I feel like this is because school, especially college, and particularly exams, is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get, so they look back at that time as peak-anxiety. Think about it: you're being evaluated and the result of that evaluation shapes the next step in the pipeline, and ultimately the trajectory of the rest of your life! Well, at least that's what the university officials, professors, your peers and parents all tell you. You pretty much have a series of "one chance" events that you must pass or you're done for. Failure of any step is permanent, and affects your average (seemingly) forever.
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
When am sufficiently stressed at work - a recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.
But overall school and college was a great experience - the tests and assignments sucked, but what I remember is the great friends that I made, the interesting people that I met and all the personal exploration that I did.
No regrets that I took my sweet time to finish undergrad, in the grand scheme of life it was not time wasted, but time well spent.
Adulting does not offer the same opportunities - so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it.
> so kids bask in your youth! It's fleeting and gone before you know it.
Depends on the perspective, I guess. I was working in several different places, and sometimes I had hard time. Even working in the worst places, I felt better than in school.
I hated elementary school, because kids were cruel (some time I came back to home with chocking marks) and teachers decided to just not see bullying. Or decided to give me a hard time, too. When someone destroyed my textbook by writing on it while I was not at the desk, I got note to the parents because supposedly I told someone to do that.
I kinda liked liceum because finally people were more mature. But man, long term, it was very exhausting. The lesson schedule looked like it was set randomly. For example, in second class, being 16-17 yo, Thursdays I had lessons from 9 AM to 6 PM, and the next day I was starting at 7 AM. I was tired all the time and had no time for social interactions.
Please note that the following paragraph is not personal. It applies to the entire phenomenon. For me, it is annoying when grown-ups tell children that it is the best time in their life. When I was a kid, I felt fear a lot. As a teenager, I was depressed and tired all the time. And, you know, if it is the best time in my life, why should I care about my future at all? It is going to be terrible anyway...
Everyone has its own perspective. Maybe you had great time in school. Maybe for my mother, school years actually are the best years of her life. But telling young people that they are living the best time in their lives, and it will be only worse later, is... unfair.
I share your experience. I always felt out of place and struggled through school. Tired, extremely bored, constantly felt inadequate. There were a few teachers that basically carried me through because they saw something in me. But other than that it often felt like torture.
I want to echo this sentiment, albeit for different reasons.
When I have a particularly bad day as an adult, I often think back to being a child (or worse, teenager) in school forced to follow arbitrary rules by tired adults who were more interested in making sure nobody wore a baseball cap than keeping kids safe from anaphylactic allergic reactions.
When I think back to my school days and how anxious, stressed, unheard, and restricted I felt almost 100% of the time, I usually feel immediately better.
I remember being 16 in high school, and during the school day I couldn't just take a walk, because that would be truancy to skip class.
I couldn't just take a walk at night because our municipality instituted a curfew past I don't know, 10pm or something for those under 18, and a police car actively patrolled my neighborhood for violations.
I lived 18 years like that. Allowed to make no choices about where I went to school or at what time.
So now, as an adult, sometimes I just exit my apartment and walk down a city street when I feel like it, and it feels extremely empowering.
Taking a mental health day and not showing up to work, or better yet, handing in my resignation, also feel extremely empowering.
From my perspective, being a child sucked. I hated almost every moment of it, despite being reasonably popular in high school, having a close circle of friends, and never worrying about my grades.
Being an adult is amazing by comparison and I would never want to go back.
But I also understand that to some degree, that's a result of the freedom that comes with a high salary and an in-demand skillset that allow me to leave jobs and take days off with little risk. Many adults don't have that opportunity, and I totally understand how in some cases they could see their childhood as having been better due to a lack of responsibilities.
I don't think it's a perspective - I believe I was fortunate to have the support system that I had. As a child you are supposed to be protected and cared for. And I hope that I can do the same for my children.
Maybe you mistook my perspective for hubris - but it is what childhood should be - innocent and pure and if it's not, then society is failing.
I am sorry if I misunderstand something here – to be honest, English never was my forte, so I may miss some subtlety.
I did not take your post as a form of hubris. What I meant when I wrote about perspective is that personal experiences shape our assessment of reality. I agree that childhood should be innocent and pure. But sometimes, it is not.
No offense taken at all - I agree those formative years of childhood shape our view of the world.
