What High School Doesn't Teach Us

I still remember how life was before quarantine, being carefree and indifferent to the big problems of the world; living life through the highs of today rather than the worries of tomorrow. And many people say that quarantine made kids grow up too fast, showing them that the world isn’t a perfect place, rather a collection of imperfect ideas that when looked at from the right angle gives the illusion of tranquility. An illusion that was broken in seconds.

When people say this, they usually mean it negatively, as if to say being older is being thrust into a world with problems, without the solutions. And I completely agree with this, but is it such a bad thing? As people, we naturally feel lost when there’s nothing we’re working towards, like a big promotion, a group project, or a nonprofit cause. But children haven’t developed this sense of self-awareness. Naturally, as we get older, this universal fact becomes clearer and even self-evident. I feel lucky that I got a taste for this during quarantine when we were required to find something that we enjoyed doing for long periods of time.

To avoid feeling lost, we need a spark that keeps us going, and finding such a spark as children is invaluable. During quarantine, I would spend hours on end doing things I genuinely enjoyed, and never felt tired. And I think this is what we should strive for, to become passionate people who feel such a deep connection with what they are doing that they forget about everything else. As someone who eventually did lose the genuine enjoyment that came from what I loved, I completely understand how Aaron Burr famously asks Hamilton “How can you write like you’re running out of time?” Hamilton’s undying passion for writing and revolution is what drives him, which is something Burr can’t understand.

And this happens in high school, students are driven to finish their homework, study for tests, and work mindlessly on extracurriculars that nothing else matters to them. But when they’re forced to pursue something on their own, moreso when that thing doesn’t have a definitive end goal, they fall flat.

Now I’m an olympiad person and I’ve spent countless hours preparing for math and computing olympiads. Why do I practice? Originally, I enjoyed learning new concepts and how to apply them creatively, the “problem-solving process” as coined by many fellow olympiaders. But as time went on, that love faded away, and I ended up practicing for a feeling of usefulness, a feeling that I was doing something for a greater purpose, one that would gain me the respect of others, and more importantly, the respect of myself.

And I can say pretty confidently that I’m pretty good at olympiads, specifically the computing olympiad. Being invited to USA Computing Olympiad Camp (top 25 nationally, competing to represent the US at IOI - International Olympiad of Informatics) was one of the best moments of my life and was a goal I’d been working towards for 2 years at that point. When training to get into camp, I justified it by envisioning how I would feel when I got the invitation, rather than the true passion that got me into competitive programming in the first place. I practiced more just to feel like I tried my best, to salvage a bit of self-respect in case I failed. 

After Camp, which was one of the greatest experiences of my life and is a story of its own, I had a chance to really reflect on what I valued. I had probably peaked in competitive programming, and any further practice wouldn’t lead to a tangible goal, so I stopped for a while. And it took me that while to find the passion for problem-solving that made me start programming in the first place. What inevitably inspired me were the other people at Camp, but let’s not get carried away.

Right before quarantine, we would have these programming classes at school. I would spend countless hours on the projects that were assigned for this class, and still remember staying up late on the day before our presentation, talking to my friends about how we broke our project and literally couldn’t do anything. Our presentation ended up being a passionate rant about how programming was broken and how the logic we had written should work. And this passion fueled a lot of what I did during quarantine. I’m extremely proud of the projects I built in 7th grade, like the Connect 4 bot and Rubik’s Cube Solver that I still show off today. Back then, I would easily spend a whole weekend debugging a large project, just to find a trivial error, and just shrug off the wasted time. As time went on, my values changed, and when practicing, I would hate time spent debugging, only because it meant I didn’t make tangible progress. 

One of the most powerful quotes I’ve ever read is “the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.” And that's the problem with dreams, they give us temporary purpose and the illusion that life will be better after. What we need is passion, something that keeps us going past our dreams. And this is what is what high school doesn’t do for us. It doesn’t help us find purpose that exists without an end goal. 

In fact, everything in high school revolves around an end goal. Whether it be a grade, becoming the captain of a sports team, or the president of a club, high school is inherently designed to give us definitive end goals. And as teens who genuinely feel lost, we don’t know any better than to pursue them. But, by doing this, we are inherently restricting ourselves. This is exactly why you’ll see the same person study for the same amount of time per day, regardless of their workload. Students have an end goal, and to avoid feeling lost, they attempt to constantly make progress towards that end goal, feeling the same even when additional progress is minimal (like studying for the same test for 6 hours) or when they’ve barely progressed (like studying multiple subjects in the same 6 hours).

So how can we learn this? How can we be passion driven? That's a tough question with an incomplete and vague answer. I’ve tried being more intentional about my decisions, and then more self-aware about my intentions. I guess there’s some things we have to figure out on our own.