My two cents: I also come from a rather educationally disadvantaged household. Except for my aunt, who studied art (!), no one has a high school diploma. Everyone else are craftsmen or attended evening school to become technicians, etc., or ended up in professional positions they wouldn’t get today.
I never wanted to go to the Gymnasium, but I was simply enrolled. My parents thought I was too lazy and that I would learn even less at a comprehensive school than I already did.
I had already regretted my decision against the Gymnasium. However, friends whose children went directly to Gymnasium tell me nothing different regarding the problems in schools.
The great thing is that you simply have a higher level (or should have), on which you are carried along. If you are not interested in the subjects, topics, or school anyway, it at least motivates you not to fail a year. I only made an effort when my promotion was at risk. I just wanted to stay in class with my friends.
first an apprenticeship. There I learned what it means to sit in an office all day and do rather boring tasks.
Vocational school and entry-level office job in the commercial sector – the most boring time of my life. I never experienced anything as undemanding as a German vocational training at vocational school again. The lowest possible level compared to the high school diploma before and especially university afterward. With exactly the corresponding equivalence in everyday professional life. A perfect AI-ratio field. But that motivated me to study. That I could never have afforded a house with the salary back then was mentally accepted. But filling that job until retirement? That’s when ambition caught me.
with Atari and Nintendo
Looking back, wanting to play on the PC also helped me enormously at that time. We simply didn’t have a Nintendo or PlayStation at home, and I had to somehow get all the games onto the PC. Just for that, I had to learn so much English that I could navigate through the crack sites, find registry entries on some boards, and make other modifications to the program/operating system. The whole cat-and-mouse game between getting the crack and not catching a virus was something that no longer exists today with game flat rates.
Or in some cases not at all (poem interpretation?).
I would have loved to have teachers like my wife. She believes that language competence is precisely the most important thing today in order to navigate the modern media landscape. She digs up the old Shakespeare from the mothball chest and relates it to current discussions.
Poems and I – we probably won’t become friends. But language as a tool of influence – that could be taken as a lesson for life.