Hope we don't let the bad experiences color the future.
Very much agree with this. I often (day-)dream about using a time machine to tell my younger self a few words that would have changed the whole experience drastically. The main advice would be: stop trying to care. You, my young friend, are not the stakeholder in the institutions you're forced to attend. The system doesn't have your well-being and your benefit as a first priority. The interests of the faculty, parents, and in some cases future employers, are much more important, and you have no way to influence that, no matter what you do. When they think about you it's invariably an afterthought and they have a world of incentives to deny reality, bias the analyses, and treat you and your friends as means to some end.
I hated school. I hated the inadequacy of lesson - some were obviously way too easy for me, while others way too hard. The number of lesson hours per week per subject didn't align with my interests nor the difficulty of the subject. The amount of wasted time was staggering. For example, it so happened that I didn't attend high-school for half a year in my fourth semester. I had enough scores in some subjects to pass, but for a few I didn't, and was given a few weeks to prepare for oral exams. I managed to learn half a year worth of biology, history, and chemistry in 3 weeks, and passed the exams. It was a Pyrrhic victory - I passed to the next grade, but at the same time I realized that I'm wasting (6 months - a few weeks) each semester. I started questioning the meaning of going to school; I realized that I could learn faster on my own, then realized that I would have learned a whole lot more if I could learn with a mentor who'd have my best interests in mind. I also realized that no teacher has an interest in working with someone like me, and that the system is actively hostile to all the non-standard approaches and needs. By the next year, I was diagnosed with depression and missed the whole year while trying to come to grips with that harsh reality.
Later on, I was locked in a constant harassment from an English teacher (a second language here). I learned English in private lessons and on the Internet and I was good at it. That was unacceptable for her. I was to sit quietly in the corner and when I tried to participate in the lesson, I was branded her enemy. The unfair treatment was to the point where I barely graduated, yet I got 97% score on the matriculation exam. I had an urge to find her and throw the results in her face, but I knew I would never recover the lost time and expended psychological effort to persevere.
If I could do it all again, I would focus all I had on breaking out of the system. That system very obviously wasn't made for people like me, but I felt helpless, knowing there's no alternative. It was wrong. The alternatives are always there, even if deliberately hidden as to not "encourage abnormal behavior". I could have tried harder to get away from the system that damaged my health and gave me next to nothing in exchange. And if I couldn't find an alternative, I would have changed my attitude at least: look, Mr. teacher, you're being paid to teach me, and I'm not being paid to learn. So, Mr. teacher, act like I'm a paying customer, please. Because otherwise, Mr. teacher, I'll go through all possible means to fuck you up, cheerfully and as a hobby. Just as you've been doing to me all this time.
Hell, I have dreams that I've forgotten to attend class all semester long in grad school and the final exam is tomorrow, and I never even went to grad school! It's like my brain subconsciously realized the undergrad panic dreams no longer make sense as that's too long ago, so now they've evolved to something more suitable for later in life, even though I never did that thing.
This is my dream as well. About 10 years (god has it been that long?) ago I took an informal poll of my small office and was shocked at how many of them had this specific dream. Not just some school anxiety dream. That specific dream where you have a class you either forgot you enrolled in or never attended and have the final coming up. It was like 60% of the office!
God, to make these dreams even worse, I once literally did completely miss an exam in college, as in, I somehow missed the announcement of when it would be, and skipped the study period in the morning when it was given, and then only learned about it later that day in the lecture when everyone was talking about the exam!
Once you actually live that experience, it (or versions of it) will haunt your nightmares for the rest of your life.
I have had a few dreams about forgetting that I have registered for a class, and realizing late that I have an exam.
A more recurrent dream for me is finding myself in the backseat of an empty, moving car, able to reach the steering wheel, but unable to control the brakes.
I've had that backseat driving one a lot, and it tends to come and go throughout my life.
Sometimes I'm alone in the car. Other times there is someone else in the front but they are incapacitated, or unwilling to bring the car back under control. I'm usually alone, though.
On a few occasions I was able to climb into the front seat, but of course then the brakes either did nothing or were so ineffectual that trying to use them to slow down only distracted me and made matters worse.
(1) do you have a feeling that you have control of your own life? Maybe it feels that you are in a prison where "your hand is forced" and you cannot take own decisions, have to play the bad hand you received
(2) are you doing something risky, like working in a failing start up? Or a company thay is going towards bankruptcy?
