Stop Homework

I received the fol­low­ing email from a former-graduate student:

A For­mer Grad­u­ate Stu­dent Speaks Out

I admire your mis­sion. The sub­ject of how I spent my life doing home­work and what turned out to be worth­less school­ing is a sub­ject I often cry and get angry about, but a past sit­u­a­tion I would for one like to make up for, and also a sit­u­a­tion that I would like to help oth­ers on. I am turn­ing 30 now, and have a lot of liv­ing to catch up on and have wasted many of my best years.

Actu­ally my grade school, mid­dle school, and high school were mostly fairly run and had oppor­tu­ni­ties for the smart and dri­ven stu­dents, but they forced stu­dents to do work whether they liked it or not. The harder courses were taught by effi­cient, inspired, and help­ful teach­ers. The dumber courses were run like pen­i­ten­tiaries. I myself was a very smart and dri­ven stu­dent, eager to get work done early.

The prob­lem that I and most stu­dents faced was that doing our work bet­ter and faster only led to get­ting placed into harder courses that assigned even more work. There was no incen­tive to reach com­ple­tion since we were like ham­sters caught in a wheel. The faster we ran, the more the wheel turned. The dumber courses did not teach any­thing, but just wasted time, and assigned about the same amount of work– just dumber and more repet­i­tive. Stu­dents who were non-compliant or who failed cer­tain manda­tory tests were forced into yet more school­ing, sum­mer classes, and force-fed education- – which we all feared.

The good thing is that I used my high school to place out of 35 col­lege cred­its – through the advanced place­ment pro­gram, and earned full schol­ar­ships to col­lege. The down side was that I was putting off liv­ing a nor­mal life, believ­ing the sac­ri­fice would pay off.

Even with schol­ar­ships though, the work in col­lege was gru­el­ing, while keep­ing the schol­ar­ships depended on main­tain­ing strin­gent GPA require­ments. I grad­u­ated with a degree in physics and minor in math­e­mat­ics with a good GPA, but once again, I had put off liv­ing a nor­mal life.

The begin­ning of the senior year in col­lege, I real­ized there was not really any avail­able employ­ment with just a bachelor’s degree and so I was per­suaded to take hard courses in order to get into grad­u­ate school. Being suc­cess­ful at them, I then went on to grad­u­ate school to be a research sci­en­tist, and did all the require­ments of a master’s degree, but never fin­ished my the­sis since there was lack of fund­ing for that field of research and I had real­ized that I was pur­su­ing a dead-end career.

Since then, I’ve spent 5 of the last 6 years either unem­ployed or severely under-employed, all the while des­per­ately look­ing for work. In spite of my immense knowl­edge, tal­ent, and work ethic, my cre­den­tials and expe­ri­ences were con­sid­ered worth­less. My for­mer teach­ers only rec­om­mended more school­ing to earn Mas­ters and PHd’s – though many of their stu­dents were also unem­ployed and many deeply in debt from their school­ing. None of the peo­ple I had spent so much time with and worked so hard for had any real leads at all to any employ­ment, just more school­ing. Even a dean of my under­grad­u­ate col­lege said to me that “Edu­ca­tion is nice to have, but it does not really mat­ter. We just do what­ever, anyway.”

At first I felt unfor­tu­nate, but then I felt betrayed. Among the jobs I had the last 6 years, I sold watches in the mall, folded shirts in a depart­ment store, washed dishes in a restau­rant, cleaned toi­lets, and mopped floors at min­i­mum wage to find work. I never imag­ined that my dili­gence would lead to that. Obvi­ously, most of the recent jobs have not con­tributed any­thing to my resume or finances. The one good job I had was as an engineer’s assis­tant, but the posi­tion only lasted a year until we com­pleted major projects. I thought I would find sim­i­lar work soon, but all the com­pa­nies I had found were either out­sourc­ing or lay­ing off their workers.

I would sure like to use my tal­ents to earn a liv­ing wage, but for now, I am just doing a part-time gov­ern­ment job which is just 20 hours a month and below $15 an hour. I have lived with my par­ents for the last 6 years and we are all very con­cerned since the econ­omy has only got­ten worse.

In some ways though, the past few years were a bless­ing to catch up on life, and to get to know my own fam­ily bet­ter – a few of them who only had a few more years left in them. I enjoy liv­ing myself, hav­ing nearly missed out on life, and I have been grate­ful to reclaim a life of my own.

And so, I say to every­one as a hard learned les­son: There is a world of dif­fer­ence between a mirage of promises and what is truly reward­ing in life. Live lives of mean­ing and pur­pose and to thy own self be true.

Posted in category Guest Bloggers, Students Speak Out on June 10, 2009 at 7:43 am
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