School - 11/28/2006 in 2005 - 2007: High School

Can we talk about how much of a slacker I am? I am a huge slacker. I really spend just about all of my time at home doing whatever I damn well please, even though maybe I should be doing some French homework once in a while or arranging or at least practicing. Or maybe I should have taken AP physics instead of concert band so that I would have more than three real classes (none of which are all that real.) I really do not do anything.

The thing is though, even though I feel guilty, I'm enjoying it. I like spacing out. I like playing the Sims 2. I like coming home in the afternoon, and instead of panicking about all the shit I have to get done that night so that I won't die, saying, "What would I like to do today?" Yesterday the answer to that was "research alternative educational systems." So I did, and I kind of came to the conclusion that school sucks. Seriously. School does not encourage learning. It encourages "doing well in school." Sometimes those things overlap, but sometimes they don't. Sometimes they are even mutually exclusive. Kids don't have any choice in the material they learn until they're juniors in high school, and even then there isn't much of a choice. Somebody else is always telling you what you should learn, and it takes up so much time that in your free time, you want to steer clear of learning as much as possible. School teaches you how to bullshit and play mind games and crush the opposition and be a pack animal. School is a terrible place for introverts. At our school, there is literally not one place where you can sit and be by yourself for a minute. I try to be by myself often, and it never works. I'm starting to understand Julian's hill thing.

I researched alternative educational systems for a couple hours. Then my mother came in and started criticizing me for goofing off, which she has been doing every single time she has seen me on the computer lately. I kind of exploded, since this exemplified the attitude that I was feeling angry at. I told her that I was reading about something that interested me; that I was educating myself. I told her that although sometimes I am doing dumb stuff when I am on the computer, sometimes I am writing or reading or making music, and that I think these things are a lot more valuable than filling in verbs on a worksheet. And I told her that I have good grades anyway - all As except for Bs in calculus and gym, so obviously whatever I'm doing, it's enough. Then she implied that that's because I have a slacker schedule this year. And she said that anything that is not homework counts as goofing off. Which I still think is a dumb attitude.

But I also know that most of the reason that it made me angry was that she's right. I am a huge lazy ass. I do not like work, and I do not do a lot of work, and even though I would like to be able to do whatever I want and learn about whatever I want, doing that might end me up in a van down by the river. This schedule means I don't have to be stressed out about school, but not being stressed out about school is making me not care about anything. I don't even really want to do work for my jazz band anymore. Right now, I want to eat pie and play the Sims 2. That is all I want to do.

But I am forcing myself to do other things, to prove that I am not a huge lazy ass. I am still not doing schoolwork. I practiced and worked on my band and now I am writing this entry. There, I proved it. It's not that I don't feel like it, it's that I disagree with the philosophy of schoolwork.

No, you know what? "I don't feel like it" should be a philosophy. Why the hell would I do things that I hate doing? I hate AP French. If I want to perfect my French, I will go to France and talk to French people. And maybe read French books. I plan on doing these things anyway, and I feel like they would be more effective than filling out packets. That's all we fucking do in AP French. She really likes packets. Like, every day she'll give us a couple of packets, and we have to do them at home, and then the next day we go over the packets. We are not reading any literature. We "do not have time." I also hate calculus. I don't care. Maybe in the context of physics, I would care. (Maybe I should have taken AP physics.) But in no context at all I don't care. We're doing stuff that doesn't even mean anything. It's terrible.

Chinese continues to be fascinating. But that could just be because Chinese is easy.

I dunno. Usually I manage to be a pretty good student. I am never sure why, but usually I can at least make myself do it. Maybe I just need a couple of weeks to regroup, or a vacation, or a semester change, or to get accepted to First Choice School, or to get rejected from First Choice School, and then I will get my act back together. But right now I have no motivation at all to be a good kid and fill out worksheets.

I am being wishy washy. I am not sure how I feel. The end.