RE: Education and Motivation
January 11, 2013 at 3:24 am
(This post was last modified: January 11, 2013 at 3:37 am by Darth.)
I'm a high school drop out.
I didn't get motivated to learn until I was 20 or so. I failed year 11, twice. I rarely attended school and if I handed in an assignment, it was late.
I'm now a uni student. And while I still have a number of bad habits that I struggle with (assignments get done the night before, though they are never late) I'm a trillion times better than I was. The bad habits and my issues with school started round about year 7 (just before high school) but things got worse in year 10, and terrible in year 11.
To get into uni I had to sit the STAT test, which is a test for mature age students only, it gives you an equivalent ATAR mark (which is the final high school exam here in Australia,). The STAT test is divided into 2 components, written and 'maths' (it's more like logic, those maths game thingies). The ATAR mark is a score out of 100. Out of 100, I scored a 92.3. That was with a grand total of 3 hours preparation (going to the adult high school's 3 hours STAT prep session). A 92.3 is good enough to get me into all but the most competitive of courses, like medicine for instance (think it's 95 for that), and the courses with specific maths requirements.
That right there is one of the issues.
Without wanting to sound arrogant, I was rather brilliant. School was mind numbingly dull and what I learnt was largely out of my control. Little was challenging until I stopped showing up, then things eventually became challenging but for the entirely wrong reasons. I went from being in the top maths classes, to the mediocre ones, which didn't do my pride much good. Some of the things the second high school I attended (year 11) did in my seccond year there were more embarrassing still. What saved me was dropping out of that school and going to an adult high school (we have 2 main ones in my city). No nonsense, no P.E, no assemblies, no being treated like children (even though a select number of students were like me, minors who were fresh drop outs). As there were no nonsense, only the classes that you selected and needed, there was quite a large amount of free time to be had when compared to a normal high school. I still wasn't attending as much as I should have been, but it was better than year 11 had been. I had a large part of my Thursday free, so I went down to my local TAFE college (don't know quite how to describe them, they're post secondary education and they give technical certs and diplomas for the most part) to learn a language, as I had always wanted to do. And that was the important thing, learning what I wanted to learn. They had one of the languages I wanted on a thursday morning on a part time basis so I signed up. And I loved it. The next year I signed up to learn the language full time at the TAFE college (so dropping out of high school doing finishing year 12, our final year) and though it wasn't the most challenging of courses (until the interpreting course) it was what I wanted to do, so I showed up very regularly. This choice to leave the adult high school and go to TAFE however eventually led to me getting kicked out of home*. I trained to become an interpreter, though I failed the final test to become an interpreter with the national accreditation authority by a mere 1% (most fail on their first shot, I'll be doing it again don't you worry) but attending the language and interpreting courses gave me a love for linguistics, which led me to my current uni course (speech pathology, not linguistics, I do need a job after I graduate).
*with the languages you start at Cert II, and move up to CERT III, IV and diploma. TAFE isn't at all prestigious, and Cert II's are for the most part a complete joke.
I didn't get motivated to learn until I was 20 or so. I failed year 11, twice. I rarely attended school and if I handed in an assignment, it was late.
I'm now a uni student. And while I still have a number of bad habits that I struggle with (assignments get done the night before, though they are never late) I'm a trillion times better than I was. The bad habits and my issues with school started round about year 7 (just before high school) but things got worse in year 10, and terrible in year 11.
To get into uni I had to sit the STAT test, which is a test for mature age students only, it gives you an equivalent ATAR mark (which is the final high school exam here in Australia,). The STAT test is divided into 2 components, written and 'maths' (it's more like logic, those maths game thingies). The ATAR mark is a score out of 100. Out of 100, I scored a 92.3. That was with a grand total of 3 hours preparation (going to the adult high school's 3 hours STAT prep session). A 92.3 is good enough to get me into all but the most competitive of courses, like medicine for instance (think it's 95 for that), and the courses with specific maths requirements.
That right there is one of the issues.
Without wanting to sound arrogant, I was rather brilliant. School was mind numbingly dull and what I learnt was largely out of my control. Little was challenging until I stopped showing up, then things eventually became challenging but for the entirely wrong reasons. I went from being in the top maths classes, to the mediocre ones, which didn't do my pride much good. Some of the things the second high school I attended (year 11) did in my seccond year there were more embarrassing still. What saved me was dropping out of that school and going to an adult high school (we have 2 main ones in my city). No nonsense, no P.E, no assemblies, no being treated like children (even though a select number of students were like me, minors who were fresh drop outs). As there were no nonsense, only the classes that you selected and needed, there was quite a large amount of free time to be had when compared to a normal high school. I still wasn't attending as much as I should have been, but it was better than year 11 had been. I had a large part of my Thursday free, so I went down to my local TAFE college (don't know quite how to describe them, they're post secondary education and they give technical certs and diplomas for the most part) to learn a language, as I had always wanted to do. And that was the important thing, learning what I wanted to learn. They had one of the languages I wanted on a thursday morning on a part time basis so I signed up. And I loved it. The next year I signed up to learn the language full time at the TAFE college (so dropping out of high school doing finishing year 12, our final year) and though it wasn't the most challenging of courses (until the interpreting course) it was what I wanted to do, so I showed up very regularly. This choice to leave the adult high school and go to TAFE however eventually led to me getting kicked out of home*. I trained to become an interpreter, though I failed the final test to become an interpreter with the national accreditation authority by a mere 1% (most fail on their first shot, I'll be doing it again don't you worry) but attending the language and interpreting courses gave me a love for linguistics, which led me to my current uni course (speech pathology, not linguistics, I do need a job after I graduate).
*with the languages you start at Cert II, and move up to CERT III, IV and diploma. TAFE isn't at all prestigious, and Cert II's are for the most part a complete joke.
Nemo me impune lacessit.
