Thanks for the comments everyone. I upvoted all the replies in this thread, even:
We'll miss you sudgy!
Also, this hit me kind of hard:
Congrats on youngest burnout record.
Because that's definitely not what I want, but it's totally what it sounds like and may to some extent be happening. I'll keep this in mind.
None of it is an excuse to bow out of f.ds.
Um... dude. f.ds is a hobby. People give up hobbies all the time.
Yeah.
You still coming to ucon this year?
You remind me so much of what I was like 10 years ago. Enjoy the end of high school and college afterwards!
I hope so!
How has no one linked "Hello, Goodbye" yet? I mean come on people.
As someone who also did math stuff in high school, then slipped into CS in college, here's some unsolicited advice:
- Although it's better to struggle a little, it's entirely okay to drop a course because it's too difficult.
- Humanities can be annoying, especially in high school, but don't underestimate it. Writing well is stupidly useful and critically attacking your own position is also stupid useful (and at least for me, it's much harder for me to do that when there's no proof/mathematical structure.)
- People are awesome. If you don't think so, it means you haven't found the right people.
I completely agree with all this. I might end up slipping into CS (or some other mathematical science) too.
Probably my OP is not entirely accurate. I can see how it would suggest that I have a different attitude than the above three. None of my courses are currently too difficult, just take a lot of work. That's high school. Writing is important and hard, yeah. I've met plenty of awesome people.
Hope too see you back soon, maybe once you hit college! (Those classes are going to be easier, right?)
One can hope. I'm most looking forward to non-standardized curricula. AP is so dumb. I'm sure that they won't be easier, but I hope that the course structure and material will motivate me to put in the work much more.
For example, my AP Statistics class. Statistics is interesting. There is cool math behind it. It really shouldn't be too hard to get me invested in that class. But not only does the course refuse to talk about any math whatsoever, it dumbs down the material as much as possible and is clearly teaching to the test. It encourages memorization and replacing your brain with a TI-84 calculator. The homework questions in the textbook are horribly repetitive and uninteresting and the lectures in class just parrot the book. This combined with the fact that homework is just 15% of the grade leads to my homework average of 60% and overall average of 93%. This is the sort of thing that I hope I won't have to deal with in college. /rant
On the bright side, my school offers multiple math and science extracurriculars which are quite good and have plenty of student-interest.
Oh, and I've checked out the state of online dominion and the league/fds championships. Looking forward to playing some Dominion this winter break, and maybe Adventures will be available?
EDIT: I was back for a solid week, played in the Uconn tournament, now I'll be gone again until mid-December at least.