Marshall High School: Fill & Download for Free

[I want to agree with Tony Schpierer as much as possible. I am an outlier and lay much closer to the median than a lot of the other answerers. ]I dropped out of High school when I was 16 and 'went to college' as well. In reality I was plenty smart but horribly immature. I drank my way out of 3 colleges in three semesters and was on my own at almost 18.Following that I worked in jobs that didn't require a degree. I made 5th wheel trailers, worked at a humain society, worked at a vet clinic and a gas station.10 years after I dropped out I was working 49 hours a week at a vet clinic and an additional 24 hours a week at a gas station. 2000 was, financially, my best year up to that point and I made $32,000 with a wife and two kids. Doing my 2000 taxes I realized how little I was being paid for the work I was doing and I figured there had to be a better way. 6 months later I was enrolled full time in school and 8 years after that I have a BS, MS and am ABD.The interesting thing about my dropping out is that I had all the intellect needed to develop an impressive resume. I had acceptance letters from Harvard, NYU and Franklin and Marshall. I also had a grossly overdeveloped sense of self worth. My life went from a harvard trajectory to cleaning up dog shit. Further more, when I returned to school it was a small state school that was cheap and near my home. Despite (because of) this, I feel like I earned most of my success in life. For an upper-middle class white male I spent a fair amount of my time in the shit of life and am able to empathize in a way I never could have before.

This answer is probably only useful for American high school students. It's my impression that high schools (or high school equivalents) in other countries are alternately worse/better in qualitatively different ways such that these wouldn't be as useful. This is also derived from my own experience (i.e. only a single data point) and speaks to things that I did and/or things that I feel I should have done, and which of those things were worthwhile and which were a waste of time. It's also more or less targeted at the intellectual/nerdy types that seem to be more likely to frequent Quora, haha.Here are some things that may appear important at the time but really aren't:1) GPA and other academic achievements are not very important in and of themselves. You should think of these as symptoms or side-effects of other, more important things you should be doing. But attaining a certain GPA or particular academic award is absolutely the wrong goal and will get you nowhere in life. You heard me right: getting a 4.0+ GPA in high school is not going to help you in life. Moreover, pretty much every award or accolade you achieve in high school is utterly useless and completely uninteresting to anyone post-high school. Think about that. At best, it will be a curiosity to be brought up in casual conversation or maybe something people will make fun of you for. I say this as someone with a bedroom back home filled with random awards won during high school. It's okay to win them if the activity you're doing is fun or fulfilling on its own merits, but don't let the award be the target.2) In general, high school isn't worth very much in terms of lifetime educational value. I say this as someone who went to a (supposedly) "good" public high school. After exiting high school and going to college (and then entering the post-college working world), I was flabbergasted at all the simplistic, partially-true, or outright false ideas I had been taught or otherwise exposed to during my high school years. Except for maybe mathematics, it's almost all superseded by much more advanced and complete theories (the hard sciences), more thorough and in-depth understanding (literature), and more complex and variegated truths (social sciences). You honestly aren't learning that much. Get ready to have your mind blown after you graduate.3) Do not bother trying to achieve perfect attendance. Don't skip school habitually, but if your school offers some kind of incentive for perfect attendance, it is totally worthless.What should you be doing instead?1) Your GPA and academic achievements are a sort of proxy for how well you can learn the stuff you've been exposed to, and to some degree, how motivated of a person you are. College admissions boards care about that, but it is mostly to tell them how well you're going to do at the school. Assuming you are looking to go to college (an increasingly less cost-effective thing to do nowadays in the US...), you need to do well enough to go to the school you want. That's all. The rest of the time, you should just try to learn what you can in and out of class, but do not expend extra energy trying to get those last few GPA basis points. Instead...2) You need to learn to socialize. My impression of high school social life in America is that it's kind of vapid and stupid (it was when I was there). Nevertheless, you should be taking this time in your life to go hang out with other people and learn to date. It turns out that later success in the world is very, very heavily predicated on how good your social skills are, and you don't learn those from a class or a book. Trust me, you're not. You're definitely not learning them from Quora. You learn it from spending time with people, doing awkward social things, failing, having stupid crushes and relationships and heartbreak, and if you're not already the most popular kid in school, you need to start spending time doing all that stuff now. Yes, you should do your homework, but after you get it done, get out of the house and go out with friends. All of that useless "socializing" is actually key practice for developing social skills - which later in life are called "business skills." (There, doesn't that make it sound more useful?) Do your best to leave your insecurities behind and learn to be cool. This goes double if you are a huge nerd. You can be a cool nerd. Just get out there.3) Engage in athletics. It turns out that physical health is really important. However, based on physiology, it doesn't become a quality of life factor for most people until their mid/late-twenties so if you don't exercise, you can still get by (i.e. you won't get fat while you're in your teens and early twenties). But it turns out that it takes a few years of diligent exercise and/or athletics to condition your body into generally healthy function, so if you have been exercising or playing sports for years, you are years ahead of anyone who starts later. If you believe that the gnostic and intellectual is all that's important, you're wrong. The mind-body duality is false, the keen functioning of your mind is enhanced by vigorous and regular exercise. I did not know this when I was young, and it's only in the recent years as the intellectual demands of my career continued to rise that I realized that I needed to target high levels of physical health in order to boost and maintain peak mental functioning. If you're not already doing so, take up a sport or join a team now in high school. It will not only affect your academic achievement; it will probably enhance it. Also, it will likely help with #2.4) The key things you should be working to build are motivation and willpower. This is because the other things you're being run through (e.g. academics) aren't actually true - or they are, at best, partially true. What you're doing is preparing for life after high school, where persistence and the ability to work hard are worth more than anything else. These things are built by repeated application, so just try to repeatedly do things that are hard for you, like work on really large projects, take on a sport where performance is difficult, learn a skill outside of school, etc.5) Don't compete, create. This one is a key mindset thing for your whole life. The American school system (and much of work life) is designed to place you into zero-sum situations where you're competing against other people for limited amounts of resources or recognition. You're often competing to see who's the best, and there can only be one (or a few) of the best, and that person (or people) get the pass to move on to the next level, where the process repeats. It's a tremendous waste of resources. There are other ways to live life and - arguably - be much more successful and productive doing it, which is to carve out new areas of expertise and productive activity through creative endeavor. This is why I say that GPA and academics achievements (especially competitive ones) are not as worth it. You should try to learn and create new things. This is different things to different people, but you need to explore and find out what it means to you now. The difference is that if you're competing, you might have two (or n) people competing, each one expending, say, 100, 99, or 98 units of energy, and the person who expended 100 units of energy wins the whole prize, and the 99 + 98 units of energy from the other two participants have been completely wasted. Instead, if all those people worked on their own thing, expending 100, 99, and 98 units of energy, it could have all been worthwhile and invested into whatever they happened to create. Schools - especially high schools - do a terrible job of this latter thing, so watch out for it. Make sure your effort will still count even if you do not win, because later in life you will frequently not win, and you cannot afford to waste your energy.-----The biggest, and most overarching thing to keep in mind is that you are, basically, in a larval stage right now. Thus, the most important thing right now is to marshal your resources in preparation for future growth and opportunities. None of the "goals" at this stage in your life are real life goals that matter. Even e.g. getting into the right college is not a key goal - if you fail to do that, you will still do absolutely fine if you have prepared yourself adequately for adult life. Make sure your focus your energies on building yourself up and not the temporary, intermediate goals that have been set in front of you.

