I miss school...

If 10 years ago someone would have told me that in 10 years I would be missing school, I would have laughed. But here I am, saying that I genuinely miss school. I don't particularly miss high school it wasn't that enjoyable for me. I had friends and all of that, but I think living an hour away from the school didn't really help the whole highschool experience for me. I also didn't really have an appreciation for learning either and I know I didn't apply myself in the least.

The other day Amy was going through our little filing cabinet and she had pulled out my highschool transcripts. She was pretty surprised at what she saw to say the least. My highest grade ever in any highschool class was an 80. And for the first 4 years (in Ontario back when I went through high school if you wanted to go to University you had to take a 5th year) I really flirted with disaster, doing barely enough to get by. Literally, that's what I was doing. I would almost never do my homework, only when it was actually going to be looked at or checked the next day. On certain occasions if I knew that all the teacher would do was walk up and down the aisles and look to see if we had actually written anything, if I hadn't done the work I would just pull out some old work where the number of questions was close to the actual assigned work. If the teacher paused at my desk and turned some pages, I would continue this B.S. and go off telling them how there was a specific question I didn't get or something as if I had actually opened the book. There were some teachers that knew I was sandbagging it too. I went to a french grade school, yet when I got into highschool I took only the advanced class of french, and not the enriched class. Why? Because I was a slacker who wanted the easiest way out. But in the advanced class I had this one teacher who saw right through me, he knew who I was and what I was doing and kept telling me that I wouldn't be able to do this forever.

In order to get into University, it didn't matter what I did my first 4 years of highschool, all that mattered were those 5th year classes, as those were the ones that the University would look at. So continuing on with my slacker ways, once I knew what school I wanted to go to, I looked up the classes I needed to take, and looked up what the average was that was generally accepted and made sure I got just above it. The guidance councillor was even a bit concerned about my future because in my grade 12 advanced math class I got a 50 right on the nose. So when in my grade 13 year I took Advanced Calculus, Advanced Chemistry and Advanced Biology in one semester(because these were classes required to get into the University program I had selected) he definitely had his doubts. And yet, I managed to get mid to high 70's (which was all that was needed). Who honestly goes from a 50 in a generic math class to almost an 80 in an advanced calculus class...what a fraud I was.

Then came University. My first year really just continued down the same path as my highschool career. I had taken Biological Sciences as my program mostly because I didn't know really what I wanted to do. How I didn't know is beyond me. Every day I would be on my computer until like midnight-1am on school nights...you would think I would have clued in. Well at the time I was dating a girl whom I had known for quite some time and who was taking one of the computer science degrees. I remember that often times she would come over to my house and I would take a look at some of the things she was doing and get quite interested. So I finally clued into this and decided that I would switch programs the next year. I was a bit nervous about doing it because my dad was paying for my school and even though I knew I wasn't applying myself I didn't want to be a financial burden on him. The next 4 years were amazing and a complete 180 for me and my grades reflected it.

My nostalgia was brought on recently because of work. I have this programming problem that involved parsing some BOM's (bill of materials) from a legacy system so that I could import them into my Teamcenter Engineering environment. I could have written the code to do this parsing in Java or C which are both languages I do know, but chose puposely to use Perl so that I could learn it (I now love Perl by the way). But what I was most interested in is ensuring that the complexity of the problem was good as it possibly could be and what the most efficient algorithm would be to solve it. The old Sean probably would only have cared to see the problem solved, and would have taken the easiest way out (i.e. not taken the time to experiement with a new language).

I just wish I could retain some of the information a bit better without having to reference old notes!