quote:Originally posted by Nighthawk: And it's of note that our school only allowed us to take TWO AP courses, and even then only in our senior year. I know of students in public schools that have not only started to take AP courses in the 10th grade, but have taken upwards of SIX AP courses in their senior year.
It upsets me to hear about schools setting up artificial caps on learning.
posted
Well, it wasn't an official limit. The limit was imposed by the logistics of our curricula. How could you take these AP courses, when all the other requirements didn't leave room for them?
In all fairness, I know that this has since changed.
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*nods* Colleges are gathering to them a lot more information nowadays, and placing a lot less weight on GPA, class rank, SATs, and even AP scores, instead focusing on teacher recommendations (and how those reflect really connecting with a teacher), personal essays, and certain aspects of extracurriculars.
Doing decently well on GPA/class rank/SATs/APs just gets you past a minimal cutoff, you get in on the basis of the other stuff (though exceptional capabilities in the aforementioned can ameliorate some minor problems with an essay or recommendation).
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To clarify some more: everyone's courseload was the same as everyone else's in the same grade. There were no electives below eleventh grade. There were honors math classes, but they were the same course, simply at a more accelerated level. There was leveling in espaņol/Spanish as well, but everyone took one Spanish language class. Everyone took the same science, the same social studies, PE, theology, English, and so forth. Eleventh grade you had room for one elective (no more PE!) and twelfth grade you had room for two. So where were AP courses going to fit?
quote:To clarify some more: everyone's courseload was the same as everyone else's in the same grade. There were no electived below eleventh grade. There were honors math classes, but they were the same course, simply at a more accelerated level. There was leveling in espaņol/Spanish as well, but everyone took one Spanish language class. Everyone took the same science, the same social studies, PE, theology, English, and so forth. Eleventh grade you had room for one elective (no more PE!) and twelfth grade you had room for two. So where were AP courses going to fit?
I'm not trying to be deliberately offensive, but seriously, this sounds like one of the worst schools I've ever heard of.
Edit to add: Then again, I might just be spoiled. My high school had scheduling more or less identical to college scheduling. As long as you satisfied certain basic prerequisites (Bio was required as the introductory science, you needed to take Algebra before taking Algebra II, duh, etc.) and met the quotas for graduating (4 English credits, 3 math, 2 science, 2.5 phys ed, 2.5 history, 2 visual/performing arts), you could take pretty much whatever you wanted. If you were going for a serious deviation (two english classes in the same semester), you needed approval from the department head, but that was easy to get unless you were trying to do something truly insane (e.g. more than 7 AP classes in a semester).
If I had gone to a school with restrictions as harsh as the ones you're describing, Icarus, I can't imagine having stayed long enough to graduate.
Posts: 246 | Registered: Jul 2006
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Well, they had a very conservative outlook, and wanted to not give people the option of taking any easy ways out. They are, as I said, internationally renown, and have world famous alumni, including corporate and world leaders.
But yeah, I was unhappy there, and, to echo pH, no way in hell will I be donating money.
One of the things I'm most bitter about now is their almost total neglect of the arts. I really wish we had had some kind of music program. Or maybe a single music class.
(Their conservative outlook was not merely academic, but gender-related as well. Ours was an all-boys school, and so they didn't teach things they felt boys didn't need to take, like art.*)
*Of course, this is all speculation on my part, as there was no mission statement on boy subjects and girl subjects. But I'm right.
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quote:If I had gone to a school with restrictions as harsh as the ones you're describing, Icarus, I can't imagine having stayed long enough to graduate.
It was all our fathers' dream. Many of our fathers, including mine, attended the same school. Those of us who didn't make it were regarded as failures, and they regarded themselves the same way.
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quote:And my point in bringing this up (or rather, Nighthawk's, I think) is not to address what a curriculum ought to be, but to back up my claim that high powered prep schools very often don't have the interests of their students in mind
quote:Originally posted by Icarus: Well, they had a very conservative outlook, and wanted to not give people the option of taking any easy ways out. They are, as I said, internationally renown, and have world famous alumni, including corporate and world leaders.
I have to wonder: is the success a result of the style of education?
I mean, my high school sounds like it was the polar opposite (you could take the easy way out without a problem, your course choices didn't even need to be approved by your parents), but we've contributed more than our fair share of corporate and world leaders (e.g. Steve Case on the rabid evil corporate side, and Barak Obama on the uber-awesome political side), and I'm not sure how much of that is the result of the education received or the mere name (my high school, and I'd imagine yours is similar in this regard, has enough name recognition that many universities will add between 0.5 and 1.0 to an applicant's GPA automatically based purely on the name).
quote:One of the things I'm most bitter about now is their almost total neglect of the arts. I really wish we had had some kind of music program. Or maybe a single music class.
