No Clue (Rating: Mature) · 2:18am Apr 2nd, 2014
So, this is my last semester in high school. I have four courses this semester: Manufacturing, English, Hospitality in Tourism (Which is a cooking course), and International Law. My two big courses are English and Law, which I'm doing fairly well in. But, one thing that always gets me for any course is assignments. Things like ISUs or Essays or stupid fucking novel questions for a story that is less than 110 pages long.
I've told you guys in the past that I have a Law ISU this semester that'll be eating up my time. I believe we start working on the last half of it this week for the next six weeks (or whenever May 19th is). I'll have to write a research report, an essay, and then design some sort of presentation for the class. It's okay since I have a partner. What's not okay is a partner who lacks the motivation to do well in their courses. This happened last year and my mark wasn't affected by my partner. This year, it is affected. So, basically, I'm sort of solo'ing this entire project that I'm not exactly interested in: Criminology. You're probably like "well, why'd you choose it, you idiot?" Well it's cause I had to be absent for the day topics were being chosen and anything good was taken. I was going to do something about the United Nations, but, whatever.
What I'm trying to get at is that I'm under a lot of pressure. On one end, I have en English course where my teacher believes I am the Jesus Christ of the writing world and I'm going to save the English language, but he stacks a shit ton of work for a College level course (I was in university, but, I dropped down for the sake of balancing a workload. Yeah, that didn't help eh?). On the other end, I have a Law ISU constantly dangling over my head that I'm not vaguely interested in, no thesis is prepped for the essay my partner and I are going to write, and researching anything on the topic of "how do ppl bcum criminals pls tell goobi" is pretty much the same stuff regurgitated by every University of Law over and over and over again, so finding anything unique beyond "biology, family, economy, etc" is pretty much close to out of the ball park for me. Maybe I'm just approaching it wrong. Who the hell knows. All I do know is that this shit is constantly nagging me and I can't get a pinch of sleep or relax properly.
Another thing that is constantly dragging me down is my future. Over and over and over again I have to go through the same conversation in my head about what I want to do with my life and what I want to be. Truth of the matter is, I don't think I can be anything at this point. I'll be graduating with Law under my belt, which is pretty much useless in Canada, considering our country prefers to hire ethnics or extremely intelligent people to get into a the police force (I don't want to be a lawyer. I suck at debating and defending someone's life would just be worse). I'd love to be an officer, but, that dream is kind of flying all over the place, considering that I'm not suppose to sink 40K$ a year into the Police Foundation if I won't get hired. I'll have trade skills under my belt, sure, but I need to go through the apprenticeship programs, which is a bit more difficult, considering that things like the Electrician are starting to close in on actual course requirements like physics or chemistry. Two things I definitely do not have. God knows why you'd need them, but, I never studied those courses. Honestly, I'm so mixed up in what I want to do with my life that I'm worried that I'll be stuck in a dead end job with nothing other than a diploma making minimum wage and less than 12K$ a year. I have no one else to blame but myself for this position, and I don't think I'll be earning a "real job" anytime in the near future (something like, 4-5 years. Whatever the average course completion length is) or at all, for the matter.
I'm just stuck in what to do with my life. I'm stressed out and losing sleep over Law and English, I can't enjoy playing games with my friends (even though I do it often) without the constant nagging feeling in the back of my head that I'm not accomplishing anything. I mean, I make sure to do at least 80% of my homework (if any) on Friday and then finish it up early Saturday morning so I can attempt to enjoy my weekend, but even then I get that perfectionist feeling of "you half assed all this shit you're going to get a terrible mark." And then I get a 4+ (90 - 95%) and am curious what type of crack my teacher smokes. I also can't relieve this stress easily, as I couldn't get into the weight training/fitness course I wanted this year, so, I probably lost all progress I made during my fitness course last year during this semester, and that's a big bummer to me and I can't do anything actively without wasting valuable time that can be spent doing homework or trying to avoid the constant nagging by watching videos or playing games. I could replace the game time with working out, but with how I work as a person, I just feel like I can't be active until this large ISU is completely done with.
I'm sorry for venting all of this out here. I feel like I can be a bit obliged to have a vent about something personal so people understand my situation. I'm sure a lot of you are unsure what you want to be, or maybe you're not. Maybe it's just me. Everyone tells me "a lot of kids are unsure" when all my friends and my friends' friends know what they're going to be and have planned their courses out. Meanwhile, there's little ol' me, completely unsure what to do because I never thought the need to attempt to figure out what I'd like to do with my life and just take some sort of interesting courses that, sadly, won't do me any good.
I'm sure there's a million contradictions here and a million solutions. I'm already thinking them up right now, but, I just want to get this out there because I feel like I'm going to punch a hole in the wall. This is also a contributing factor for one of the reasons I've been slacking on my job as a Story Approver. I've been trying to pick it up as much as possible, but, it's just... I don't know. I can't motivate myself to do it 90% of the time. I use to do the entire morning queue (there were usually 10 - 20 stories there) and then do some throughout the day to make sure I was doing average compared to everyone but Meeester, but now I'm doing barely 1 - 2 approved and then just losing complete interest in trying to fathom reasons as to why to fail a story or why to approve it. Maybe I'm making excuses, maybe I'm not. I don't know at this point.
Anyways, I'm sort of done talking. Feel free to tell me if you're in the same boat as I am or not.
What kind of high school are you going to that teaches law?
In my experience (with the US education system, mind, so I don't know exactly how it translates, but I can't imagine it's much different across the board), absolutely not one single god damned thing you do in high school matters one good god damned bit once you start college. Absolutely nothing. You failed a homework assignment? You drew dicks on a history final and turned it in? If you have the GPA and the test scores to get into the college you want, literally nobody on the entire planet will ever give one single fuck about any of that for the rest of your life.
I swear, I spent a lot of high school really worried about a lot of things, and then senior year I just said "fuck it all" and coasted the whole rest of the way out of there. Got a terrible grade (by my standards anyway) in Spanish that year, and if I had any other legitimate classes that required more than 0.01% of my brain activity in order to complete, I would have done the same. Didn't care. Had fun. Currently attend college on enough scholarships that they pay me to go there. No regrets.
And when I do look back I remember times like that one group project I lost all kinds of sleep over because we got a B, or that one big important paper I spent so much time writing because I was so concerned about getting a good grade, and I go... why?
I mean, absolutely, don't just slack off and do nothing, but there is no point in losing any sleep or worrying one iota about anything that goes on in high school beyond your overall GPA and how you score on the tests. If you feel like blowing off assignments and half-assing pointless stuff you aren't going to need in your career, and it's not going to have a tangible effect on your GPA, then screw it. You will honestly not be losing anything of significant value by playing Team Fortress 2 for four hours instead.
The primary education system, in pretty much the whole of the Western world, is pretty much broken, because it's built to do a job it was needed to do in 1950 - get people ready for the absolute basics, and spit them out into the labor force at 18. But we've got a service-sector economy now, and we don't need a million 18 year old factory workers anymore. College and technical schools are where the actual job skills are taught, and so essentially 12 years of schooling more or less go to waste. Well, maybe not the whole 12 years, because we have to teach the little ones how to read and so forth, but beyond that it really breaks down. So far into college, I've been re-taught almost everything I learned in high school, and I don't think I've had a single course yet that didn't start off with a couple weeks of shit I already knew. Schools don't teach how to manage money, how to open a bank account, how to live as an adult in today's world; they spend four solid high school years teaching you the material you'll go over your first week of college. It's a fundamentally broken system, really.
There's nothing you can do to fix it, though, not in time for it to affect you. So have fun and try to enjoy it, and don't worry so much when things go wrong. Literally all anyone cares about is GPA and test scores. If you get those two, you could submit 2nd person anthro clopfiction for your Big Important Research Paper, and the minute you walk onto a college campus nobody will remember that ever happened but you. So why get worked up over it when you could be jerking off or collecting hats?
/rant.
I just decided to take courses I liked and see where I ended up. I don't know where I'm going either, but I just plan on seeing where life takes me.
1975541 It's an elective in many highschools.
You're definitely not alone. I'm in my senior year of high school and for the past two years, I've been taking a special course in Aviation Technology. Ever since the start of this school year, I've been constantly changing my mind on whether or not this is what I want to do with my life. I'd like to be an aircraft mechanic, but at the same time so much is expected of me that I don't honestly know if I can go through with it. What's been keeping me going, although barely, is the hope that after I suffer through my courses and get my education, it'll be a lot easier as I won't be as pressured as I am now.
The reason I even bothered typing this out is because it makes me feel immensely better knowing that there's another person out there who suffering through the same shit I am. I can only hope that it can at least make you feel a little better too.
1975541
What Shag said, an elective. I wanted to take it because I was interested.
1975564
Maybe you're right. I just went through school being taught that "high grades = jobs = dosh." Personally, I don't see what my knowledge of short story novels or the process of cell reproduction or how objects move really matters when I'm going to go to a job, be taught how to do said job, then do said job. A monkey could easily do that. I'm not going to throw my grades away, obviously, but I'm just worried that the courses I chose aren't going to do much for me. Kind of too late to opt into the "stay back a year" program because I was unsure whether I'd need anything for something I don't know about.
1975642
It makes me feel a little better, yeah.
1975881
You know what you should do for a living? You could write a book, become an editor for writers, start a YouTube Channel(hint hint), literally all kinds of things that you can do. And don't say you're not a good enough writer to write a book. I've read some of what you've wrote, and it's amazing. Don't give me any of that crap either, about how it has always been your pre-readers and editors who make the stories into something worth reading. You are the one who makes them worth reading, whether you will admit it or not.
I think what I'm trying to say is, you can be so many things, but you just refuse to admit yourself that you can do them. I think your English teacher knows what he's talking about when he says you are an amazing writer. Really, if I was in your position, I would choose to become a writer. At the moment, becoming even half the author you are would be a miracle for me.
