Today marks the end of my totally uncommitted time.\u00a0 I’m going to spend most of Monday studying for epistemology.<\/p>\n
As I’ve said before, it’s not that I’m anywhere near bad at epistemology, it’s one of my better subjects, but lately I’ve felt like I’m not studying hard enough.\u00a0 Sure, there are a lot of subjects I can get through without really trying, but just because something is easy doesn’t mean you can’t still get results from working hard at it.<\/p>\n
I think because my dad made me feel obligated to go to university I didn’t really take my education seriously last year.\u00a0 It was the same in high school.<\/p>\n
I think I’ve written about this before, but I had a lot of problems with high school, both social and academic, and after getting expelled from my first high school, I kind of moved in and out of the whole school system until finally my parents let me just drop the whole thing for awhile.\u00a0 My official story at the time was that I was doing my courses through correspondence, but I was as poorly committed to that as I was to the regular high school system.\u00a0 So I spent something like six months doing absolutely nothing.\u00a0 I sat in the attic of my mom’s house playing video games and exercising.\u00a0 The only times I ever went outside were wednesdays, when I had breakfast with my father (my parents are divorced) and then saw my psychotherapist.<\/p>\n
I won’t deny that I was a textbook example of a loser at the time.\u00a0 But spending six months out of high school was probably the best thing that happened to me.\u00a0 I mean, up until then, I despised school.\u00a0 It was something forced upon me since before I had long-term memory, and the way it was always presented to me is “Here are a bunch of people who aren’t your family, don’t love you like your family, don’t give you food or shelter like your family, but they have absolute authority over you.”<\/p>\n
In spite of having a pretty screwed up family, I think I have pretty strong family values.\u00a0 I do what my parents ask because I know they have my best interests as their main priority.\u00a0 If my parents were ever to hurt me, I know it would be as a result of some kind of misunderstanding.\u00a0 The authority represented in teachers never gave me this impression, especially since at least two thirds of my Ontario public school teachers, simultaneously bloated with arrogance over the almighty power of their workers’ union and burning with rage over Mike Harris’ conservative government, were concerned more with their paychecks and pensions than the growth of their students.\u00a0 I always felt pushed aside in school, and the “authority” given by teachers seemed to serve only to assist them in pushing me aside.<\/p>\n
Anyway, I didn’t like being forced to be in school, so once returning to high school was my own decision, it put me in a distinctly different position: If I did poorly, I was no longer making statements about my own objections to being forced into jumping through hoops by random authority figures, I was simply hindering my own personal goals.\u00a0 My grades improved drastically just from this.<\/p>\n
I remember what I thought at that time in my life, when I was sixteen years old, and I only had something like six high school credits out of a necessary thirty to graduate.\u00a0 I recalled my middle school’s principal in eighth grade coming in to make a speech about what highschool was like.\u00a0 He would repeat this phrase “sixteen credits by sixteen years of age:\u00a0 If you have not accomplished this goal, you are more than fifty percent likelier to drop out of high school” followed by a long speech about how people without high school diplomas in Canada can’t even get jobs at MacDonald’s.\u00a0 According to my principal, then, I was not only doomed to fail high school, but I was destined to be begging on the streets for money in ten years.\u00a0 I hated that principal.<\/p>\n
Not that I hate all teachers and principals from my past.\u00a0 Without the support of the principal of my last high school, I wouldn’t be here, and certainly not this soon if at all.<\/p>\n
In any case, I’m remembering this at the end of this term with the determination to take the rest of my time here at UBC more seriously.\u00a0 I don’t need six months away from here to learn the same lesson all over again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today marks the end of my totally uncommitted time.\u00a0 I’m going to spend most of Monday studying for epistemology. As I’ve said before, it’s not that I’m anywhere near bad at epistemology, it’s one of my better subjects, but lately I’ve felt like I’m not studying hard enough.\u00a0 Sure, there are a lot of subjects […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":65,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-59","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/65"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":60,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59\/revisions\/60"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/giantsquid\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}