School cool cool

If you're thinking that this title doesn't make any sense, you'd better start watching Community. I'd like to dedicate this post to education. And I have a lot to write about.

First of all, I'm going to write something personal. I used to be the complete opposite of who I am today. Although I went to extremes, I guess it's common to be uninterested in anything related to the school during puberty. I think I didn't like a single subject at school when I was like 13-15 years old. My laziness and indifference escalated and I was expelled from the best (most prestigious) high school in Brno after 5 years (out of 8). I was 16 back then and didn't really care about anything but online games, music and partying. Luckily, I somehow gradually managed to end this "dark era" relatively soon.
This expulsion and change of school was the best fail-to-succeed experience in my life. I started as a weird guy of whom probably everyone thought the worst. I didn't have any problems with subjects, I had the "advantage" of repeating the first year even though I knew nothing from the school before. As the first year was going by, I realized I was able to have great marks and results with minimal effort. And I am not writing about some inferior easy school, I was only paying attention. For example, I wasn't very good at math, but I quickly became one of the best ones in my new class. How? I liked my new teacher, paid attention from the beginning and simply got interested in it. I started liking more and more subjects and now I can say that I liked/loved almost all of them by the time I graduated. I don't wanna sound too cocky or egocentric, but I became the best student of my class (self-praise stinks!). I used to have one of the best school reports (I think I had the best one in the last year), I graduated with A's only and had the best results in university entrance exams, although I didn't really study for them a lot unlike the others. Well, yeah, this definitely sounds cocky and I hope you won't hate me too much for my self-confidence :-D
I just wanted to reveal my journey of becoming the person I am today. How I went from "zero to hero".

I believe there is no need for universities in this world anymore. People, who decide to study at the university, should be capable of a complete self-education with today's technology. Until then, yeah, kids usually don't have the will to study on their own, for themselves. I wasn' different. The sadder part is that a lot of high school graduates go to university only for the piece of paper, to make their parents proud and to be a "student". I felt really ashamed when teachers were asking my classmates what they were going to study. It was in the last year so I supposed most of them had made up their minds by then. I was sure I wanted to study Chinese philology with Spanish philology or with economics as a double major degree. And I knew that for a long time. Unfortunately, the vast majority replied with "I don't know" or "some humanities". I had a girlfriend among them and when I was with her, she wanted to study journalism, after breakup, she wanted to study law and from what I've heard, she ended up on aesthetics (seriously?!). To be fair, a lot of those people sent countless applications for meaningless and absurd study fields, their combinations, or didn't really care at all and conformly applied for the most frequent study fields when they didn't know what to do. Of course, some of them had made up their minds a long time ago, but some people disappointed me. Well, I just realized I don't really have many friends there, my connection to the most of them is rather "I don't mind you" than "I like you" and I feel like it's mutual. I have 2-3 true friends among them and like 3 people I can't really stand. I'm really curious how many of you, guys, are reading this :-)

I love studying and I love self-education even more. I'm fascinated by science and many other things. I'm able to watch something about black holes and then start reading social psychology textbook. I love maths, physics, chemistry, psychology, economics and many more. For the past year or so, I'm constantly looking for various educational videos, books, textbooks or other ways to broaden my horizons. I have found a site Coursera.org approximately 6 weeks ago and this takes it to the whole new level.
Simply, it provides A LOT of courses which deal with things from law to the advanced calculus or bioinformatics. They are run by university teachers from all around the world, but USA colleges dominate it. Course duration depends, I've seen 6-14 weeks range and they are mostly 8 weeks long. There is also an estimated amount of hours a week you should dedicate to study a certain course (watching video lectures, reading textbooks, discussing in the forums, doing assignments and quizzes/exams), the average could be around 6-8 hours. And I still didn't mention that it's free so those teachers do it for the sake of handing over their knowledge the best they could and it really looks like all of them are pretty enthusiastic. Those courses are called MOOCs (massive online open courses) and I didn't expect it would be as massive as it is. One of my courses have over 200.000 people in it! The average would be around 100.000 I would say. I've seen some attendance maps and it looks like there is an Indian superiority. I should have expected something like this but it was quite surprising. And it was also nice to see some Czechs out there. I think I would welcome some discussions in Czech now and then because I sometimes have no idea how I would explain some of those things in my mother tongue without using any English at all, which feels very weird.
Speaking of which, I would like to see some statistics of my language distribution. I can't remember when was the last time when I saw a film or series in Czech or with Czech subtitles. When I want to look something up on the internet, I do it in English. I even read books in English, right now I have like 120 pages left of the whole A Song of Ice and Fire saga (Game of Thrones series) and those 5 books contain almost 5.000 pages. There are still 2 books left to be published, yay! And I want to try even more voluminous saga, The Malazan Book of the Fallen, which is said to be even better fantasy and it's divided into 10 books, making it total of 7.000 pages and more, depending on the type of the book cover. Screw you, J. K. Rowling!

