Continuing the discussion from the Song thread so as not to derail it.
Yeah, my high school experience was something like Tulip's. I actually had two high schools, my freshman year in Georgia, which was a good school, I think, and would've continued to push me and force me to apply myself. But sophomore year on, we moved back to Louisiana, and the place I graduated from was the high school equivalent of a degree mill.
The teaching was there, I think, in some fashion, and ergo the opportunity to learn was there. But it was set up so that you didn't have to try very hard or do much of anything. And someone at least as bright as myself could skate by. Which, unfortunately, I did. I was naturally good at math, English, and some other things, and didn't struggle in college in those areas. But I could've gotten WAY more out of economics, history, Ag, and businesses classes that were taught in high school.
And then there was a computer science class that taught Fortran (obsolete even at the time). I could've learned the basic concepts of programming and algorithmic thinking way earlier than I did.....and that class absolutely should never have passed me, because I learned nothing. But that class was really different in this way: It was not taught in person, only a proctor was present in the classroom. It was a tele-learning class where we logged on with several other high school classes around the state, and were taught by a prof at Northwestern State (I think). He was Asian and had a severe accent that made him very hard to understand, particularly when his voice was coming out of a lo-fi speaker and we couldn't see him. But the worst part was that class met every day, but our school had switched to this weird college-style "A" and "B" days schedule, where they alternated back and forth. Unlike college, which tends to be a set MWF or T-Th schedule, we had "A weeks" and "B weeks" because some weeks were ABABA and the next week was BABAB. So we were only actually present in this programming class every other day, yet it was taught every day. We literally missed half the classes.
We talked to the principle about it, and looking back I realize the answer we got was basically his way of saying "This is out of my control, it's not changing in the middle of the year," but we were told that admin didn't see the problem, and to just deal with it. He came to sit in on one of our classes to "witness our concerns." At the end of class he said he didn't see the problem, we could hear the professor talk and had access to computers to do our work. I told him the class isn't the problem, the problem is we're not here for half of them, but it fell on deaf ears. We all "passed," but I for one didn't learn much.
The whole experience fostered my natural laziness, unfortunately. Some people are naturally built to excel with no external push. That was not me, growing up. I needed pushing, and I needed to know the real possibility of failure and repeating a grade. I was smart enough to skate through a couple of years of college even, because of those bad habits. There did come a point where it just wasn't happening anymore, and I had to learn to buckle down and apply myself. Fortunately, I was able to do that, but inasmuch as it's worth blaming anybody but myself, my high school didn't do such a great job of preparing us for life. IMHO.