The old saying, "Hindsight is 20/20" is especially true for high school aged students. My friends and I did some pretty stupid/crazy things. We weren't bad kids, mind you, just mischievous and bored. Not a great combo.So our school decided to host a little competition similar to America's Got Talent. If you couldn't perform your talent live you had the ability to submit a video of whatever it was. One kid did a pretty technical dive from a high dive, another filmed himself shooting a target from 500 yards out, etc. And then we had Matt, one of my best friends and the single craziest human being I've ever had close interaction with. We used to say if he lived to age 25 it'd be a miracle. He's 28 today so miracle achieved.Anyways, Matt gets this brilliant idea…to light himself on fire. And film it. And submit it for the competition. And what did we, his smart and strapping young friends do? We helped him plan and execute it, of course.Again, in hindsight, he could have died. My friends and I very well could have been charged with a felony for our involvement. But thankfully, he wasn't hurt and I'm able to write about it on Quora :)We chose Brandon's house, since his house was pretty close to his pool. Matt's brilliant idea was to light himself on fire, jump like a ninja from the roof, and douse himself in the pool.He soaked his undershirt, underwear, ski mask, and shoes in cold water to protect himself, and then donned a jacket, and pants which we sprayed with engine starter fluid (which is basically gasoline in aerosol can, very flammable). Matt got mentally psyched up and said, "Let's do it." At which point Jared just lit his lighter and touched it to Matt's clothes. He quite literally burst into flames."Oh sh*t!!" Matt loudly exclaimed and starts running, and jumps. He holds this crane-like pose and flies through the air for what seems like an eternity. He hits the water and all trace of flames disappear. A rousing "YEAHHH!!!!!!" from all of us on the roof met Matt as he swam to the surface and got out of the pool.We left quickly since Brandon's parents had no idea what we were doing, and Matt submitted the tape for the competition. The judges were adults who knew better than us though. They called Matt's parents, who in turn contacted all of us. Two of my friends had to go to a class at a fire station on burn victims, Matt's parents made him do community service with the Fire Marshal, and my parents made me write a 3 page paper on choice and accountability (which was torture for a 17 yr old). If my parents knew about the burn victim class I have no doubt they would have sent me to it. They were rightfully upset, since Matt could have been seriously hurt.This group of friends all grew up to be relatively responsible adults with relationships, careers, and even kids, but man we did crazy things as teenagers. Once another friend and I switched places so he could be the driver and I the passenger…while the car was moving at 60 mph on a dirt road. I then got on the roof of the car with two of my friends who were sitting in the back.We were idiots but we survived and thankfully never hurt anybody.