Failure "All the cool kids are doing it."

[Tdc2182]

I don't know why failing and being an asshole is popular now. Talking back to the teacher and make the class laugh? at what cost? failing the class and making it that much harder to get a job. If they don't have the papers that say they at least got out of highschool, then they are going to have a hard time getting and holding a job

I have no patients for them, I do my work so I can get a good job and live a happy life. I have .a self declared no social life. I don't go to party or dances, or very rarely hang out with my friend on weekends. Why? Because I want to get through highschool, then collage, and if I'm lucky, medschool. And I'm not going to be able to do that if I goof off and fail all my classes.

You sacrifice your social life? Thats a little extreme. I personally have never been to great at school, but I don't fail on purpose. It kinda sucks, but I scrape by. I have not understood a single lesson a math teacher has taught me in the past two years and manage to pull off a C.

 

[Kuchinawa212]

I don't know why failing and being an asshole is popular now. Talking back to the teacher and make the class laugh? at what cost? failing the class and making it that much harder to get a job. If they don't have the papers that say they at least got out of highschool, then they are going to have a hard time getting and holding a job

I have no patients for them, I do my work so I can get a good job and live a happy life. I have .a self declared no social life. I don't go to party or dances, or very rarely hang out with my friend on weekends. Why? Because I want to get through highschool, then collage, and if I'm lucky, medschool. And I'm not going to be able to do that if I goof off and fail all my classes.

You sacrifice your social life? Thats a little extreme. I personally have never been to great at school, but I don't fail on purpose. It kinda sucks, but I scrape by. I have not understood a single lesson a math teacher has taught me in the past two years and manage to pull off a C.

Indeed. To an extent. I have friends. I can't deny that, but like I said, I don't go out and do much. Boring, yes. But I don't get in trouble

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

I bless the Academic and Applied system at my highschool. All the people who really don't give a shit take applied, and I take academic. This makes the amount of assholes I have to deal with on a daily basis go from about 69% of the people I interact with to around 15%. However, some classes are open (not split) like my civics class. That pissed me off, because I was the only kid who wasn't a fucktard.

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

Like you said, this ailment has been with society since, well, its beginning.
What you're seeing is the slow destruction of natural selection by modern medicine beginning to take effect.

Sarcasm?

I hope?

Not at all. 300 years ago, all these people would have either:
A) Died from doing something batshit stupid
B) been bor into a rich family, and stayed away from us peasants.

Now that medicine is like Jesus and the social classes are pretty blended, we don't have the luxary of "Dumbass died in a stupid accident that he should have know better"

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

This is just showing the decline in society as a whole. I am annoyed by it also. I feel that the worst part is that our society as a whole seems to cater to this trend. We lower standards and make it so these types of people can get a job. By taking away any incentive we are not fixing the problem but making it worse. I will admit though that I used to be just like them until I was shipped away to a third world country to survive for a year on literally maggots and dirt. I slept in the streets and really understood what a blessing it is to live in a place like Canada. This may be extreme but it did work and currently I am working toward a PhD in kinesiology. I feel that if society made life a little harder for these people then the problem would fix itself.

Well said. Very well said.

 

[Ham_authority95]

life is full of people you think are lazy and willfully ignorant people.

The most you can about this trend it is just to ignore people that adhere to it.

One day they will either try to turn their lives around or simply suffer the consequences.

Just focus on making YOURSELF the best you can, and you will be rewarded for it one day.

Either that or try to get into politics and pass Pro-natural selection laws if you're that determined

 

[Quiet Stranger]

I dropped out of school at 12 because I couldn't handle the social side of things and then floundered as social workers scrambled to figure out how to "deal with me".

I wish I could've put up with school, I wish I had stayed to be properly educated, but I didn't.
I just wanted to learn whilst ignoring people, but I had to put up with them, it crushed my soul, I couldn't handle it.

I hope that doesn't make me "a cool kid".

Regardless, I can't understand "normal people" wanting to dick around and not be educated.
I wanted to be educated, I just couldn't handle being social.

It really baffles me.

So what happened? i am very interested now, how is your life doing now? What did social workers decide to do? How many years or months has it been? Also I knew people like that all throughout High School, they were in all of my classes, sad really

 

[Ham_authority95]

Life should be about finding your own happiness

I disagree with this. Life is about FORGING your own happiness. Don't look for it, create it.

