 'as though' it designs or plans at all, any more than clouds 'plan' to rain on the plains. Evolution is better described as 'survival of the fittest' than 'programmed to -foo-'. Keeping it phrased correctly also helps keep specious Intelligent Design arguments at bay - by talking about 'design' or 'programming', you're implying a sentient cause. And you don't actually need to say things like 'programmed by evolution' anyway. It's better to say 'resulting from evolution' or similar. Makes the same point, but keeps it correctly phrased.

'survival of the fittest' is also misleading because fittest doesn't mean how buff you are, but how successfully one fits into their current environment.

Being ripped doesn't save you from the plague, but it might help later against the zombies.

no, please stop spreading such misleading information, it is not survival of the fittest at all. go read about evolution please. You're right, evolution is not sentient, we're passed that, it is useful to think of it in that light when looking backwards at the process (as we can only really do anyway), we've all read the Blind Watchmaker and don't need this obvious point made over and over when it's been explained why we are doing so.

to be honest I can't follow what you're even trying to say. It's making no sense, and in general just inaccurate.

I'm not talking about individuals, but in general, and in that regard we are all sex driven. Of course evolution isn't sentient, but when you think about it, it's a reasonable way to think about it because the results are the same. It just depends which way you're looking at the process, looking forward, you cannot refer to evolution as a design process, but looking backwards you can. The design we see today is the result of the evolutionary process. It's tiresome having to explain all this.

hunting skills are much the same as war skills and man certainly hunted (I believe that's what I said) but we are also a very violent species.

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