Tis the season when the children are being ushered back to school. First of all, good riddance. I mean, you kids just prattle on and on about stupid stuff, and it isn’t even your fault. It’s hard to know what value is until your life has lost some of it, and unless you’ve had an unfortunate childhood you haven’t had a chance to gain perspective yet. Potential is a cruel mistress and idealism is a rich man’s game. Wait until the signature on your rent check is your own.
Exhale.
But what I really wanted to do it give you a small piece of advice. Because, I’m, y’know magnanimous and all. I know in the past that I’ve been pretty adamant that I don’t like to give advice, but since you aren’t real people yet I’m making an exception. So I’m going to advise you to do one thing:
Embrace the bullshit.
Yes, that means that I agree that you have to deal with a ton of ridiculousness in school. Teachers aren’t particularly intelligent, in case you haven’t noticed. They aren’t unintelligent either, they are just people with a job. The best teachers are people who made an effort to learn because they had to, and hopefully still know more than you. People who are too smart to struggle have no idea how to help other people through their struggles.
What does this mean? Don’t expect too much from your teachers and avoid the really smart ones. But also, you are going to have bad teachers and good teachers having a bad day. They may assign busy work just to get you to shut up. As noted above, I am sympathetic to the sentiment. You are going to be upset because it’s a waste of your time and the teacher doesn’t know what they’re talking about and you’re never going to have to use this stuff and you have other important things to do and nobody trusts you blah, blah, blah, BS, BS, BS.
Welcome to the rest of your life. We all have to deal with crap that doesn’t make any sense or seems unfair. How you deal with it directly correlates to how successful you can be. Let me explain the corporate ladder to you, it only goes up. You get promoted until you no longer deserve to move any higher, which typically means that you aren’t that good at what you do. But they hardly ever move someone back down. So unless your boss is still on their way up, they have reached their plateau of incompetence. The plateau makes you bitter, so you take it out on your staff. It’s not fair, he/she doesn’t know what they’re doing, nobody works harder than me, that’s my stapler, this place would shut down if it wasn’t for me blah, blah, blah, BS, BS, BS.
And that’s the pattern. The more comfortable you are with the suck, the better equipped you will be to handle it. So all of that stupid busy work that is a waste of your time is actually one of the most important things you can take away from your education. And typing, you should learn how to type. You can pretty much ignore the rest.
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