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Originally posted by starbum
Okay, thank you all for the feedback. I'm leaning more towards more schooling, possibly hopefully keeping my job at the same time.
However; big problem. I suck at school. I've been homeschooled mostly, and when I went back to public for 9th (social decisions), I failed alot of classes at the public school. Im just petrified of the requirements.... I learn hands-on, in real world situations as they are happening or just before. I cant get anything from a big textbook with hypothetical situations that are nearly impossible to occour. I did that when trying to learn cisco at the community college here, I barely knew how to turn them on afterwards because we didnt get to touch a single router. Now with my job, I had to configure one of those routers for a network job, and my company taught me on the spot, and now I know 3x more than before.
Am I just picky about learning or is this actually a problem of mine that is going to make life hard on me in college?
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Okay, I can understand a little. I did get my degree, many years ago in journalism, but I ended up in technical publications, in various computer and software firms. That was in the day when nobody trained tech writers; you walked in cold with a few writing samples, having never seen a computer before, and they showed you a terminal and said, 'learn.' And I did learn, over the years -- database, graphics, layout, desktop publishing, manufacturing ops, server maintenance, system administration, a zillion different apps, and several operating systems. I learned from experts: people who came over to my desk and walked me through things, who were available to talk to me one-on-one, who gave me time to muck about with new pieces of technology and make my own sense of them, hands-on. I did that for 20 years, and wrote a lot of manuals.
So now I'm back in school, and we're trying to learn practical matters by listening to lectures by professors who'd rather be doing research than teaching, reading long boring books, and trying to relate it all to what we do in our field study, if it relates at all and it often doesn't. I'm not going to say that college is worthless, but sometimes it's just about the piece of paper, and some of them -- especially the larger universities -- seem to be run more for the sake and convenience of the professors than for the students. I'm sure not learning as much as I think I should, and I'm trying hard.
So yeah, somewhere down the line not having the piece of paper is going to impact you. But if you're not up for the whole academic grind -- if the book/paper/report thing is just not you -- I wholeheartedly understand, and sympathize. I learned the natural way for 20 years and was paid for it, like you were. The college/academic way is _not natural._ It's mass-produced instruction, with cost efficiency as important or more important than the learning environment.
Tell you what. Keep your job. Take _one_ class, one, in something you need for a degree and that you're also interested in, at night. Try your hardest. See how it works out. But don't risk it all to find out that it's not really for you. I hear other people saying, try, try, but not everybody learns that way, and a lot of people don't learn _well_ that way. If you don't learn well in college, the challenge is to find another way of learning that gets you status in the world 'o work. And they are out there.