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Usually I say in conversation something along the lines of, <em>"Highschool is bad"</em>, and most people agree and we move on. In reality I don't just think highschool is bad… I think highschools are <strong>one of the worst social institutions to exist in the US</strong>. Most highschools are built in a way where they are <strong>perfected machines to <em>suck the soul out of learning</em></strong> for most if not all students.
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I'll take this blog to both flesh out my point and express just how much I hate the structure of highschool.

First lets imagine a student interested a subject—lets say history. They love reading through history, finding historical trends, reading stories, and finding unique links between certain periods. Maybe they have a couple papers written out describing the unique parallels between the Roman empire & current day US—predicting failure modes in our current system. Altogether the students future seems extremely useful & promising.

Now lets design a system to completely break down this passion.

1. **Let's waste their time.** Let's literally take 8 hours out of their day, every single weekday. Which hours of the day? How about the morning ones, the ones where people commonly do their best work. What if they don't want to go? Let's make it government mandated!

   *What about their time at home?* Surely we can't stop them from working on history at home. **Lets give them "homework" (~3 hours of work a day).** But we can't let this homework be a creative outlet for them, that would be too much. Lets make them simple things, like problem sets, ten pages of notes, or even writing an essay in another language (which you have to take).

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2. **Let's break their sense of community.** By telling them the only way they'll meet other people interested in history is in college. Of course the only way to get into college would be by checking the list—14 AP classes, 4.0 GPA, 1600 SAT, 36 ACT. If not someone else will check those boxes, someone else will get the community you want. Maybe you could lean into your passion—history?

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3. **Lets break their passion.** *This is the most evil, most deplorable part of highschool in my opinion.* Lets make them hate history. How do we go about this? Its pretty complicated and well thought out, so hang with me here.

   **First we need to convince them history is actually just memorizing facts.** How could we get them to think this obvious lie? We'll repeat it to them. Every single day. For 181 days straight. We'll tell them their worth, how much they know "history", is by how many dates they can recite. How many people can they fill in the blank for, how many passages from the textbook can they memorize.

   **Second, we need to prove to them that they hate history.** How do we make them think such a thing? Give them homework. Take their passion that they once loved doing, and condense it down into a grotesque mind numbing activity. Every day have them memorize ten different dates, memorize a new chapter of history. Don't focus on the big ideas, make sure to have the homework focus on the "gotchas"—the exact spelling of the names, the specific type of product, June vs July.

   **Last we need to make it hard to escape.** The problem here is teachers. They might actually have a sense of passion for the subject, they might possibly show these students what real history looks like. How do we pull of the task? Rank teachers by how well their students do at memorizing dates. Perfect. That way teachers are obligated to throw out any passion they have for the subject, obligated to assign as much homework as possible, obligated to grade as harshly as possible—solely as long as more students get a 5 on an AP test.

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Okay lets take a couple steps back. Do I regret my highschool experience? Surprisingly… I don't. **I managed to <a href="https://neelr.dev" style="color: #75a4c3;">do what I loved</a>, <a href="https://hackclub.com" style="color: #d47471;">meet communities outside of school</a>, and <a href="https://notebook.neelr.dev/stories/the-hacker-zephyr." style="color: #9065b0;">explore my passions</a>. In short, I was <span style="color: #cb932f;">lucky</span>.**

Though, if we invest so much time and effort into an educational system, ideally people who follow their passions and do what they love should be the norm—not an anomaly. How do we change such a system is an entirely different blog in and of itself (I have some outlines here <a href="https://notebook.neelr.dev/stories/education" style="color: #75a4c3;">on my blog about education</a>) but you can't deny the system is broken right now.

I'll keep my takes on the "what now" question pretty short for this (look above for more fleshed out takes):
- Charter/project focused schools are great but still fail in the way of mandatory classes + assigning students projects. Teachers are also still paid in metrics of how well their students do on standardized tests => leads to systemic issues.

- "Some highschools aren't as competitive => aren't that bad." My response here is mainly that the competitive highschools are at the current equilibrium given a majority of students want to go to college (limited seats mean inherent competition). Noncompetitive highschools will probably attract people who want to stand out => cause other students to start the rat race. We probably shouldn't be designing systems that work worse when there are more passionate people. 

- IMO College admission rates aren't the whole problem. We probably need a structure that 1) gets people to their passions quicker and 2) allows them to up-skill fast. If this happens then ideally colleges would of course want better people and the system would adapt pretty fast.

- Private schools seem to work better because they have the resources to tailor an education to every single student—think having college professors teaching for highschoolers. This just isn't scalable with almost 50k-70k per year per student. I also don't know how they work for students who already want to specialize (ie. why waste a students time teaching the Bohr model of an atom when they're interested in Roman history—it's extremely hard to align student current interests with what you "want to teach them")

- I'm bearish on the classroom + curriculum method of education. It seems fundamentally problematic to distill peoples interests into curriculum that they must follow (contrary to interests at times), as well as trying to align to 30+ student interests.

