I am so bored!!!

[sbugir]

Well, I studied my butt off and graduated cum laude with a BA in English. But it was hard work. I still remember studying into the wee hours and cramming my brain with all that knowledge. And being an English major with a specialty in creative writing, I remember writing and writing, and trying to eek out poems and stories when my mind was a blank. When I look back on it, it was a lot of pressure. And much of the pressure was trying to decide what I was going to do after I graduated. It was a huge weight on my shoulders that I could never, and still have never figured out.Sure, work, motherhood, wifely duties, maintaining a home, paying bills, and all the other things I do now are very stressful at times. But I wouldn't want to relive my school days, either in schoolwork or enduring the many mistakes I made in my personal and general direction in life at that time until now. It might be worth it if I could change things and some fateful decisions I'd made... but that's not the case.

Wow, great explanation, and congrats on the cum laude that is something to be proud of. I couldn't imagine getting a degree in English. Too much work :lol: . Err, I must say, I look forward to graduating high school next year. It'll be great to leave that drama, and enter into something completely new and different, although I'm sure college isn't exactly fine and dandy either.

This is completely off topic, but what really bugs me about school is the whole concept of GPA, and, I quote from my parents, "If you don't get good grades, you won't go to college." I get very good grades and do well in school, but does that necessarily mean I will go to college? It depends. I see the whole concept of GPA

an excuse for the school boards to differentiate which student is better than the other, and who to recruit. Why look for the specifics? Why not open doors for everyone to grasp such an important opportunity? It doesn't make sense. Christ, I'm sounding like a socialist... (Had to add that in )

Sorry, I had to vent on something so stupid as GPA (heh pun). Stupid Finals make me go a little berserk.

 

[PhilinYuma]

No, Katt is right. Anyone who did well in college worked his/her ###### off, and it certainly wasn't the best time of their/our life. In my case I also worked full time throughout my college career. I had no choice with a wife and child when I started and a different wife, as I remember, and three kids to support when I finished. And no, it wasn't all fun, but for some of us, it was/is like food. You might not always like stopping to eat, but you can't live without it. Really. And sometimes, in both science and the arts, you get huge, beautiful insights ("epiphany" is a greatly overworked word) that make you search for people to share them with. That happened to me today, which is mostly why I am writing this.

Tonight I spent two-three hours chatting with Sunny, my Bright Kid and Prize Student. She had been reading the Meno and asked me if I could go over Plato's stupid square demonstration as a an example of anamnesis . While we were doing that, I told her that I thought that whole dialogue was a piece of ###### and suggested that she read the Phaedrus, which is at least funny. We discussed the fact that kids tend to admire their peers who are good at math (neither one of us is) but look down on or past those who excel in the arts. I told her what I have said before, that for me, many of Plato's ideas/concerns have little interest for us today, that some of his ideas were grotesquely wrong and that to my ear, his rhetorical style Seriously Sucked. And at last, I got round to telling her about the time when I realized, in the middle of a technical class discussion of R and J, that Shakespeare is really as brilliant, on multiple levels, as he is generally cracked up to be, and isn't that amazing?! It's the same in science, without, sob, the aesthetics, though there has to be an aesthetic elegance to the Second Law or Evolution.

There's a lot of politics to college, from knowing what your prof has published to finding easy ways (like always getting that paper in on time) to boost yr grade. Like Katt, I am sure, I made the awful discovery in my junior year (in English. In biology this was never an issue!) that however hard I worked, I could never improve my GPA but merely retain it, and that if I made one serious mistake, it could only change for the worse., and I could never regain my old level, "such things as nightmares are made of."

So there you are. Being really bright is no cause for pride; we are as smart (like you, lemmiwinks, and a few other teens on this forum) as God or our ancestors' genes made us, but our knowledge base, huge or puny, is the product of our work, and the source of our delight. It may be possible to build such an edifice without a college background, but four years of learning how to think and learn, can't do any harm. You'll enjoy the girls, too!