No performance groups of any kind?
'Cause, yeah, that would be obnoxious.
quote:*Of course, this is all speculation on my part, as there was no mission statement on boy subjects and girl subjects. But I'm right.
quote:If I had gone to a school with restrictions as harsh as the ones you're describing, Icarus, I can't imagine having stayed long enough to graduate.
It was all our fathers' dream. Many of our fathers, including mine, attended the same school. Those of us who didn't make it were regarded as failures, and they regarded themselves the same way.
That makes sense. My dad was similar, although I'm pretty sure he knew in advance that I wouldn't make it to Harvard. I bet he lays awake some nights, though, wondering at the merit of that attitude since I dropped out of college after a year and went on to start a business that, in its first two years, grossed over $200,000.
Parents are really dumb sometimes. It makes me fear becoming one, especially when it comes to things like education.
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quote:Originally posted by Demonstrocity: . . . but we've contributed more than our fair share of corporate and world leaders (e.g. Steve Case on the rabid evil corporate side, and Barak Obama on the uber-awesome political side) . . .
Well we've easily got you beat on the evil side, both corporate and political. As far as good people . . . ? Um, let me get back to you.
quote:
quote:One of the things I'm most bitter about now is their almost total neglect of the arts. I really wish we had had some kind of music program. Or maybe a single music class.
No performance groups of any kind?
'Cause, yeah, that would be obnoxious.
Senior year we had drama as a one-semester elective.
Which I took.
That was it. No marching band, no strings, no chorus, no drama program. No drawing, no dance.
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I'm dying to know where you went to school. I spent a year at Pine Crest and a year at St. Andrew's, in very, very similar environments to the one you've so accurately and brilliantly described here.
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: Secondly, I dislike the Scandinavian educational system when compared to the Gymnasium/Lyceum/Liceo/Grammar School system, which is fading all too fast, but your system appears to yield better results than the U.S. system.
What do you think the difference is?
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quote:My school only allows one in tenth grade and three a year from then on. Mind you, I am taking four tests in May, but from two formal courses and two independent study.
Pelegius,
You should know I almost pulled your comments from the other thread out into an individual thread, just what you ended up doing.
Why? Because I think they make you come off as a pompous @ss, especially in light of what you said at the bottom of the last page.
Your basic argument seems to be this: I am better than everyone else around me; the educational system is stifling my growth to try and encourage these mediocre peers of mine who aren't as naturally gifted as I am.
I'm actually surprised you received as warm a reception as you did from the others in this thread. Usually if I'm hotheaded about something there's several others who are, also.
Some background: I attended three high schools in four years. Two private schools in South Florida that I found very similar to the one Icarus has described. I left the first after 9th grade because I didn't like it; I left the second after 10th grade because we moved back to Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania I attended public school, but it was a public school that pushed APs almost harder than the private schools. Never explicitly, and there was certainly none of the self-esteem-bashing-don't-apply-to-good-schools attitude of the college admissions counselors - if anything, people were encouraged to try beyond their means - but it was still an intense academic environment. (That said, it was also diverse. We offered classes on levels A, X, H, and AP, standing for Academic, Accelerated, Honors and AP.)
Still, most people went to four year colleges, something like 90%. We had a high school graduation rate of almost 100% and a some-kind-of-college rate of 98%.
I hung out with the top 10% of the class. Of my closest friends, two went to Harvard, two to Princeton, one to Brown, one to Dartmonth, at least two to Cornell, 10 or so to the University of Pennsylvania, one to Columbia, and at least three or so to Yale.
Maybe they way you talk makes me angry because I was the only one of our school's 16 National Merit Finalists who didn't go to an Ivy League school. The people who got in looked down on me, whispered behind their hands, and were so judgmental because I didn't get in to the schools I applied to. You can talk about meritocracy, but the school you attend doesn't make you inherently better than anyone else.
I agree with what Irami's said in that from a sociopolitical standpoint I think it's better to have a public education system that strives to provide a diverse array of thoughtful voices that contribute to an interested, progressive {in the scientific sense) society that moves itself forward and benefits from a variety of life experiences.
But this goes way beyond politics to a fundamental moral value of how you treat the other people that you come into contact with. Yes, society has become anti-elitist, in my opinion, to a fault. But there's a difference between being anti-elitist because you feel threatened by what you perceive to be your own intellectual inferiority, and being "anti" the sort of people who see themselves as inherently superior to others and therefore deserving of a better life. The second sort, in my opinion, is entirely justified. That attitude is the one that spawns racism, sexism, classism and a multitude of other evils in our world.