Wow I have had a dream very similar quite a few times. I'm driving on some very unstable road, often made of sand and the car falls into the lower levels of that road, getting stuck... Sometimes it's a curvy bridge the car needs to climb and it constantly tends to fall off. I thought the school exams were the only common dreams that I had, but at appears that similar ones to this one is dreamt by others too!
Yeah it’s very surreal, during the dream I realize that hmm, this is pretty dangerous, but am still somehow casual about it, and then I don’t complete the turn and the car starts plummeting down and I start saying I love yous and I wake up
It's such a common dream! I wonder how school-themed stress dreams would have manifested for people who lived before what we would recognize as "modern" educations system...
> I am an assistant professor. Suddenly I receive express orders from the dean to teach osteology at the very last minute. Anxiety, anguish * * * when going over the bones in my memory. I enumerate those of the hand: scaphoids, capitate, and I did not know any more. Meanwhile the class awaits me, the students yell. I ask to myself how I will lecture about bones if I have almost forgotten them? Growing anguish and I awaken with a sense of well-being, upon realizing that I am not a professor, I am old and no one is directing me.
I legit had a dream recently that I had enrolled in a graduate degree and then forgotten I was enrolled for months and now it was a week before exam time I had just had a realisation of "Oh hey, didn't I enrol in a degree?"
I have no idea where that dream came from or why I had it. I have never had a "didn't study" dream before, university was a relatively stress free time for me compared to my earlier years
I guess I'm brimming with enough (over)confidence to avoid the "didn't study" dreams or the "sitting in the back seat of an empty car" dreams, but I occasionally dream I signed up for some class and then didn't bother to attend it, wasting my time and snubbing the teacher.. "ah shoot, sorry guys"
I have persistent dreams in which I decide to change my career to something more interesting, but requiring a different university degree that the one I have now (CS). In these dreams, I decide to go back to high school to improve on my final grades, so that I have higher chance of getting into my new university of choice (HS grades are a large component of that in Poland). Through these dreams, I attend the HS classes (as a 40-year old), sweat about the homework and exams etc. It's not a nightmare, it's just bizzare.
Mine was that I had forgotten to take a class or that the records were lost and I had to redo the last years of college. It was a nightmare I had even a decade after getting my degree.
Same here -- my classmates and I go back to high school for taking one history class, as due to administrative difficulties one requirement for the degree was not met, and noone noticed until now. I went there more than 20 years ago.
Ughhh, I had a dream within the last couple months where I had to go back to high school for a very similar reason, to finish one last class or something. I couldn't tell you why, as things in dreams often don't make sense, other than that I had to. And it was very strange having to be in those hallways with all the school kids as an adult.
Yes, I have this recurring nightmare maybe once a year and I graduated more than a decade ago. I am all stressed out because I realize I haven't attended one of my classes even once because I completely forgot about it.
These are the dreams that I have all the time as well. Usually the set up is: I dropped a class but it didn't go through in the system, I go all semester not attending said class thinking that I had dropped it, but then the last week of the semester comes and I realize that I am failing the class from missed assignments and tests, and the only way out is to ace a final I know nothing about so I can scrape by with a C.
I had a recurring dream for a few years after I'd graduated that I still had to sit my final year! The dream was so real one time that I woke in a panic and check my certificates to make sure! I studied in my thirtees as it was something I'd always wanted to do, so although I didn't have any career aspiration pressure the finals were stressful enough and I wonder if this was some sort of sub-consious shedding. Interesting to read the comments about similar experiences.
I have a recurring dream where the university revokes my diploma years after graduating because I actually somehow dropped out of all my classes and forgot to finish the final projects/exams.
That never happened, but I did drop a couple classes before the withdrawal deadline to fix the workload. It feels so real though.
I dropped out of college and never have the forgotten exam dreams. However I did do four years of theater and I regularly have the opening night, don't know my lines nightmare.
I honestly have recurring PTSD from some of the violence I was forced to walk into day after day to graduate, where all school authorities were more interested in a coverup than helping. My grades were shockingly not that good in this environment and I was just told I was too stupid to learn any topic about computers I wanted and had to learn some less prestigious topics after graduation. In this environment I could hardly enjoy good times with friends, there was just too much of a shadow lurking over the whole thing.
