Question a day

Today's question comes from Caroline of Caroline's Crayons, which is a great blog you all should be reading by the way. Caroline's question is: Please give me advice for a 14-year-old family friend who cannot bear the thought of enduring five more years of school. He's very smart, curious about the world and is a bit introverted -- kind of a maverick. Despite his strong intelligence, he has let his schoolwork slide, saying that it is meaningless. He likes Tolkein, electronics, and bakes a mean buttermilk biscuit.

(I'll address my answer directly to the young man in question so you can feel free to quote me directly Caroline should you decide you like my advice to him.)

Dude, if you think five more years of school is bad then just wait until you have to get up every single morning to trudge off to a job you hate but you can't quit because you've got to pay your rent and your light bill and your water and sewage bill and your gas bill. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that your car insurance is also due and so is your car payment. So guess what? You got to get your butt up out of that bed and go to work to pay for all that stuff. While you're working though you can go ahead and think back to when you whined about having five more years of high school. Think back on those golden days when things weren't so bad, back when you fell in love every five minutes with all the cute girls (or boys as the case may be) and when Mom and Dad paid for everything.

Seriously guy, I've got major problems with our current economic system but I know first hand that dropouts fare the worst under it.

If you want to have anything at all under our current system you have to at least have a high school diploma. Maybe college or other avenues of higher learning aren't for you, fine then, but you got to monkey up and stick it out in high school. School work may seem meaningless to you now but most of the stuff you learn in high school prepares you for life later, well except for diagramming sentences. People don't become great writers like JRR Tolkein by giving up in high school, nor do they get those high paying electronics gigs that drive the women wild with desire by dropping out, and perhaps you might like to parlay that interest in baking into a career, well pal, you've got to have the math skills to measure ingredients correctly and you'll need those English skills to be able to talk to customers in that bakery.


We all have to do things that we don't like or that may seem senseless at the time, but trust me, it will make sense one day. If you drop out or fail out of high school get yourself ready for a life of horrid drudge work that pays little or no money.
Don't be a chump, stay in school.

Thanks for sending in that question Caroline!

Question month rolls on tomorrow and I'll answer questions all January long if you send them to monkeymuck AT gmail DOT com. I've got some great questions yet to answer but I need more, so keep them coming kids. I'll try my best to answer all questions on all topics all month long.