Just because you take four AP classes - and two of them independent study, oh look at you going above and beyond the call, inhibited by your terrible school district - doesn't make you better than anyone. It doesn't, by itself, say anything about how successful you'll be later in life. If anything, your willingness to post in the way that you have about this subject demonstrates a limited worldview that will lead you to discout possibly valuable information and experience entirely - and that you will be more unsuccessful becuase of it.
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quote:One of the things I'm most bitter about now is their almost total neglect of the arts. I really wish we had had some kind of music program. Or maybe a single music class.
No performance groups of any kind?
'Cause, yeah, that would be obnoxious.
Senior year we had drama as a one-semester elective.
Which I took.
That was it. No marching band, no strings, no chorus, no drama program. No drawing, no dance.
quote:My father admits his educational advice was faulty.
I can't wait to see my mistakes.
:-|
Is there a way to know if they're mistakes beforehand? I think that's what scares me most: knowing that there might be a right answer, but you have zero way of finding out beforehand (and therefore have no way of altering your actions before arriving at results).
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Well, to be less heavy, the fact is that if you're paralyzed by fear of mistakes, you will simply do nothing . . . which is probably a mistake too. So you do your best, and you make your mistakes, and you hope you children will forgive you, and you forgive your parents for their mistakes, because you need the karma. Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Pelegius: My school only allows one in tenth grade and three a year from then on. Mind you, I am taking four tests in May, but from two formal courses and two independent study.
Your basically perpetuating everything the above quote rails against then? Maybe you are qualified to pass these tests, but what makes you so sure? I suppose though, that the independent study stuff can't hurt, as you haven't wasted anyone's class time if you fail.
Seems to me that the problem comes from people abusing the availability of the APs and working over their heads, struggling to hold on, and dragging down the learning level wherever they go. That was exactly what was going on in ALL of my AP classes in highschool. EVERY SINGLE ONE! Your right, it was an expected thing for students who took honors English to advance to AP, and yet an embarrassingly small number of people passed in my year, and VERY few got 4s or 5s.
It was worse for my American History AP, where we spent our days catching the slower students up on basic facts, and never really learning anything helpful.
One thing that really worked at my HS was an Honors/AP Physics class. Because it wasn't an AP course, it didn't encourage people to join merely for the AP credit, however it offered some lunch-time reviews for people who wanted to do the AP test, and a few people did. The ones who did were those who actually worked harder and were capable of it.
If APs become the new SAT for prospective students, and it becomes necessary to overload and get more and more extra tutelage in order to inflate your grade and impress schools, then what is going to be next? What other distinguishing attribute can one have? If everyone is in the best, most advanced class, and they benefit from merely being there, then where do the best students go?
As I've said before, and don't feel shame in saying, honors and AP classes got me through the last two years of Highschool because there was enough of a standard involved in getting into the class, that the type of guys I always fought with were never in them. The basic classes were always harder to handle because I had to endure the company of people I hated, and who hated me. Maybe the students in the honors classes hated me too, but they respected excellence, and I could work hard and actually get respect that way. There was no connect that I could make in the regular classes. If there hadn't been that "elite" refuge for me, or some emphasis on hard work and achievement beyond the expected, then I certainly wouldn't have made it to where I am, which is a happy place.
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KoM, the culture. For one thing, Scandinavia is much more homogenous in terms of education level, and that level is relatively high.
Kasie H, I am so glad that you are able to contribute in such a thoughtful, productive and polite manner.
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Well, someone needed to point out how condescending you've been acting. You do realize that there are posters on this board who have never even gone to college, right?
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I could make a convincing argument that the most brilliant person on this board never graduated from college. On the other hand he wouldn't want me to.
posted
AJ, perhaps. I do not recall having said anything to the contrary. I did say that our current secondary school curriculum does an inferior job of preparing students both for trades and for universities.
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It is not remarkably low, and, anyway, the number of people employed bears little relationship to the number of people adequately trained in a given field. Skilled professionals, such as plumbers, carpenters and welders, are in great demand.
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Yeah, and our economy so productive, and our products so in demand overseas, and even more of our services in demand overseas, and . . . you get the idea Posts: 15770 | Registered: Dec 2001
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quote:Well, to be less heavy, the fact is that if you're paralyzed by fear of mistakes, you will simply do nothing . . . which is probably a mistake too. So you do your best, and you make your mistakes, and you hope you children will forgive you, and you forgive your parents for their mistakes, because you need the karma.