I had to leave school to learn, and now that I’m a computer programmer, I feel apprehension that I might have to go back to school to four years to pretend to learn topics I learned independently just to assuage the school systems ego enough that they will give me an accreditation. The idea of going back to school makes me tense up at this point. Adulthood is so much less traumatizing because it feels like you have so much more choice to avoid abuse, and you can choose to confront abusive situations on your own schedule. You’re valued for so many more reasons than your ability to tolerate abuse and produce good test scores.
> When am sufficiently stressed at work - a recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.
Because my high school Biology course (A Levels in the UK) was divided into modules assessed throughout two years I came to the last exam pretty sure that I didn't have to score many marks to get the grade I was aiming for.
I ended up in a weird situation where my instinct was to prepare really well but, in practice, I should skimp on revision for Biology and concentrate on subjects that weighted the end-of-year exams higher.
The strategy worked out - I hit what I was aiming for in Biology and in the other subjects. But that whole very tactical approach so went against my character that, to this day, anxiety dreams manifest about not having done the work for that specific exam. Often they're further exaggerated (e.g. I've simply forgotten to go to any lessons all year, etc) but it focuses around that event.
I find it weird that my subconscious prefers that over arguably even more stressful (and sometimes less successful!) exams at university. Maybe I was just more equipped to deal with it by then.
> recurring dream I have is that I am in the exam room ready to take a test, but did not study or I have mixed up the dates and came prepared for the wrong subject.
I get these exact nightmares. I wonder how common is this.
I have no idea how common the nightmare is. I have never had them. But I did mix up the dates for my exam.
My friend called me as I was about to go to the gym and asked where I was, with a very concerned voice. It turned out that I was supposed to be at an exam. I rushed home, changed clothes and went like crazy to school. Luckily they let me in as the last one of the day - of course I had not prepared in the slightest - but did absolutely fine :)
> is about as high-stakes as most people's lives ever get
I don't think that's the case, but more that kids are being put in these "high stakes" situations without the mental capacity to handle them. Turning in an assignment late, underpreparing or waking up late for an exam, getting a B+ instead of an A, fumbling during a presentation – these are all insignificant and completely artificial problems in the grand scheme of life. However when you are a student going through them it feels like the end of the world, and that memory sticks.
True, but as you get further towards "A" average, the seeming difference between an A and a B gets more important.
The only person I have ever known to have cried over grades was someone who cried over getting a B+ instead of an A. I know many more people who got D's instead of C's -- they didn't care.
I cared when I got a D instead of a C in my statistics course, but only because I retook it to get the D off my transcript. What really stung was I got the basically the same grade the second time around, but the professor (same professor) did a curve that year. I replaced that D with an A. Where was that curve the first time around?
Yeah, MIT versus SUNY essentially. I got A-Bish grade average but did well enough on the SAT to get a scholarship to a SUNY and said F it to the prestigious schools. Happily in less debt now. Didn't make a difference (well, retrospectively, perhaps in a different timeline, I'm a well-respected researcher with a PHD.)
I really wish school could some how be completely overhauled to project-based learning. I feel live tests and exams optimize for the wrong thing and in general don’t help anyone except making it easier for schools to score students.
I usually learned the most out of take-home exams. You’d usually need to study and brush up on things, but then having a week to thoroughly work out everything was always a great learning experience. It is a way of the professor saying “you should know this and if not, know how to figure it out”. It was an actually good test of your knowledge and skill and didn’t rely on being able to spit something out in one or two hours in a stressful environment.
I think you’re right that no adult experiences moments like you get in school exams. Almost never are you required to know some relatively arbitrary thing or solve some problem within an hour or teo. There are crunches and moments of needing to fix something quickly and important presentations, but in every case you are presented with something you already know about or have day to day experience with. And failure is usually not some drastic adjustment of your future. If the professor is not good, which is the norm, then exams are a bit of a toss up.
It would be nice if they were able to emulate some of the more security focused interviews I've had. It consists of sitting in a room, and just a discussion about random things. For example, say an operating systems final, where it consists of you sitting with a professor and just having a conversation about the class, like "Tell me what you understand about access times for devices? What about x, y and z?'. I know there's biases, but I feel like when a person can use conversational computer science about the subject, it shows they understand the concepts enough and are ready for the real world.
