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Escaping High School

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Re: Escaping High School

#221

Post by mrguyorama »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #107
bell-cot wrote: post #2

Decades ago, an old friend of mine had a go-getter son, who started a lawn care business when he was ~15. Son was talented, and his business grew very fast. (This was in a well-to-do suburb, before there were so many lawn care businesses. Plenty of good HS students available to hire, and the trucks were leased.) For getting into top-ranked colleges, "the summer business I started in HS is already paying me more than…

This seems to be another strong argument for social class being a huge player in determining your success - as you say it was a well-to-do suburb. Good on them for taking advantage of the opportunity, but just as vitally the opportunity was there to take.

You don't need "an argument" that social class is the biggest player in determining success when the statistics have told us this plain as day for decades.

Re: Escaping High School

#222

Post by joenot443 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #79
joenot443 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the vast majority of people go their entire lives without doing any kind of circuit level repair work. It's just not a skill most folks acquire. I can't think of anyone in my extended family who could replace a capacitor, half of them wouldn't even know what that means.

A central AC compressor capacitor is plug and play. https://www.ferguson.com/product/mars-usa-455-mfd-440370v-du... Turn off circuit breaker, unscrew ~4 screws on the cover of the compressor unit, take a picture of how old one is connected, unplug it, connect new one matching up the symbols or letters, confirm with the picture you took, screw the cover back on, and switch the circuit breaker back on. Watch any of the…

Ah okay, this is admittedly not what I had in mind. When I read replacing a capacitor, I was imagining a soldering job, not a plug and play consumer part. You're right - this seems pretty doable for your average homeowner.

Re: Escaping High School

#223

Post by mrguyorama »

pandorable wrote: post #190
light_hue_1 wrote: post #32

Incredibly narrow minded advice for the privileged. > Maybe you go to a school in a poor area, or with a lot of violence, or far too many students for the teachers to pay any individual attention to; or, relatedly, maybe you’re required to spend a lot of time caring for siblings or parents, working a low-skill job, or holding your family together or preserving your safety in some way. Oh if only not being extremely p…

Hi, author of the post here - thanks for chiming in! Was hoping to hear from someone who had worked in or gone to a school like this. This part of the essay was admittedly the most guesswork-heavy; I included it because that seemed better than the alternative of not mentioning economic disparities at all, or of telling kids at poor schools they're resigned to doom. I'm guessing you're a teacher? If so, I'd be curious…

>What careers do the students you know typically aspire to

They usually aren't looking past whether they will be going to bed hungry that night or not. Seriously man, you come off like a scene from arrested development, like you just have never seen a poor kid in your life, or more importantly, haven't even tried to volunteer at an organization that attempts to help these kids.

Re: Escaping High School

#224

Post by balaji1 »

somsak2 wrote: post #186
balaji1 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.

i think parent prefers to simply be angry than contribute to the conversation

exactly. There are ideas in the OP article that can be taken and systematized into the high school system with the operational know-how of the parent commenter. The downstream effects of that would be incredible. We should be aiming for intervention as early as possible in the education system.

Re: Escaping High School

#225

Post by balaji1 »

jjav wrote: post #213
balaji1 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. The author seems to have put in a lot of thought. And would be open to putting in more thought if you illustrated where he is incorrect or missing info. Otherwise the content is appealing to a lot of people.

> 99% of the time it is not hubris, just the author missing some viewpoint/info/awareness. That's sort of the definition of hubris. Coming to a topic they don't have anywhere near enough knowledge but assuming they know it all because they put some thought into it.

Maybe that's the definition of hubris. But the tone of the above comment was too abrasive.

> genuinely awed by the hubris it requires to just plow ahead

that tone sounded more like hubris plus other expletives.

Re: Escaping High School

#226

Post by akshrtkaiwhjert »

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate and agree with most of what this post says in isolation, but unfortunately I think it misses the point in a broader context. This advice works when children/students have plenty of support from above. It can be counterproductive when they don't. It's preaching to the comfortable upper-middle-class choir.

These days I live in silicon valley and my wife's family sponsors a bunch of projects at the montessori school they've attended for multiple generations, but I grew up in a small town in Texas where parents (and teachers) beat children for asking questions the adults don't know how to answer. This is advice to help people who are already in a good position get into an even better position. If you're born at the bottom, using existing institutions, which are consistent and safe, to escape to a better place might be the best you can hope for. "Getting your friends together and busking" sounds great if you have money to buy instruments and free time to learn how to play them and sane supportive parents who are supportive of that, and that might make you stand out on your ivy league application if you manage to record and self-publish something. But a school marching band gives you an instrument, and schedules time for you to practice during the school day, and is a verifiable piece of experience that a state university will probably recognize even if you don't win any form of competition. So I don't consider this post to be good advice generally for the masses. And as long as bad parents are allowed to give their children bad childhoods and bad communities are allowed to treat children like property en masse, this advice will be counterproductive for a pretty significant portion of society.

