Today must’ve been the most boring day I’ve ever had at school. I’ve recently finished my HAVO (secondary education in The Netherlands) and am now going to HBO (what you would consider vocational university).

The problem is that I have a huge advantage on the people in my class. Most of them haven’t ever touched a single line of code and those who have definitely haven’t gone much further than <?=”Hello, world!”?> combined with some HTML, sometimes a few lines of CSS. I, however, have been programming since I was 8 or 9, and have done advanced PHP stuff since the second class in VWO, which was approximately 6 years ago. In that year I also wrote my first Java CLI application and over the years I’ve learned more programming languages such as Python and Objective-C. There are now even a few languages I “master”: I can do pretty much everything I want with them. Of the languages I will be “learning” none of them are actually new to me.

However, the school doesn’t just let me take the exams and be done with it. No, they want me to prove that I really can do it, before I am allowed to do those exams. In other words, I am not treated differently than other people. In some contexts that would be considered a bad thing but in my case (where I have ~10 years more programming skills than the rest) it’s not.

An example. Today we started working on a project. It’s a simple website with some registration stuff which should go into a database. A login function is not required and the site doesn’t have to look nice. There are no real requirements for the code except that it has to work.

All of that is fine, sure, but I’m in a group of four. Two of those haven’t ever written a single line of code while the third only knows HTML and CSS. We have to spend approx. 112 hours per person on this project, while I could do it in 5 myself. Yes, that’s 107 hours wasted in 6 weeks, for just a single class. MAJOR non-optional waste of time.

Actually I have to admit that this isn’t the first year I have the “waste of time” feeling. Last year I did the fifth year of HAVO and had a similar problem: I already knew 90% of the stuff they were teaching. I eventually graduated “cum laude” without doing a thing. I think that in a few cases I may even have slept a bit at school – that’s how boring it was. Eventually I got through it by looking forward to this year, where I would finally be doing interesting things.

Turns out I was wrong, but now I don’t have something to look forward to. Four years of being bored? Well, I admit that I may learn a few new things the third or fourth year, but that really won’t be spectacular.

The last time I spoke to the person who makes the decisions she told me that it may be possible to do the study in three years. Three years! How is that not a major waste of time?

A friend of mine, @barthoekstra, had a similar issue at school. He thinks that school focuses on the masses and doesn’t leave room for the talented people. He then left school and now has a nice job. I never really agreed with him but now I do. Why is it so hard to just let me do the final tests and let me do my PhD?

-Update-
Awesome! After a talk with the person I mentioned before we agreed that it was too easy. I am now a second year student. It’s still really easy but at least it’s fun again