431–440 of 480 posts
If nobody is failing, nobody is learning
Then I guess you think MIT students don't learn in their first year? And havent learned in over two decades during that first year. I guess we should stop valuing MIT education as the peak of STEM education in the world!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Children are part of hobbies. Very challenging at times, but for example I sleep with my kid hugging me, or I chat with them while in the car, or we do chores while watching tv or something like that. And not every day is packed like that, you can tell your kids "no more than 3 times per week of activties, the other 2 days are for playdates", and that should be acceptable. There are horrible days of the week, but it'…
> Children are part of hobbies. That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
I am saying that the people who have kids now are aware of how much effort it involves, so they consider it "part of hobbies" (as in, interesting things), not as part of "chores".
Modern society requires that, otherwise people just have no kids.
And yes absolutely, the government overlooks entirely all the work that goes into parenting now. The standards have raised enormously.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Children are part of hobbies. That is a weird (modern?) delusion. Without children, our species disappears in Those who are having and raising children are the ones doing the most for the next generation.
You took an unfairly uncharitable interpretation of that comment. It wasn’t saying that children are hobbies. It’s saying that time spent with children is enjoyable and time spent with them is not an enjoyable chore.
I consider hobbies highly important for my mental health, so children are highly important too
For people that find this controversial: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03075079.2023.2... "Our findings reveal that gradeless learning can increase motivation and reduce surface learning but has no significant effect on students’ later academic achievements."
For some reason that doesn't make me feel better. If college is supposed to prepare kids for the real world, we should be creating environments that simulate the real world as much as possible. Creating a consequence free semester is the polar opposite of how the real world works. In the real world, you get a job, and you're on probation for your "first semester" when the scrutiny is at its highest. You don't get the…
The University of Michigan has around a 15% acceptance rate. How is it possible that they’re letting in kids who aren’t ready to do college level work? What are they selecting for?
15% seems extremely low for a non-ivy.
Universities have caught on to this trend, and use other heuristics for acceptance like "has this person ever emailed us or visited the campus?" and not just taking applications as the only input. So acceptance rates have started to reflect this. Sorting through 1000's of throw away applications to find those who might actually want to attend.
When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, you can expect that they are going to throttle back once they're away from home with way more free time than is normal. From my kid's experience: she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice…
> When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, My neighborhood and social circle have a number of high school age children, some aiming for high ranking universities. None of them have these grueling 15 hour day schedules you’re describing. I don’t even know of a high school around me that starts at 7:30AM. What unive…
* School at 7am
* Sports practice after school. Game days were basically all night events.
* might take an hour or two break
* 2 to 3 hours of homework
For junior and senior year, I worked 16 hours on the weekends as well.
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> This has the knock-on effect that it becomes impossible to excel in your first semester. No, it eliminates the grade and GPA award for excelling. You can still excel, unless you absolutely require external validation for your work. And even then, it's still college, professors notice top performers even if they aren't giving them an A+++++ and have to give them a Pass instead.
In my opinion you are under-appreciating the external validation. Removing grades disincentives excelling. Why work any harder than getting a "pass"? At the larger schools (like Michigan), professors (if a professor is actually grading the class, and not an adjunct or grad student) are hardly going to remember individual performances on freshman exams, or even pay much attention.
Some students have a personality quirk called "intellectual interest", and actually want to learn something about disciplines that lie far outside any likely future major of their own.
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I've known many families around that age (+/- 5 years) with a stay at home spouse taking care of multiple kids. It really shapes their lifestyle in a lot of ways (smaller/older house, rarely eat out, rarely big family vacations, clothes/toys often from secondhand consignment stores, fewer/cheaper vehicles, etc.), but that's what's important to them so that's how they've set their priorities. Most didn't come from ext…
That's mostly speaking personal anecdote and live in a wealthy area. So that drives the point
Its an "easier" thing to do (not claiming its an easy thing) when you're not living in a very wealthy area. Far easier to own a home when home prices are $200k not $2M. Groceries are often cheaper in less expensive areas. The few times you do decide to eat out the restaurants are also usually cheaper in the cheaper parts of town. There's more demand for good second-hand stores so they tend to thrive more in those areas. Very rich people often vote against public transit and bike lanes, at least in many parts of the country.
If you're trying to do it on a normal-ish kind of salary in an expensive place to live, its no wonder it seems impossible.
> personal anecdote
Anecdotes can refute an absolute claim like "no one my age can afford a stay at home wife". If you claim all screwdrivers are blue and I point to a red screwdriver in my tool drawer you can't just wave it away and say that's an anecdote. In reality, more millennials are opting for a single working parent lifestyle than Gen X did, largely due to extreme childcare costs.
When the cost for childcare is essentially eating a whole normal person's salary, there's a strong question of why have that parent go to wage-earning job.
https://policycommons.net/artifacts/617147/stay-at-home-moms...
https://archive.ph/FBFjJ Given that 75% of all grades in 2022 were A's, grade inflation has already made the indicator value of grades pretty meaningless. I think this take from a student captures it well: > Louth, 20 years old, said he earned all A’s and one B in his first semester and doubted he would have worked as hard had the classes been pass/fail. But he thinks he would have learned more from his classes witho…
I don't believe that for a moment. Classes exist to force students to learn hard things, and tests exist to verify they learned the things. It's a nice thought but the reality is without verifying students learned things they'd start skipping class and not doing readings.
When you force high school kids to work days that are significantly longer than a normal adult to achieve a good GPA and get into a good college, you can expect that they are going to throttle back once they're away from home with way more free time than is normal. From my kid's experience: she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice…
This must be a State thing. > she was up at 6:30am, in AP classes by 7:30am (three more to go during the day). Classes were done by 3:00, then sports practice until 5:00. In other States, high school starts later like 8:45/9am. You can take classes online and start school later if you want or do dual enrollment and skip later periods. > Gotta have that activity on your college application, not counting other voluntee…
People are remarkably resilient in general. But if chinese workers manage to survive a 996 does that make it good?