Re: Escaping High School

#227

Post by gumby »

WalterBright wrote: post #217
gumby wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Without commenting on the dire state of music (and arts) education in the schools, the same is true of all subjects. Mathematics is mostly taught as syntactic manipulation; physics as memorizing a bunch of "laws" and doing "experiments" that have a right or wrong answer (chemistry and biol…

Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology". > teach to the test How are you going to teach to the test when the test has questions like: "what is the sum of 647 and 296?" > standardized testing There's nothing cultural about math and science. Standardized testing is the only way to objectively measure progress and mastery…

> Mathematics and science do have right and wrong answers. That's why physics, chemistry, etc. are "science" and not "religion" or "ideology".

That's an excessively reductio view of the practice of science, and frankly dangerous. I think you know better than that. I mean, is newtonian mechanics "right" or "wrong"? It can't always give you the right answer, yet we do teach it and we should.

Most science is working on the edge of what is known. The idea that there are "right" and "wrong" answers in practical science is what has supported peoples' belief that "hey, I heard of someone getting the vaccine and yet they got sick anyway -- what a scam!" or "Scientists said not to bother with a mask but to wash hands furiously, and now they want us to wear masks -- they don't know anything".

The reason I put "experiment" in quotation marks is a lot of "experimentation" in high school is at the level of "pour the solution from the bottle into a beaker, put a strip of litmus paper in, and record the pH." Everybody uses the same bottle of solution so there's one correct answer. That is not "experimentation" that is simply practicing a lab procedure.

"Experimentation" is open ended, and involves debugging. "Make a solution that has a pH of 7.2. How did you determine that? What attempts did you make and what went wrong." Or "reproduce the Millikan oil-drop experiment. What's the charge of the electron? How did it compare to Millikan's result and why?"

The "science is about facts" attitude is a pernicious meme in the public consciousness. It's just as bad as the deterministic teaching of history.

Re: Escaping High School

#228

Post by ModernMech »

jovial_cavalier wrote: post #141
ModernMech wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I teach adults, so in my capacity as a teacher, parental concerns are not my concerns. In my capacity as a citizen of this country and as a taxpayer, I also don't care about busybody "concerned parents" who feel the system is failing them personally. My concern in this capacity comes down to how the system is building a better community for everyone. Individual parental concerns shouldn't turn into culture…

What I'm trying to say is that when it comes to their own children, they are not being "busybodies". It is their right to voice their concerns, and it is the duty of educators to listen to these concerns and take them seriously. You can't just brush them off. Even if the parent is being unreasonable, it is part of your job description to make them see reason.

Sorry, to be clear I teach adults, so it's not part of my job description to make any parents see reason. The concerns of one adult do not impact the way I teach any other adult, no matter how they are related.

As for my role as a citizen, I'm thinking specifically about my local community, which is beset by people who have very loud feelings about certain books existing in the school library. A lot of communities are facing this issue.

I call these people busybodies because nothing that they do or say is based in reality, but only on their feelings. It's feelings all the way down just, like the linked blog post. All they're doing is making everyone's lives harder: other parents, teachers, administrators, and especially the students. For what? There's no actual problem being cited. This is all to quell their own feelings about books. That's pretty much the definition of being a busybody.

Re: Escaping High School

#229

Post by squarepizza »

jabroni_salad wrote: post #85

Something that bugs me today is the way music education was handled at my school, and probably other schools. I got to a pretty good technical competence with my trumpet but at the end of the day I could only play what was on the sheets. Maybe some of that is my bad, but I switched to keys after highschool and when I show up to jam, most wind players seem like musical cripples without a lead sheet, and my fakesheets…

Being in Band, one learns Music; being in a band, one learns music. The attrition rate of band students in extracurricular or post-high-school musical endeavors is a bit disappointing. It is similar to the kids forced through piano lessons who quit whenever they have a chance.

Re: Escaping High School

#230

Post by ModernMech »

Scubabear68 wrote: post #165
ModernMech wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"B" students are in fact top students. That you think they aren't is one of the things I've been pushing back on in my career. I have several learning disabilities including dyslexia and ADHD and was also a top student, so those aren't exactly determinative. Many of my top students are neurodivergent. I get a dozen letters every semester from my top students regarding their learning disabilities. Excelling in sports…

I’m sorry, are you indicating you know my kids better than I do? The kids got “B”s because everyone who showed up got Bs. It was social promotion. This became painfully obvious when the first marking period scores in many classes was F and D in the private school. And was backed up by equally bad standardized testing scores.

No, I don't presume to know your children. But I am more qualified than you to compare them to other children, because that's part of my job (unless it's your job too, I dunno). Based on what you've told me, and that's all I have to go off of, your kids are above average. It's kind of wild to me that you're on here arguing with me that they're not.

Kids who get A's, B's (even some C's); and do sports or music are well on their way to successful futures. The kids getting Fs and Ds who aren't involved in any music or sports are the ones who won't be getting spots at top colleges. That's not to say they can't have successful futures nonetheless.

Maybe so we're all on the same page, you can articulate what the profile of a "top student" looks like to you.

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