At my current company, the security positions are focuses like that and actually test people, the Dev interviews are two leetcode questions and a conversation to make sure you arn't a complete dunce. I havn't met a single dumb person on the other side of the fence, but I have met alot of dumb devs here.
This. school isn't teaching you the topic, it's teaching you to pass an exam. I had a physics teacher that fully understood this. All we did was past papers for like 6 months of I don't really remember much physics but I got a good grade in this class and it helped get me into uni so who cares.
If schools really cared about passing on knowledge then most things should be project/course-work based with a small write-up explaining what you did etc depending on the subject to make sure you know what you're talking about.
though we'd probably see much higher grades overall, but we wouldn't know if this is because it's a better way to judge knowledge or because the teacher just told them what to write.
The primary problems arise from (1) mass education and (2) cheating.
Project-based learning can't be managed with 40:1 student teacher ratios. The best learning has always come from projects and apprenticeship/mentorship style systems, but even managing that with 3 classes with a 10:1 student teacher ratio becomes hard. This should make sense, almost all the economic evidence is that parent characteristics are hands down the largest factors in what a kid's future income will be (mentorship).
Cheating is rampant which is why take-home exams rarely exist.
The reality is the world would be far better off with 3 times as many teacher, but you can't keep teachers wages as high as they are with 3 times the supply.
I left high school in junior year (intending to go straight to college — didn't work out, long story). I took the GED test, and I was SO MAD because I realized I could have aced that test straight out of 8th grade.
Has anyone ever asked about my GED? No. Lol. Has lacking a college degree held me back? No (though there are definitely fields where it would have).
One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting out which bits of "received wisdom" actually deserve that label versus being cached now-bullshit that your parents and teachers don't know is obsolete. My parents were right about a lot of interpersonal stuff, but dead wrong about whether I needed to go to college in order to obtain good jobs.
Yeah, and all the advice we get is lagged by 10-20 years. Parents are pretty far removed from the reality of entry level job markets and changes in industries
> One of the hardest parts of young adulthood is sorting out which bits of "received wisdom" actually deserve that label versus being cached now-bullshit
In California you can't take the test until you're 18 (or perhaps a year or two earlier if you can convince your local school district to give you permission).
It appears that the limits for the CHSPE are still being at least 16 years old, or having completed part of tenth grade, which have been the requirements for as long as I can remember. However, it does appear the interpretation of that has changed. When I took it, if you were home schooled, even if you were home schooled for the express purpose of taking the exam, you could have your parents attest that you were working at a tenth grade level; I took it when I was thirteen by doing this, and know a number of others, some considerably younger, who did as well. It appears that the current requirements actually do require some form of official school district approval, which may have been in response to that method of taking the test early. If that's the case, it's unfortunate; I certainly don't regret having taking the route I took. If anything, I somewhat regret listening to the advice of those around me who kept advising me against it, and giving the normal school system, which made me miserable, more chances than I needed to.
As for the commenter's point on people caring or not caring about the GED/CHSPE; apart from needing it for my initial community college admission immediately after getting it, it never came up for me at all, despite teachers insisting for years that getting a diploma that way would ruin us. I don't even remember any the details of it, or where the documentation is: there's little point in having anything pre-university on a CV.
That's what I find fascinating honestly. We let our kids undergo grueling periods while we as adults live a leisurely life. Kids have incredible strict rules to adhere to. It was almost completely unheard of for a kid to come in late in school. Kids can't do the things they want to do because parents stop them. That in combination with the high-pressure environment of school... I think the only reason they accept it is because they don't know any better.
Comparatively most adults have incredible comfortable lives. Besides going to work they can basically do whatever they want. There is no pressure to strive for anything. It's baffling to me how people can lay such high pressure on their children but let themselves go in their own life.
>It's baffling to me how people can lay such high pressure on their children but let themselves go in their own life.
The reason why most adults are not very motivated when it comes to learning is because school has killed their learn drive. The recurring dreams may very well be a sign of a traumatic experience.
Instead of putting pressure, parents should take away this very crippling aspect of today's schools by telling their children that grades are not so important and that the often required cramming does more harm than good.
If a child's learn drive survives school it will surpass many of its peers futher down the road.