- Colleges seem better initially because you get much more freedom with classes (checking for the classroom problem), but I think this mindset still plagues mandatory "intro series" classes.

This blog post is more of a rant/expressing just how much I hate the system as it is right now and I definitely think there should be more discussion into how to reform it! This takes a ton of inspiration from <a href="https://worrydream.com/refs/Lockhart_2002_-_A_Mathematician's_Lament.pdf">"A Mathematicians Lament"</a>—I genuinely love this paper and think that it highlights a lot of the problems I find are crazy with todays educational system.

a quick rant + explanation of why I have this take

During all my years of school my motto was, "Just one more day". You have a test tomorrow and fifteen assignments due the day after? Take it one day at a time. Theres just one more day, then you can relax. 

Now its here! With tomorrow being my last day at school, I'm not exactly sure how to feel. Should I be happy that its all finally over, or be sad that it's ending? Surely I couldn't have enjoyed all the stress of completing mostly meaningless assignments, or cramming before a test just to forget the topics a couple days later. Maybe it was the people, but I've also met my fair share of people outside of school that I would bet are either on par or better than those at school.

So I guess this boils down to the question of, "what would you miss about school?", yet I'm grasping at threads to exactly what I would miss. Almost any aspect of school I could isolate, there is a better counterfactual that would be a better way to achieve that goal. Going to parties or libraries to make friends, self learning concepts instead of long lectures, and even joining sporting events for the community. So why would I miss school if every part of it could be replaced? The people themselves I could meet outside of the context of school if I really wanted. So why?

In reality I'd like to think its some version of Stolkhome Syndrome. The fact that my internal habits will be changing so drastically, not having a 9am-3pm schedule of pure lectures, changing to completely new method of socialization and learning—it'll be better, but scarily different. With days passing by fast, I'll make sure to keep in contact with as many people as possible, making sure the past 12 years will at least  remembered.

With so many of my projects & ideas put off till "after school ends", it begs the question of if they'll ever happen. Motivation doesn't seem to be magically entering my fingers as the end approaches, and I think I'm fine with that. At least now I won't have the constant excuse of school lurking around the corner, but I honestly don't know if thats enough to spur me into action. Hopefully I'll wake up tomorrow, school will be over, and I'll magically have everything in my life fixed—but I know that won't happen.

So if I had to summarize it all, this would be my open note to school:

I was so invested into the small moments, I never even realized you had passed since it was too late. Though not great in teaching or even socialization, I've been with you for these past 12 years. I'll miss how you put me in situations good and bad, forcing me to make friends in the hallways. Even when it was 3am and I was praying for you to just end, your uncaring bells still rung the next day.

Most of all though, I want to at least remember you—the amalgamation of all the people I've met in the past years. With every person I forget and every person I don't meet, a small part of that memory will fade into oblivion. I don't want to act like nothing happened for 12 years of my life.

I'm glad that you're over. I want to remember you. I hope I change.

what do you do when it really is the last day?

YAY, The school year is over! Online school was quite interesting, especially with my first AP tests, as well as managing to organize myself efficiently. Mainly my qualms with online school is only the "non-socialness" of it all, but I love the freedom it provides with learning, and the ability to review anything you need, without having to search for it. It definitely blurs the line between school and homework a lot, in addition to almost constant screen time (night shift 24/7 ganggg). I don't really feel the stress of taking 3 AP classes, but they all made finals season a lot harder with almost constant studying (hopefully I did well).

Looking back I think there are quite a few ways I could improve this year, but most of all I think that my main problem was staying concentrated. In a world full of distractions, being forced to be online 24/7 is fun, but also takes a lot from your productivity. I've tried to combat this in multiple ways, from just decluttering my digital space, to chucking my phone away. Either way, hopefully next year with in person school this won't be a problem. Another thing I want to do better with is taking more opportunities. I sometimes reject some because I don't have enough time, but almost always regret it, so this year i hope to accept more of them.

Now in the summer I have quite a few things going on, from a large scale data science internship, to taking 61A at Berkeley. My goals for over the summer would be just to create cool programming projects, hopefully something related to AI and circuits! Also I want to try posting bi-weekly (2 times a week) in my notebook for fun!

I'll just list out my achievements this school year for fun, and so I don't forget:

1st place Conrad Challenge, and Diversity Award

Good of Humanity Award DV Research Paper Competition

All A's second semester, and both semesters for only AP's

Qualified to NSDA National Debate Tournament (record TBD)

TeachAids Internship, and created CoviDB for Kids (2.4k+ hits)

USACO Silver (just tried it out of the blue, may study for it next year)

Hosted our Hack Club online with 30+ members and had fun

Learned Rust (been on my bucket list for so long, it has to make it lol)

Contributed a significant change to a large github repo, the Github CLI

Helped with Summer of Making, and Scrapbook for HackClub!

What are some things I could do better, things I liked, and my plans for summer!

#school

highschool is terrible

one more day

End Of School Reflection

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highschool is terrible

one more day

End Of School Reflection

#school