Agreed

Don't adhere to trends, create your own happiness

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

Look at Albert Eistein

I'm going to have to stop you there. Records show that Eistien actually aced most of his classes, and his parents even went out of their way to find him advanced text books so he could further his studies. The whole "Eistien sucked at school" started as a Ripley's Believe it or Not! article, that was apparantly planted on the "not" side of thier spectrum.

 

[TheGreatCoolEnergy]

This thread sickens me.

I hate the passivism in todays youth. Being young is the age when you are free, make friends, meet girls, take drugs, drink, experiment.

I have plenty of friends, and meet girls often. But I have no desire to do drugs and get wasted...Guess that makes me a passive elitist asshole who needs to get a life eh?

 

[carpathic]

I love the number of people who describe themselves as "intelligent slackers".

They don't exist. You are a slacker, that is not a smart path, just a lazy one. No one ever calls themself a smart lazy person.

We create these meaningless categories that allow us to feel superior to others and that simultaneously give us a sense of belonging.

Take it from an "intelligent slacker" a few years into a career, I should've studied even though I didn't need to, cause maybe I would be in positions where I could fundamentally make things better. I chose not to make the right choices, I expected that I would be valued for my brains.

Guess what, brains are a dime a dozen. Being a lazy slacker to boot just makes your path harder later.

 

[Meander112]

It's a tautology, but half of the people in the world are of below average intelligence. That makes environments where you run into a wide variety of people (prep/high school, traffic, etc) "full" of "dumb" people.

Also, the whole "medicine is stopping human evolution" is actually not terribly true. Modern medicine has only been around for a hundred years or so. Evolutionary biologists talk about changes is species happening over hundreds of generations. An average human generation is 25 years. There hasn't been enough time for "modern medicine" to significantly affect human evolution.

 

[teisjm]

I guess i'm one of those annoyig people, who didn't really try that hard, and still graduated as the best of my class.

Durrign the third (final) year of gymnasium, i realized that i didn't have to spend my spare tiem reading my homework, only written papers had to be done. IF i had to read anything for class, i would just start reading when said class begun, which was fine, cause before my teacher had sat down and gotten the class quiet i was alrady a few pages in, and when they began asking questions i'd just raise my hand while i kept reading, and since i'd just read what the teacher was askign about a few seconds ago, i had it fresh in my memory.
The good thing about this was, that the etacher would assume i had the correct/a good answer even if they had someone else answer.

One time, i just raised my hand, I didn't even ralize we had been told to read at home, so i skimemd through the text fast, and the teacher asked me. I looked aroudn and ralized that i was the only one who had raised my hand.
Then i explained the text, quite succesfully actually, and then eomsoene pointed out: this wasn't what we were supposed to read for today.
my teacher was like oh yeah, thats right... wait a minute, Teis how did you know the answer then?
and i had to confess that i just read while she wasw telling us to answer. Luckily she was a learn-to-read-more-efficient teacher as well, so she wasnt mad, just impressed.

This other time, my teacher complinented me for my sharp understanding durring a class in which i was drunk.

I guess the kind of peopel you're describing made it easy for me to go through gymnasium as a lazy fucker, and still become top of my class.
So see them for what possitive they are to you, dumb fucks which will make you shine more when comapred to them.
While i didn't get the grades to go to med school (somewhat highest requirements in DK) i could've still become an architect or lawyer or engineer or something, if i had wanetd to.
But it just happens that i found a 3D digital arts school, which due to not requireing any sort of grades made teh 3 years in gymansium kind of wasted.
Only downside is, that it's a private school, so i had to work for 2½ years to save up the 50-60.000 $ for it.
But i got that covered now, and i'm starting this spring, and it's one of the best 3D digital art schools in the world, so i'm ensured a pretty solid education, which can even lead to me working in the movie and gaming industries.

 

[bluepilot]

Look at Albert Eistein

I'm going to have to stop you there. Records show that Eistien actually aced most of his classes, and his parents even went out of their way to find him advanced text books so he could further his studies. The whole "Eistien sucked at school" started as a Ripley's Believe it or Not! article, that was apparantly planted on the "not" side of thier spectrum.

You learn something new every day

I am going to stick to my guns though and say that not all acedemics suceed, and not all those who are bad in school are doomed to fail.

