this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Where I learned things and inhaled books at a furious rate? Yes. Where I was successful academically? No.
Never let school get in the way of your education.
Caveat: I’ve said this brashly to several deans, when it seemed appropriately inappropriate, and while a few are now good friends, the others acted troubled and now seem to avoid me. That is, YMMV. Some lifer academics may not understand when you disregard the only rubrics they know.
There's a sheer existential terror of man fully actualized and living the most free life, observed from the other side of an academic table
Whereas one life is half over and full of regrets, and mistakes
The other has only just begun, and seems full of potential and worse yet, certainty
What is there to do but to try to destroy something so beautiful?
I did a lot better in college before I had to drop out because of lack of funds. But most of my academic career was failure after failure.
If you mean grades, I’d encourage you to disentangle your own retrospective self-evaluation. The point is learning, which is ultimately a personal journey. Grades are just an institutional proxy for learning outcomes, and when some students can afford private tutors when others have to work third shift to remain enrolled, the currency isn’t fungible. That is, grades are buttons and bottle caps. Learning, curiosity, discovery, and knowledge, for its own sake, is the only true currency in education.
It's definitely grades. But that's coupled with the fact that I grasp concepts pretty fast and can understand how things work generally at s glance. The minutiae I can grasp if I am interested (it's novel), but my brain will actively jettison information it doesn't think I need or doesn't think is useful.
If I couldn't learn I wouldn't be able to do any of the trades I've been successful at. But I do see what you mean.
Looks like you need practice to go together with that theory your brain thinks is useless.
Yeah, or hands on use. A use case where the theory is applicable.
I mean, making joints out of the pages of books doesn't magically make you smart, you gotta read those pages first