Do what you feel is best, alright?
1975585 Lucky bastard, all my High School ever had back in the day was Spanish, Art, Agriculture and Band.
I was forced to do Art for two years *shudder* with a hyper Nazi teacher who if you so much as ever cursed out loud in her class even once she would begin a blood feud with you! (And it only happened because some asswipe stepped on my hand!) The only really good thing I had was Band, and right from the very beginning I always knew that I would never want to do any of those things. They were really there because the High-School itself was located in this giant rural area outside of Sacramento CA, which meant a load of farmland where Ag came in, and Art was there because the town had an Art Museum which donated some of their supplies to that dirt-ass poor school.
Sorry for the Rant, but I know where you're coming from there.
1975881 Oh, and as far as High-School goes, the electives themselves are chosen as a sort of interest program.
If you don't know what I mean, they're usually chosen based on the area around the school itself, lot of rural area? Agriculture. Football Stadiums and/or Superstores nearby? Sports. Lots of ethnic Groups? Foreign Languages.
But really, in essence, all electives really do for you is give you experience in a field that you may consider doing, like Law for example, taking it in high-school and getting straight A's won't mean jack freaking squat to College professors, what they WILL however, be looking at is how much experience you already have in that field from the elective itself.
tl;dr, chill out man, you got NOTHING to worry about so long as you can keep your grades up! GPA too.
1976010 It's certainly nice to have a good amount of choice. The problem is I think it would be really nice to have more; I only get 4 electives in my grade 11 year because Math, English, and Religion(which is the absolute most terrible waste of time) are all mandatory, as well as something else. Having an Art credit be mandatory was a pain, since I don't intend at all to do any art ever. I want to do so much more than what I'm allowed to, and I have to cut corners, which is unfortunate.
1975881
None of the courses you take in high school are going to do anything for you. Literally nobody gives a flying fuck what you do in high school beyond your GPA.
Seriously. Not "GPA but you did some hard classes so bonus points," GPA. You got a 3.5 so honor roll it is and welcome aboard. Don't give one fuck what you did to get there or what classes you took or how you nearly dropped to 3.4 because you decided to stay home on finals day and play Skyrim. No fucks given.
Unless you took honors courses, in which case you can get credit for them potentially. I got out of two writing courses because of high school English... and it's the only thing those classes ever contributed to my life.
Moral: do whatever the fuck you want and don't let anything like this bother you or keep you up at night, because there is literally no way to make high school server a purpose in the greater whole of your education apart from generating a number for colleges to look at. If you're stressed out about high school classwork in any way, and you're in your senior year, you're doing it wrong.
1975985
Creating a YouTube channel isn't an awful idea, but the issue with that is bringing yourself up. What is it a YouTube channel could do to be unique? Everything has been done before. Trying to become another Let's Player is pretty much impossible. I also need a new computer to even think about recording anything on my computer, too.
And, to be fair, my writing is pretty horrible. I appreciate the compliment, but, I tend to do a lot of things that mess up my story that I have to go back and fix. In the real world, you can't really do that. Besides, I don't have any interesting ideas for a story outside of the pony universe.
1976440
Ah, but there is one thing you could do for a YouTube Channel, something that hasn't been done before. You've said your writing is horrible, but really, who is it on this site with almost 800 followers now? Not me, I can guarantee you that.
So what you should do, is start a YouTube Channel about your writing. You know, what you write about, why you write about it, what makes you write, just different things about writing. I am positive that if you were to do that, there would be so many subscribers you would gain almost right away.
And the issue about not having any ideas outside of the ponyverse? It's okay, you don't need ideas outside of here. Because remember, if they're you're stories, then you wrote them. No one else did that. Others may have helped contribute, but in reality, you are the one who came up with the original idea. We always learn about who was the first one to discover something, almost never about the second, and definitely not anyone after that.
There are so many options to choose from for you, and all you have to do, is believe you can do something, and stick with it until the end.
1976065
Wait a minute RELIGION is required? What Religion is it? Because unless you go to a private school I believe it's actually illegal to force your religion on people due to Freedom of Religion, atleast, in a public institution like a public school.
1978377 It's a Catholic school. They're pretty standard, so nobody really cares because the religion is unfortunately so popular. We're forced to take it every year, and the last 2 years has just had classes that alternated from dogma to "finding your inner personalities" or "relationships" and other dumb shit like that where nothing they teach is EVER useful.
1978377
You're right, it is illegal to force people to take religious courses. But it isn't illegal if you have the option between Catholic schooling and Public schooling.
An example would be me going to my school currently: Religion is a required course that you need to take. However, if I had dropped out of my current school last year, and moved the public school down the road, religion isn't required.
It's only required in the Catholic school board. The public school board leaves it optional. It's possible to veto taking the course altogether, but, there's reasons the school board make kids take it and it requires the arguing of parents to get you out of religion. There's also the thing about catholic schools being better than public schools. At least for me, my catholic school is 80x better than the schools near me, so, sacrificing a course is fine for me if I can get better courses in a better school.