Rorinthas wrote:
Fair enough. I agree that there is a link to desire and quality education. I especially see that in my own life. I was a mediocre student for most of my years not because of ability but because of desire.
I fall into that category. I despise going to school (academic school, that is). I much prefer training to school, where there is an instructor who basically wants you to demonstrate competance, as opposed to a teacher that wants to insert themself into your life and "inspire" you and "develop" you and all that sort of crap; get you to "work up to your potential" or whatever. I got enough of that nonsense from my mother without having to hear it at school too.
I didn't get very good grades in college because ROTC and the Corps of Cadets were my top priorities; academics was third (maybe even fourth.. I played a lot of 40K
).
Training courses, even when very academic are a lot more fun for me. Shooting , driving fast, jumping out of airplanes, things like that are way better than sitting there in a classroom trying to get through endless prerequisites before you get to take 3 or 4 senior level courses that are actually meaningful. I suppose I might get a second bachelors, maybe in engineering since I like that sort of thing, or go to law school, but honestly the idea of more academics turns my stomach.
Something like the course I just took for the Army (actually just one phase), 2 weeks of engineer operations, was great. We did a battle problem in the offense and another in the defense, and then the final exam was 3 hours to prepare an engineer estimate and plan for a hypothetical battalion-sized offense. That's fun, and challanging.
Actually that may be the thing that makes me hate school more than anything. Nothing is challanging, it's either easy but a major pain in the ***, or artificially hard (artificially as in the teacher is grading you on stuff like how much effort you put into making your poster board look good, not on whether it even pertains to the assignment) and a major pain in the ***. Challanging means its engaging and tests your competance at the material in a realistic way.