Sometimes I am a college math instructor. Sometimes I am a grad student at a prestigious university. Sometimes I am a mother to two young girls. The hat can change multiple times a day. So depending on when you see me, I can be a completely different person with different issues at the top of my mind. Right now I am an instructor teaching a class of adults - with one adult in attendance who still stinks of high school.
High school is good for many students. For some other students it's a place they are forced to go day in and day out. It's a (supposed) waste of time and skills. This can be true. It can also be true that the people who think high school isn't working for them probably aren't working very hard to get anything out of high school, either.
I have a guy in my class that is in a pre-apprenticeship program. The program is phenomenal in terms of skills taught, job placement rate, and starting (and future) salary. This guy has the world in front of him. He even dropped out of high school in his senior year, got his GED, and has just been sitting at home for three months waiting for this program to start. And he got a 30 on his first homework assignment. A 30 out of 100, mind you.
This isn't rocket science we're doing, it's basic math. And this guy isn't missing problems because he's ignorant, he's missing problems because he's not doing them. I mean, he'll just quit half-way through the assignment because (I have to assume) he's tired of doing math problems. As I am grading his paper, I can smell the "I-don't-give-a-shit-about-your-class" attitude wafting up from his paper. His thick-ink writing emulates "What-a-waste-of-my-time." High school.
One day he may understand how fortunate he is to be in such a great program. He may realize that learning is a gift that many people around the world don't have a right to do. Or he may come to understand that the results we get out of the world are directly proportional to the work we put in to it. Until then, he is just a cog that sticks in the inter workings of my math-instructor brain, sucking up valuable space intended for my girls and maybe a little bit of my own homework.