My life got better when I began to internalize this exact advice and quit trying to lay blame on my parents for things they did wrong. And, I decided that as long as I loved my children and did my best for them, there was hope that one day they would forgive me my wrongs too.
Posts: 14428 | Registered: Aug 2001
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"But this goes way beyond politics to a fundamental moral value of how you treat the other people that you come into contact with." This makes no sense. Oh, it works as a proposition etc., but makes no sense within the context of this thread.
"Just because you take four AP classes - and two of them independent study, oh look at you going above and beyond the call, inhibited by your terrible school district - doesn't make you better than anyone." This, on the other hand, hardly makes any sort of sense. Trimming down the far-ranging parenthetical proposistions, your proposition seems grounded in my claiming something which I have never claimed, i.e. that I am better than some person or persons unnamed.
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quote:your proposition seems grounded in my claiming something which I have never claimed, i.e. that I am better than some person or persons unnamed.
Pel, I'll come out with it: in overcompensating for your admitted inferiority complex, your tone positively drips with condescension. While you're far too clever to come out and say that you're superior to someone else, that implication is being read into every single thing you say based on the manner in which you say it. It's possible that you aren't aware of this; if so, I hope that knowing this will now make it easier for you to understand many of the critical comments that've so baffled you.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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Tom, as you doubtless know, I do not take kindly to being insulted, any negative tone was entirely due to Kasie H's insulting comments.
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Sometimes the people you think are insulting you are merely trying to get some points through your scull.
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No, Pel. First off, you frequently perceive insult where there is none. I'll freely admit that many people have insulted you, often without any cause, and that you've got every reason to feel hurt and defensive. I regret this, and wish everyone had treated you well. But for the most part -- in fact, I'd say it's just shy of "overwhemingly" -- you have been criticized politely and fairly, and your points addressed in a manner far more respectful and observant than your replies to those criticisms have been.
This is perfectly common and understandable. You're defensive, you're already a little emotionally fragile, and you're a bit stuffy; all of these things add up to decent justifications for your behavior.
But.
Whether or not Kasie was being insulting, and whether or not your tone was more negative in reply to her, that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the fact that consistently -- from your first post on Ornery and in pretty much every post here on Hatrack -- your posts are full of condescension, dismissal, and ego. People pick up on this.
I understand why you take this tone. It's a kind of emotional shield, a bulwark of excessive formality that allows you to hide behind it and feel superior to your challengers. A lot of intelligent people -- not all of them kids, even -- do this. But you have to understand that this annoying.
Even worse, to a lot of people, this kind of formality is a clear sign of weakness and illness. It's like blood in the water, or a limping zebra. It says "I am wounded in some way, and should be culled." I think you've fallen prey to this instinct to some extent, through no fault of your own.
But you have complete control over how you come across. You don't, to extend this metaphor, have to limp or bleed. Your tone, your personal causes, your refusal to admit that your limited experience with reality can in fact be a detriment: all these things scream "Poindexter." And even the nerdiest nerds have an atavistic response to other nerds.
I have no doubt -- none -- that you will grow out of this. And I have little doubt that you'll go on to do some really great things with your life, and will look back on your adolescence with the same bemusement that most of us regard our own. But I get the sense that you really are struggling to understand why so many people are accusing you of being pompous, and so I'm trying to help you see things from their perspective. Drop me a line if you'd like to talk about this some more.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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I shall not be posting for the next month, as I leave town. This is, doubtless, for the best. I have proposed solutions to problems only for these solutions to be ridiculed. I have presented problems and been told that the problems are all in my egocentric head. This is no longer, if it ever was, an enviorment where problems may be adressed.
SAALAM, with hopes for the future, Pelegius, the heretic.
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posted
OSC makes a compelling argument that it was caused by the entrance of women into the workforce. (Sounds like something controversial, but it actually makes a lot of sense.)
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It's actually one of the more intelligent things I've seen him say, and I think it's a fair argument. Basically, the idea is that the addition of women flooded the workplace with what was, at the time, mainly unskilled clerical labor. And since prejudice against women continued at the higher levels of the workplace, unskilled clerical labor ceased to be the career path that it used to be for men, back in the era when almost all secretaries were male; "secretary" rapidly became a permanent position, and not a stepping stone, and secretaries became overwhelmingly female. So if entry-level clerical work was now unavailable as a career path, there had to be a way to skip that step and leapfrog directly into administration and/or accounting. And college was that step.