Half joking: where can I find this adult leisure? School meant free food and post school meant (really, really) struggling to stay afloat financially. It took nearly a decade to get to a point where I could take a vacation without risk of financial ruin (like get evicted or not be able to pay for fuel to get to work). Now things are much better financially but I still don't do what i want to do because i still have a lot of responsibilities. My kids however are leisurely creatures who i wish would take school more seriously as I'm worried about their ability to support themselves as they come to that age.
Of course everyones adult life is different but if you have a decent job you generally never have to worry about money, unless you spend it on unneeded stuff(I admit this assumes a western country). That doesn't mean it matches your experience, but an outlier doesn't invalidate the general point I made.
> My kids however are leisurely creatures
How so? They are forced every weekday under duress of the law to go to a place they didn't choose to be. If they don't perform in their forced labor they are put into more forced labor. They have to listen to you and you probably very often take away their agency to do what they desire. Kids do have more "free" time, but that time is not actually free. But the way the can spend is very narrow. But more time does not equal better.
> Of course everyones adult life is different but if you have a decent job you generally never have to worry about money, unless you spend it on unneeded stuff(I admit this assumes a western country). That doesn't mean it matches your experience, but an outlier doesn't invalidate the general point I made.
You grew up middle or upper class and the person you’re responding to didn’t, or had no or very bad relations with their family such that they didn’t or couldn’t help.
Don’t forget that school is the most orderly environment lots of children experience, the one where they’re most likely to be around educated people, intellectual stimulation, the least violent, the one where they’re reliably fed. Without the pretense that it’s about education that would be hard to keep up.
One of my favorite engineers dropped out of college because the university (UC) demanded an English proficiency test for the diploma after completing 4 years of of school.
Now they have 40+ patents and confounded 3 biotech companies with 9 digit exits.
Friends from the old days ironically refer to them as Dr.<Name> because they are the smartest person they know.
I knew a few people who were stuck in that mindset of "if I don't get straight As in everything I'm going to be doomed forever" mindset in both highschool and university. It did not seem to make them very happy, and it's entirely bullshit, especially in highschool.
Eh, I still dream about school sometimes, and it was as low stakes as it can get for me.
I never studied for anything, never did any homework, and to enter university in Germany I just needed good enough grades to pass high school (Gymnasium). GPA was irrelevant.
Of course, I don't wake up with any cold sweat over it.
For me as well, in the last years of Gymnasium they didn't control homework or even attendance much. I missed many classes in the last 2-3 years, because I preferred to stay at home and get some sleep or whatever. Or maybe it is more that I missed most classes by sleeping in class. Memories are hazy at this point. Which could be one reason that I've started to have these dreams where I notice I didn't attend this particular class all year and it's too late.
In Poland, if you want to get into any university, High School diploma is all you need. However, if you want to go the best ones, or to a popular subject (psychology, computer science) in a mediocre one, you need good grades.
The situation is similar in Germany, where I grew up. You need good grades to study the popular subjects. For mathematics, they took anyone who was willing.
I've found that it also sets some really bad habits for the real world, particularly for the types of higher upside / capped downside scenarios that you often see in startups or some of the arts (eg trying to make it big as an actress).
>The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.
I never experienced any anxiety from exams or performing well in the elementary school. School was easy for me and also, coming from one of the Nordic welfare countries, I never thought that my life would somehow be ruined if I didn't do well in school. I felt much more anxiety about other kids in school since I was quite nerdy and didn't fit in well.
Consequently, I never have dreams about exams. However, I do have dreams that I have to go back to school as an adult for some reason (usually because I missed some classes or exams or something and I have to do them now). The dreams are also never about the actual classrooms but just hanging around in the school with the teenagers and feeling weird about it.
I can't say I ever felt like that during school, Uni maybe a bit but not school. My final school year was stressful during exam time but that's to be expected I guess since my uni application hinged on my exam results.
But having said that I imagine it could feel pretty different depending on what expectations you set for yourself, or more importantly - what expectations your parents set for you. If you've got mum and dad looming over your shoulder 24/7 pushing you for more so you can be a doctor/lawyer/CEO/whatever then you're probably going to feel pretty differently about the whole situation.
