519: 11th Grade

Explain xkcd: It's 'cause you're dumb.
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11th Grade
And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.
Title text: And the ten minutes striking up a conversation with that strange kid in homeroom sometimes matters more than every other part of high school combined.

Explanation

This strip is a comparison about the time spent in 11th grade doing various things, and how important those things are to one's future. The first two bars on the chart are 900 hours of class, which is about 180 hours short of how many hours kids spend in school each year, and 400 hours of homework, or an average of about 2.2 hours per school day. Conversely, idly messing around in Perl (a programming language) for only one weekend is shown to have a much larger impact on one's future. This is likely due to the skills one can pick up in even just a single weekend dealing with what some consider to be an elegant, easy-to-use programming language.

The title-text is a further exaggeration, claiming that the social skills and new perspectives practiced and gained by taking a risk and talking to the unpopular kid far more important than all four years of a high school education. While it may have felt this way for Randall, and while it was probably a healthy experience, it obviously cannot compare to the myriad of practical things he learned, nor (for sake of example) the trigonometry and calculus he learned that allowed him to begin his career in robotic engineering.

Transcript

11th-grade activities:
[Bar graph y axis: Usefulness to career success.]
900 hours of classes [small bar.]
400 hours of homework [smaller bar.]
One weekend messing with Perl [huge bar.]
comment.png add a comment! ⋅ comment.png add a topic (use sparingly)! ⋅ Icons-mini-action refresh blue.gif refresh comments!

Discussion

There's no claim in the title text about gaining "social skills and new perspectives". I suspect it's more about the chance that "that strange kid" might turn out to be the next Mark Zuckerberg, or some such. Wwoods (talk) 21:25, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

Or Eric Harris / Dylan Klebold. 108.162.216.54 20:44, 18 December 2013 (UTC)

Yep. Or that he knows a guy who can find you your first job. Or he's the one who tells you about his interest in x topic and sparks your interest in it as well, and maybe it turns into your future career. It could happen. 108.162.221.33 01:50, 29 January 2014 (UTC)

I thought the comment about "that strange kid" was about Randall himself. 108.162.212.36 07:18, 27 December 2014 (UTC)


Usually I'm that person people treat as "that strange kid." Really hoping to kick some serious ass in the future. Mostly the asses of all the rudefucks that bullied me all throughout grade school. In space. XD International Space Station (talk) 06:31, 22 November 2015 (UTC)

Funny, with a 'hmmmm....' that makes you ponder. The hovertext, to me, can be an afterthought, or a rimshot, or a deeper layer of the onion. I took 'career success' as one's career through life, as in path through life. Most of public instruction is outside->inside...putting a structure into someone. One weekend, you're intrigued by something, and you pour yourself into it to the exclusion of all else. This is inside->out, and that changes everything. And the strange kid in the corner might be you. Jorjor (talk) 15:19, 11 April 2018 (UTC)