I just need to find a new example now...

 

[Godavari]

Whatever. If some idiot (and they are humongous idiots) wants to purosefully fail classes, it's less competition for me.

 

[sean.A7x]

People don't mess around because its cool, they do because school is boring its just that its generally the popular people that do

Its not trying to be cool its having a laugh and not being boring =D

and its funny how i don't try my very hardest and mess around with my friends, yet i got an A in maths a year early

EDIT: And anyone who thinks you cant have a social life to be successful. I want you to know that who you know is just as if not more important than what you know. Its sad really, there has to be a line somewhere between work and play. Otherwise you'll be working through school, working through college, working through your work, and then working to dig your grave. Whatever, happiness is different for everyone i guess.

Agreed, who would you rather be a boring lonely successful man, or someone who has fun

 

[jakeEHTlovless]

Throughout my school life I have been surrounded by people I'm sure many of us would affectionately refer to as "idiots". Almost every day I am amazed by just how unintelligent someone can be. People who are in their last year of nationally mandated education and yet have no idea what the Soviet Union was much less the Cold War. People who never knew that Japan was a major power in the Second World War, or that there was even a First World War. There is even one person in my Political Science class who doesn't even know his ABCs, and yet has ended up sitting next to me in a class that is part of my school's College Preparatory Program. People like this are a nickel a score at my school and tend to annoy the hell out of me. But the one thing I find admirable about some of these people is that they actually try, even though they might not succeed in their endeavor.

In the last few years though I have seen this particularly dim flock begin to thin and have begun noticing a new trend of willfully failing classes growing in my school, as well as other schools as far as I can tell from my social interactions with other people both online and in reality.

Yes. Students who willfully tell their future to fuck right off and fail all of their scheduled classes, all while trying to maintain the status of "the cool kid", as if repeating the same grade and classes over and over again is somehow consider cool by any stretch of the imagination. I'm sure almost all of us in high school at the time have either seen, know, or befriended one of these people. The kind of kid who sits in the back with their cellphone texting all class period then comes up with a bullshit excuse for not being able to turn in their homework they swore they did, or if they have the gall, will outright curse out the teacher knowing they can't do very much about it. From the classes I have been in over the last few years I hove noticed almost all of these people have a gangster mentality and view school more or less as force labor camp or a place meant exclusively to hang out with similar minded friends.

I am aware this trend has existed as long as school or much less civilization as a whole, but it has exploded form just a small percentage of students to an alarmingly large portion the past few years. In a modern day world where jobs are scarce and students in one country have to compete for even the most menial jobs with people with more degrees and better education from a country on the other side of the world, education and skills are key. What's worse is that a lot of these people will find jobs in their life and still have this same attitude towards work. It's because of this that hard working people like me have to serve an increasingly large line of impatient customers while they text in a corner and contribute very little to the workplace.

I don't claim to know the causes of this trend, but I do have my theories. Regardless of the cause, I do not believe that many will disagree with me that this is indeed a major problem in modern day society.

[sub][sub][sub]EDIT: Whoo 4th Gonzo![/sub][/sub][/sub]

try being in a school full of rednecks.... west virginia is notorious for them

 

[feather240]

Wait, didn't you just get hit by a hummer? Take it easy on the pain killers, and listen to the cool kids. V_V

 

[Mercurio128]

This is why I'm an ardent advocate of 'streaming' students into classes based on ability. There is an underlying assumption of most education systems that if you put everyone in together it will pull the under-performing kids up as they try to catch up with the rest, this of course, is utter bullshit.
The reality is that when you put high achievers in with low achievers the opposite happens, the disruption caused by those who don't care is detrimental to everyone and worse still, more often than not it, can lead to kids deliberately not participating in class so they can 'fit in' with everyone else and avoid the risk of being singled out for taking an interest. (anyone else think it's weird that the sorts of things that are considered normal in terms of classroom bullying would land most adults in jail if they happened in the workplace, for example?) I speak from years of experience when I say that when you take the douchebags out of the classroom the whole process gets a lot more engaging. Being able to speak freely without fear of social exclusion should be a right, for those who want to.

Not to mention the fact that when you remove the problems associated with bullying and social exclusion it becomes a lot easier for people to develop healthy social skills, something that can be utterly destroyed by a bad schooling experience and which is probably the biggest determinant of long-term success in most careers.