Let's get back to Coursera. Right now, I'm enrolled in 4 courses: Social Psychology, Calculus One, Microeconomics Principles and "Creativity, Innovation, and Change". I already left one, Think Again: How to Reason and Argue, and it was not because it didn't look good and interesting, but I simply wasn't able to completely devote myself to all of them and I had to choose which one to drop out. Honza is actually enrolled in this one so he might give me some feedback later.
The first 3 courses are really great, I love them. I didn't get much into the last one as it started as the latest one, but the first week module didn't impress me to be honest. Will see how it goes after the second week, I might also drop this one out.

Social Psychology started as the first one, it's also the shortest course with only 6 weeks span so it will be over soon, but it's the most time consuming. Video lectures take like 2 hours in average, there are related films included, such as Obedience or The Stanford Prison Experiment (I actually knew and heard about them even before this course so it might evoke something in you too). Then there are assigned readings and I have to admit I only read those from Week 1 and 2 (still like 110 pages in total), but I plan to read the others later. You have to complete assignments but I already skipped half of them due to lack of time and unbearable sleepiness. Yeah, I could have done it earlier but I somehow chose to start working on Social Psychology in the last place. The first assignment was a simple quiz and the third one had to be a social-psychological analysis of one website against smoking. I spent a few hours working on it because I didn't remember all those terms and it paid out. It is peer evaluated which means that after submission, there is an evaluation phase and you have to mark the other students (at least 5) according to certain criteria. 3 of mine were great, 1 average and 1 was a joke but I still gave him some points for trying. My analysis got 10/10 which made me unbelieveably happy because I managed to create supposedly great "technical" work in English.
The comments from my peers:

peer 1 → Some great and original insight In this piece. I like the inclusion of Salience and attitude inoculation and I support your argument for a more user friendly and fresh looking site. I think your arguments would be even stronger if linked back to the course material, although it is clear that you have a good grasp of the concepts. Well done!

peer 2 → The work describes all advantages and disadvantages of the website pretty well. I wish you best of luck!

peer 3 → I like your brief introduction. It makes me linked to your statement. The statement is clear and original. I enjoy reading it.

peer 4 → Very good. But the suggestions were a little lazy, no? XD

peer 5 → The analysis was well framed with highlighting of social psychology concepts but u forgot to present strength and weaknesses that you found in the site.Kudos to you to disclose your personal introduction and personal experience in the world of smoking.

And this makes me think that there should always be a written feedback and criticism from teachers at schools when students hand in their works. A feedback of how the work was great and why would make me so much happier than a simple A.

The second course is simply about calculus, it's 14 weeks long so I expect they will get really in depth. We didn't do this in our maths classes and I will deal with that at the university so I wanna have an advantage. Those 2 guys who teach it are really funny nerds and I enjoy it a lot. It's different from the maths classes you used to take. I didn't even need to try practise exercises and after the video lectures I went straight to the quizzes and scored 100% in both of them. But I guess it will become harder pretty soon.

I also took the third one because of the university and I hope that the microeconomics course will be at least partly as interesting and enjoyable as this one. The funny thing is that the teacher is Hispanic and I adore his English accent. He even pronounces some words in the Spanish way, but his vocabulary is rich and there is no language barrier. I would love to take that course in Spanish with him even though I wouldn't understand much. This one also strengthened my decision to study economics. The course running is similar to the Calculus, but you have more options how to get the Statement of Accomplishment. I chose to score high on all quizzes. There is also a project option (I would love to try that, but my time options don't allow me to) and something like collecting possitive feedback in the discussion forums.

I wanted to write more about each course, especially about Social Psychology, but I'll include it in the next post as it will fit the topic better. I hope I pushed you to visit coursera.org and I'll be glad if you join something with me.

Due to all of this, I realized that I prefer studying to working so I kinda left my job. My contract is gonna change and I'll be only looking for suitable clients or possible co-workers and arranging meetings with colleagues who do this full-time. Commissions from this are still gonna be much higher than you would expect and it doesn't consume much time. I actually plan to do something completely else, something which is gonna be amusing, enjoyable and you still earn some nice cash. And this isn't the only alternative, let's hope that I'll realize most of them, will be able to study everything I want and still earn much more than average university students do. By the way, I joined into this and didn't even hesitate when I saw that it's only for 400 czk. I read a book from one of those instructors, it was really great and his own daily training courses cost about 10.000 czk each! If any enterprising soul would like to join me, you're welcomed, but I don't know if the discount applies to every student or only to UPOL students.

I've already written much more than I had expected so I'll end this with my school timetable. It already looks terrifying and it's not even complete! :-D

I hope the hard work will pay off and I won't drop out. I'm a bit scared of being able to manage all of this (self-education, university, work and still having some free time to do sports/everything else), but I'll see pretty soon if I'm capable of it. I'll definitely need a strict time management which is hard to maintain. Wish me good luck! :)