And the more people went to college without actually needing skills from college, the more essential a college diploma became in and of itself. Which brings us to the present day, where thanks to a glut of workers people can no longer support a family on one income and everyone -- men and women -- is expected to have a bachelor's degree.
I don't agree with all of the argument, but the broad outline is compelling.
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Also, in simple terms, there are twice as many workers as there once were, and so those seeking to stand out need to be increasingly "qualified."
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posted
Hmm, very interesting - makes sense, too. Just for balance, it's worth pointing out the other side of the equation : With twice as many workers, everybody gets paid half as much. (On average, of course.) However, with twice as many workers, you can get twice as much done. So the half pay buys twice as much per unit, since the supply of 'stuff' just doubled and its price therefore halved. On average, households are better off, since their two incomes add up to one pre-change income, which buys twice as much real stuff. (Or, if you don't want two people working, you can get by on the same amount of stuff you had before. You most certainly can support a household on one income; what you can't do is buy three plasma televisions.)
Of course, all this is on average, assuming other things equal, over the long run, and in principle.
*Hopes no real economist comes along to kick his ass*
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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Interesting way of looking it. Instinctively, I would say you are wrong, but I'm not sure how to prove it. The big issue is how do we compare "quality of life" between, say, the fifties and today? We'd also have to agree on what a luxury is.
The reason they didn't have plasma TVs (I don't either, btw) wasn't beause they were a luxury, but because they didn't exist. It should be possible, based on price at the time, to decide how a TV in the 1950s compares to a plasma TV today.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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posted
Well, of course I'm wrong as applied to an actual, working economy. Real economies have frictions, regulations, resource bottlenecks, and all kinds of lag time; and real workers have skill differences. But consider : As a minus twoth approximation, it is reasonable to consider the economy as a big factory making generic 'stuff', which pays you in shares of what it produces. If you produce one percent of the stuff, that's what you get to take home.
Ok, let's look at the approximations I made : One, you actually take home 'stuff tokens' rather than the stuff itself, and because of the secondary market in stuff tokens, there can be weird effects - the stuff tokens you get today might be worth more or less actual stuff tomorrow. Second, I have assumed that the factory accurately measures how large a percentage you produce, which is not clear. Has Bill Gates really produced as much stuff as an average third-world country? And, conversely, in low-level jobs that pay everyone the same, some might still be a lot more productive than others. So it's an approximation. But I don't think it's too unreasonable.
Now then, let's say the factory has 100 workers, so they produce 100 stuff. Each worker is paid 1 stuff, right? Add 100 extra workers to the factory, they now produce 200 stuff. They still get paid 1 each, and since the number of stuff tokens doesn't change, their bank accounts will show smaller numbers. But that's just an accounting effect from the token thing. (In fact, in such a case the factory probably would change the number of tokens, ie the Fed grows the money supply to match the economy's growth.) If they live two by two, they are better off, since the same number of people now have twice the amount of stuff.
Of course, this assumes that the factory can expand its production just like that! That's not true of an economy, obviously. Then again, the women didn't all enter it at the same time. And over a period of thirty years you get technology advances, so each worker produces more stuff; and for some kinds of stuff, you didn't really need to double your production. And so on. But as a model, I think it's a good one.
For plasma televisions, I think there's no need to look up the numbers. You can just notice that households in the 50s had at most one TV (with insignificant exceptions) and now the average is somewhere around two (maybe three, I dunno.) You can do the same math for bathrooms, cars, computers (ok, you need to compare to the 80s for that), and stereo systems. Considering that all this stuff has gotten a lot better, too - well, to whatever extent quality of life is measured by 'stuff', households have more of it.
I think, if you stuck to just using the kind (and number) of appliances they had in the 50s, one car, a 50s house, and don't send your children to college (or let them go on scholarships), you could live on one income. Oh, and take a packed lunch to work. Whether you want to is another matter, but I'm quite convinced it can be done.
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posted
Oh yeah, I'm imagining that the stuff tokens don't show "One Stuff" but rather "One Percent of Production". Just in case it wasn't clear. So in the case with 200 workers, each worker is now being paid "Half a Percent", as opposed to the "One Percent" that used to be the wage.
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posted
Hmm. Thinking about it, it's possible that Bill Gates actually has produced as much stuff as Namibia, or whatever country it is he can buy now. After all, like it or not, Windows is the dominant OS, and without him it wouldn't be built. And since almost all the computer work done today relies on that, well. Maybe his pay isn't so unfair as all that.
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So you do your best, and you make your mistakes, and you hope you children will forgive you, and you forgive your parents for their mistakes, because you need the karma. 
