poke at "Student Dysphoria"

Commit because I have an appointment to visit my mom, but I'd like to
tie off the conclusion and publish this tonight. It's not my snappiest
work, but it's better published than withheld.

diff --git a/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md b/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
index 7eaaf78..ba2d8fd 100644 (file)
--- a/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
+++ b/content/drafts/student-dysphoria-and-a-previous-lifes-war.md
@@ -22,12 +22,11 @@ And not just reading, either. I remembered enjoying the linear algebra class I t
 
 This was fine, for a while. I learned from my books, and—there was a _dignity_ to working at the supermarket. It was boring, to be sure, but at least I had some function other than simply to obey a designated authority. You can _tell_ when a customer's latte is too foamy, or the coinmag on checkstand 1 needs to be swapped out, on its own terms, and not because the teacher said so.
 
-But making $9.40 an hour at the supermarket indefinitely (and paying a nominal rent to live with my mom) didn't seem like an acceptable destiny for someone of my social class. It was assumed that at some point, I would have to figure out how to get a grown-up job (although my colleagues who had been at the supermarket for 30 years probably wouldn't approve of me calling it that).
+But making $9.40 an hour at the supermarket indefinitely (and paying a nominal rent to live with my mom) didn't seem like an acceptable destiny for someone of my social class. It was assumed that at some point, I would have to figure out how to get a grown-up job (although my colleagues who had been at the supermarket for 20 years probably wouldn't approve of me calling it that).
 
-[TODO—
-A+ cert, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College, diff eqs., ending up in community college/SFSU]
+Somehow, this seemed more of a daunting problem than learning linear algebra. To make a dumb story short (I tried [career college](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heald_College) briefly on the theory that they could _just_ teach me job-stuff without them fraudulently claiming credit for my education, then found that horrible and traumatizing for the same reasons as regular school and quit, then thought I could study for the same [certifications](https://www.comptia.org/certifications/which-certification) on my own, then took a differential equations class at community college just for fun and to prove that my math self-study measured up—and did poorly, leaving me devastated and feeling obligated to finish my degree after all in order to prove that I could), I eventually ended up back in college again, at community college, and then San Francisco State, my father not willing to pay for me to go back to the University in Santa Cruz again.
 
-I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of acheivement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
+Especially now that I had a higher form of existence to contrast it with, going back to school was _awful_. I hated the social role of "student" and the whole diseased culture of institutional servitude. I despised the way everyone, including and especially the other "students", talked about their lives and the world in terms of classes and teachers and degrees and grades, rather than talking about the _subject matter_. I wanted it to be _normal_ for boasts of acheivement to take the form of "I proved this theorem and thereby attained _deep insight into the true structure of mathematical reality_", rather than "I got an 'A' on the test."
 
 (Where, sure, it makes sense to take a test occasionally in order to verify that one isn't self-deceiving about the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality, or in order to provide some amount of third-party-legible _evidence about_ the depth of one's insight into the true structure of mathematical reality—but the test score itself isn't the _point_.)
 
@@ -43,4 +42,6 @@ We could imagine someone sympathetic to my plight in school deciding that my pro
 
 I don't think this would be helping me. When I was angry about being in school, it wasn't because of _the word_ "student"—it was because I wanted more autonomy and I wanted more respect for my intellectual initiative. Changing the words without granting me the autonomy and respect I craved wouldn't be solving my _actual_ problem. It would probably make things _worse_ by sabotaging the concepts and language I needed to _articulate_ what my problem was. My pain and suffering was no less _real_ for being "merely" game-theoretic (looking to the reactions of others), rather than some intrinsic organic condition to be accomodated.
 
-Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing novel original research.
+Likewise, being a "student" would have been fine in a world where students got more autonomy—a world where there was a collective understanding that courses are a supplement or pragmatically useful guidepost to one's studies, rather than course grades being _the whole thing_. I'm happy to learn from the masters: that's what textbooks _are_. I wasn't _delusional_ about doing particularly novel original research; I just wanted recognition for the real work I _was_ doing.
+
+Asking whether "student dysphoria" is a real condition would be the wrong question. The pain of not being seen by Society the way you want to be seen is unquestionably real—and because it is real, it can only be sustainably abated by addressing its real causes.