What do you think of school and how do you relate it with Treehouse?

Sadly, during high school I rapidly began to switch off to structured lesson plans and only had little interest in hands on practical lessons.

The reason for this is that before beginning high school, students are individually tested and evaluated as to each students "learning potential and intelligence" in England (where I went to school)

After being graded and told that I allegedly had an above average grasp of science, biology, and the english language (it was said that I was 2-3 years in advance of my peers) I was thought to have autism or ADHD... Because I had a genuine interest in science? Please...

The educational board would't put me in lessons where with kids in a higher grade than I as they said it would be "unfair to the other children" What does that even mean?

Anyway... So as a child, I loved reading, writing and all things science, so I had educated myself just by reading things that had interested me.. For this reason I very rarely leant anything new in high school and felt like the majority of my lessons were poorly structured, uninformative and frankly boring.

(Why I switched of during my school education) One friday morning I arrived at my first science lesson of the day with my teacher Mr. Faulgerhatur. Todays lesson was about light.

The lesson began like any other typical science lesson in my school. Mr. Faulgerhatur began talking about light, how we perceive color, the speed of light etc... He went on to say that "no matter what, light always travels in straight lines"... I immediately raised my hand and interrupted. "No, Sir. Actually it doesn't."

After a heated debate I was removed from the classroom for actually proving to the class that light bends.. Thus my teacher wasn't happy to be proven wrong.

There is one lesson to learn other than "light does bend" and that's when you should keep your mouth shut, as this incident is what drove me to switch off in school.

For those of you interested in science, here is a link to bending light: http://www.mathpages.com/rr/s6-03/6-03.htm (just to prove i'm not crazy. :P

Joseph, very happy to hear that you are enjoying your Treehouse learning experience. You've raised a pretty deep subject here! My reply only scratches the surface as there have been thousands of pages written on this topic.

I think that student engagement and performance in academics is impacted by many factors, often outside of the classroom (friends' interests and attitudes, conversations with family, extra curricular activities, etc). For me personally, it was certainly outside of classroom factors that caused me to get bad grades in early high school. Nevertheless, if I had to narrow it down to the 'biggest factor'...in my school experience, both K-12 and postsecondary, good teachers are the crucial difference maker.

If a teacher is good they'll make the material interesting and figure out ways to get different types of students engaged. Indeed, in general I feel that a student getting bad grades is more an indication of bad teaching and/or school administration than student capability. The result of cumulative years of bad teaching is disastrous.

That said, it's funny because I can remember good teachers and the material they taught easily...bad teachers, I can't even remember their names. But really bad teachers, I can remember their names and some of what they taught, so does that make them a good teacher?

Where/when (age) do you think the individual has to take some responsibility for their own academic performance? Do you think hard-work and discipline come naturally or need to be learned?

For me being in technology is all about one central tenet ...

teaching yourself how you learn.

Everyone learns a little differently, and out in the real world no one spoon-feeds you answers.

So learning how to ...

• Find resources
• Extrapolate from a general blog article to your specific case
• Troubleshoot errors
• Creating reduced test cases

That's what it really takes to learn new technology skills out in the real world.

That's a good point James. Not just for technology either...autodidactism is something that will help you in all facets of life, work, etc.

@Michael

To answer your questions.

Firstly, I feel that as human beings we are natruly responsible for our own academic acceleration as soon as we start to develop oral and writen skills to persue knowledge. I'm not saying we are we shouldn't be expected to educate ourselves, but each and every one of us will have more or less interest in our willingness to learn a certain skill set or subject, so to speak.

Secondly, hard work is something we choose to undertake as an action. Discipline is something that can be natruly learnt at a young age, given that we are taught it. We can then make a conscious choice to learn and develop other disciplines that we can apply to tasks, jobs, skills, that we undertake.

Regardless of whether we choose to apply both hard work and discipline, we learn that not applying these skills can be detrimental to our own education and prevent us from exelling to or beyond what our assessed potential may be.

Each and evry teacher and member of Team Treehouse has made a conscious choice to either help teach others and or learn from others. I would say that the actions that encompas everyone that's a part of the teaching group, and all of Treehouses students have taken the necisary steps to better themselves in their choice of study here, for that is showing both disapline and hard work to a greater or lesser extent.

Written but not dictated. Haha. :)

+1 @Joseph Hirst, you are not alone in that. I schooled in Kenya and faced the exact same thing. Interesting thoughts there!

@James Barnett, well said.

Great discussion guys. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts!