yeah, I had to move out to escape the not being social enough end of the spectrum. my mother gave me shit for it.
and now i’m spending some time in my parents place right now, and i doubt it’s sustainable. i mean it’s nice and all in that mommy fan makes me oj in the morning and a salad at night, but we are gonna get on each others nerves long-term. i’m already telling her to freaking knock before she enters the room i’m in. WOULD YOU DO THAT TO A GUEST? NO? WELL, DON’T DO IT TO YOUR ADULT DAUGHTER!
parents can’t really help being controlling. it’s innate.
See, I don’t get this. Why, as a parent, would you make it so this was the choice?
My mother basically sat me down when I was 18 (still in high school) and said she was done deciding what I could and couldn’t do. I was expected to tell her where I was, when I expected to be home, and whether I’d be joining her & my stepdad for meals or not. If I wanted to borrow her car, I needed to have gotten at least 5 hours of sleep the night before. (Mainly an issue if I was out partying Saturday night and then wanted to drive to church the next morning… yes… I was a real wild child going to church by myself on improper rest.) Permission was a thing of the past. I had to inform… not ask.
I was a good kid. I wasn’t a social enough kid. That’s what happens when you marry a socially awkward dude, you MIGHT have socially awkward kids as a result. My mother is super extroverted. I’m not.
I mean, it was time for me to move out anyway. I was almost 27.
Same. I knew when they were born that my kids wouldn’t qualify for need based grants. So I started saving for college when they were babies. I paid tuition, room and board. They cover(ed) discretionary spending. Oldest graduated debt free with starter money in the bank and a Roth IRA and younger one will as well.
Neither attend(ed) fancy schools. I think I spent about 70-80k for the older one and I’ll spend about 120k for the younger mainly since COL in London is higher.
This was a life goal of mine and I’m happy I was able to do it for the reasons you mentioned. The guy in the OP is an idiot.
Yes, this also explains exams getting harder when the committees get experienced. (Bruce talked about this on AO on multiple occasions.)
The first test I gave in my first teaching job…
I made it wwwwaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyy too hard. I took the exam and finished it in half the time my students had, which I thought was reasonable. The top students in the class struggled to finish. A fellow teacher later told me I needed to be able to finish the test in 1/3 the time as a new teacher and 1/4 the time after I’d taught the class a couple of times (at which point the material would be even easier for me.)
Hmm, when I look back at college math, I’m am absolutely bewildered that I was ever that smart. Maybe the difference between magilla and me is that he pole vaulted upwards, and I pole vaulted upwards, and then landed back downwards.
Well, some forgetting is normal and natural and why you always need to learn more than you will actually use.
So I think the hardest stuff, and stuff you never got super good at gets forgotten. The stuff that became trivially easy (like calculating derivatives and integrals if you took subsequent coursework or actuarial exams where you had to know how to do that to solve even more complicated problems) gets easier the more you do it.
I mean, I vaguely recall thinking long division was really hard when I was in 4th grade (or whichever grade I was in when I learned long division). But now it’s trivial. Tedious, and I’d use a calculator or spreadsheet if I could. But I know how to do it and could even do it in my head if necessary… though that would take longer.
I dunno. I literally killed calculus in high school. 5 on the BC exam, in 10th grade.
I think I forgot 90% of college. But I also suspect that it’s now completely out of my depth. Same as the poetry I was writing at the time.
And back on the topic-- in short, I’ve always felt like education was an arbitrary salary hurdle. From HS ($8/hr) to BS ($12/hr) to Student ($25/hr) to ASA ($40/hr) to FSA ($80/hr), I am the same exact damn person at every step.
I think it does. As a statistical study, it doesn’t require 100% success to show “value”.
In fact, the fact that not everyone gains might even provide some information on the characteristics of HS kids that best predict their gain in “critical thinking” in college. Or, the types of college programs that seem correlated to gains in critical thinking.
I agree with this.
As you can guess from my posts, I think that “critical thinking” is either
– such a fuzzy concept that we really can’t know whether college improves it any more than other life experiences would if we control for the individual talents/personalities.
– well enough defined that we can come up with some way of measuring it. In which case we can see if college really helps, and whether it helps for some people and not for others.
But, even more important, that we could design a college curriculum or better yet specific courses that improve critical thinking. Are there courses titled “Critical Thinking” in modern college catalogs? I don’t know. Does taking a logic course improve your critical thinking score? Could we do better with a different type of logic course? Should history professors explicitly point out how this history course improves your critical thinking skills, using these specific examples and exercises?
I’d love to believe that college really improves critical thinking. Maybe unfocused osmosis does some good, but I expect some focus would do a lot better.
There are science classes, for example. Really, every liberal arts class should be a class in critical thinking.
To pin down exactly what critical thinking is would be to come up with a self justified theory of knowledge. Many have tried, and all have failed. (Maybe that’s exaggerating.)
And reasonable people are going to disagree about whether, say, postmodern feminist thinking or aristotle are better examples of critical thinking.
Universities have certainly been critical to the creation of the modern world. Something has happened between now and Charlemagne.
More practically, I think the course grades themselves are measures of the ability to think critically. My senior year in college, i was in a discussion class that had several freshman. Their ability to critically read and talk about the text improved noticeably throughout just that class. The grade was designed to measure that (although not the change I suppose.)
I don’t really understand this comment. I don’t think a class will improve the critical thinking skills of a passive student. The student has to want to improve themselves, and use the class as an opportunity to do so.
Depends on the drugs, obviously nothing like heroin or meth. Cannabis or alcohol as long as it’s not a constant habit, sure, if they want to experiment with LSD I wouldn’t approve but I guess I’d prefer I can take care of them.
Playing games overnight and missing classes would be my largest concern, but if it’s some BS class where you can show up and take a test and they’re doing well, okay.
Drunk friends crashing, absolutely yes, please do this, I’ll make sure they’re okay and have a glass of water at night and food in the morning.
