i was just thinking about a history report i wrote in seventh grade about assassins because i thought assassins were rad and what if i had been instead encouraged to study a history topic which was at all practically relevant or meaningful in my life

all of the useful skills i have learned have been through the process of needing to do a thing and having to learn how to do it, and very very little of that was ever supported nay discussed in school

i wasted huge amounts of time early in college taking classes aligned with my “interests” that i had no actual interest in applying, instead of learning about systemic injustice and the problems in the world which i actually cared about getting solved

and i think about the function of coolness in this sense, for white kids, as a way of encouraging this sort of wasted energy to redirect them away from work which would actually force them to confront their privilege

example: i learned XML in high school because i wanted to create a custom conlang dictionary for the macOS (then OS X) Dictionary.app, which was XML-based. this is not the most pressing issue which needs solving in the world, but it was a real problem i cared about, and working on it exposed me to all kinds of problem spaces in document processing, information representation, data entry ergonomics, as well as internationalization concerns, IETF standards (BCP 49!), and automation workflows for handling large amounts of structured metadata. that's the sort of thing which happens when you work on a real problem. you get exposed to existing solutions; in trying to comprehend those solutions, you gain an understanding of the broader concerns they are trying to address; you develop and mature and grow as a person. i don't care about conlangs anymore but i do still care deeply about internationalization.

in contrast, i can't think of a single thing i learned in a math class which meaningfully developed me as a person or a professional. i went into college wanting to be a math major,

entire field of cool solutions with no problems attached

uh, it's BCP 47, not 49, idk what i was on