I think this is only true because your life has been so short at that point. The idea of having to repeat an exam next quarter or god forbid, next year feels like an unacceptable waste of time
I think it has more to do with the "mode" in which a child brain is, absorbing and learning durably. I can look at a class photo from 30 years ago and name all the kids I was with. I will struggle with colleagues I worked with 5 years ago. I think that's why the stress and trauma you live through as a child follows you all your life the way an experience as an adult might not.
It took me five, almost six, years to graduate high school. Underachiever is an understatement. I still dream about not having graduated. It feels so real in the dream, the failure. I am a successful business owner who has no issues with financial security. My lizard brain or whatever it is just likes replaying it to screw with me I think.
Like other commenters, this doesn't fit my anecdotal evidence of sample size 1.
For me, both elementary and high school were easy. I would do a minimal amount of work, show up to the exam and get maximum marks. Exams weren't especially stressful.
As a stereotypical school nerd, PE was stressful though - I do remember lots of anxiety being asked to jump the vaulting horse, do somersaults, handstands, and that kind of things I wasn't able to do.
And yet, I regularly dream about not having passed some non-PE high-school subject and having to retake the exam and/or go to class (even when these subjects were easy for me) and don't dream about PE.
Just because it's easy doesn't mean it didn't worry you. I recall significant amounts of stress about passing tests on subjects I never got lower than an 80% on. Just always expecting to do the test, thinking I did well, and then get slapped with a fail. Never happened, still worried me.
I'd honestly not be surprised if the whole "dreams about school" thing turns out to be world-wide low grade PTSD.
I mean this in a polite way, but if college is the highest stakes one has experienced, then that's a pretty narrow experience of anxiety and difficulties life has to offer.
To me that seems like a very fortunate life experience.
School was not very stressful for me. I never had especially high grades, but didn't do that bad either (3.4ish GPA in undergrad). There were specific classes that were annoying either because of the content or teacher. I'm sure there was some temporary stress over a few of those finals, but not excessive.
Work is much more stressful and high stakes. There's no real structure, no contract or performance guide (like a syllabus), and I need this job to support my family. Getting another job would be very difficult.
I disagree with this. In school I didn't feel much anxiety and didn't try very hard at exams. I didn't think my life would be over if I didn't do this or that. I simply didn't have those thoughts back then.
Now I'm older I understand what stress is and I do feel like my actions (or inaction) could ruin the rest of my life. There have been several key moments in my adult life that I can pinpoint as high stakes and peak anxiety. Yet I still have the school dreams. I had one just last night, in fact.
The issue is, people believe that to be the case. That sixth grade exam on long division you got a 17/100 on? It doesn't really have any bearing on what you do as an adult.
Interesting theory. One data point for your theory: i never dream of school - school was the easiest part of my life and i seldom prepared for tests. I viewed it all as a req'd time sink to get a good job to escape poverty. My equivalent dream is being unable to punch or fight (like a kitten could take the punishment and keep napping) or move fast enough.
I don’t know about that, I was never particularly stressed at college or school. I’m way, way more effected by stress at work where failure to deliver has massive consequences on the state of my startup or the lives of the people that work there.
ok, that tracks because I don't look back on that as peak-anxiety, and I don't have dreams about being back in school. But I do have dreams about peak anxiety events that I will not be sharing here.
I think this is one of many explanations. While exams were stressful. I loved learning and would love to go back for my PhD or even a brand new discipline if I had the funds to support my family with that lifestyle.
It’s the easiest way to do ranking and sorting in a consistent way for large populations and reduces opportunities for corruption/favouritism/teacher bullying. Once you think of school as a place for ranking at least as much as for learning things make more sense.
> Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever!
What? That's so far from the truth. If you fail in school you just get to try again. You may not get into Stanford but realistically your life can still be great no matter how many times you fail.
I don't think the commenter still believes that. But it's certainly reflects what I was told by schools growing up. Friends aren't important and work hard else your life will be menial labor until you die.
I'm not really one to bash my country, the US, but we have to pay for school here so you really only get about 1 -> 1.5 shots before your debt is too high to keep attending.
Most definitely. When I was doing computer science the threat of failing a class and costing myself money and sure that I was anxious pretty much the entire time I was in college. I had a lot of fun though
The whole path from elementary school through to college graduation feels like a career development game where the stakes are raised every year. Fail once off the path, and it's Walmart Greeter for you, forever! It's no wonder I still wake up in a cold sweat over it, 30 years on.