Frances
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Posts posted by Frances
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My son did non work study jobs, either research or being a TA in his major and a very lucrative outside job (very part time during the school year and part-time during the summers when he did research during the week) that could have paid for his college had he not had a full tuition scholarship. He didn’t qualify for financial aid anywhere, but was offered work study at one of the elite LACS, but not at the university he actually attended. There was no way he could have worked 20 hours per week during the school year with his very demanding class schedule. But he worked 6-7 days per week during the summer by choice and also worked quite a bit during the holiday break.
We are currently helping out a local college student and she works 20 hours per week in the dining hall which I personally feel is way too much given her demanding major. She’s made very few friends and is only involved in one activity, but she gets credit for it, so it’s almost more like a class. I feel like it’s really negatively impacting her college experience at a small LAC. And for the most part, she doesn’t need the money to attend.
One thing that seems new since I went to college is some of the work study jobs being out in the community, this came up at more than one of our campus tours. For her work study, my niece tutored at a local private high school for all four years. She could walk to it so didn’t need a car. She also did other non work study jobs like being an RA, student academic advisor, etc.
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British actress Nicola Walker. I thought she was quite well cast for Last Tango in Halifax and loved the show, but she seems to play every character in every show almost exactly the same. She completed ruined “The Split” for me. Every other main character was wonderfully cast and she was definitely not. She was completely unbelievable as a posh divorce lawyer and seemed to be playing her character the same way as when she was a poor sheep farmer in Last Tango.
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11 hours ago, gardenmom5 said:
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12 hours ago, gardenmom5 said:
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Wow! If he’s leaving it right at your door, I’d tip at least $50. That’s amazing service in this day and age. I did that over 45 years ago when I had a route. We no longer get a physical paper, but when we did, no one ever walked it up to our door. They just threw it and it landed wherever and usually made a loud thunk. And trying to get replacements for missed papers was always a pain.
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4 hours ago, PeterPan said:
Watermelon
That's what my FIL wanted at that stage. Just some fruit that tastes good to eat.
Since you got monthly flower delivery for MIL, you could look at monthly fruit delivery for FIL. Harry and David is one company that does it. Everyone who we give pears to from there loves them. And they will replace any item that isn’t as good as it should be.
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Nope, gift giving and receiving are not my love languages so I try to keep it to a minimum. If anything was needed last minute for a gift exchange, I would grab some handmade art from my husband’s stash.
I do buy gift bags on sale or at inexpensive places because they can be pricey, so I like to have them on hand. I always have a stash of nice blank cards (usually to support a cause or artist) because I do frequently send a card and note for all sorts of reasons.
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Make sweet potato chips in the oven and use the leftover tzatziki for a dipping sauce.
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Congratulations! Love the photo!
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Absolutely yes.
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1 hour ago, Heartstrings said:
I wonder how much that holds true now with kids taking APs and other college level classes in high school versus the classes even a Yale level student had access to in the 40s. Was the average Yale student in 1940 expected to take Calculus in high school the way a Yale bound student would be doing today? I’ve not studied it but I’ve heard and read things saying that something around Algebra 1 was what most high school students took for math in the 40s.
I’d say the students at a place like Yale or any large university likely have the option to be challenged, but some may choose an easier route due to major, course and prof selection, course load, etc. My son took graduate level classes as an undergrad and I don’t think his experience was unique based on other posts on these boards. When I was in grad school at an Ivy, I sometimes had an undergrad or two in my classes. And I do think it’s possible in at least some cases that students are being challenged by course material despite easy grading standards. But I also think the opposite is true, that students are taking a college class in name only.
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1 hour ago, Katy said:
I went to a highly selective university and I can confirm my AP classes were much more difficult, at least in everything except math. The material was essentially the same, but at my high school at least the grades weren’t about cramming for the test that was essentially the same as a college final because there was an extremely inflated weight on homework that was essentially busy work. IE: don’t just read these 20-40 pages a night & memorize relevant facts in whatever study method works best for you, but also do 10 pages of notes in this complex way that isn’t relevant to learning anything, but proves you can jump through a ridiculous hoop. Extra points for more pages. Homework and class participation points are more relevant to your weighted grade than scoring a 5 on the exam, so you must excel on both to get into a highly competitive school.
Undergraduate liberal arts classes don’t have any of that level of BS. A handful of papers and a couple exams are all that mattered. I went back to school AFTER my highly selective one. The undergraduate material at any regionally accredited school is about the same as a highly competitive university. That’s why they must be regionally accredited to transfer. The difference is whether the professors are nationally known and the networking you have with people who will be very powerful in years to come. Also going to a top school gives you better chances with grad school, assuming you participated in research.
Anyway, you don’t have to take my word for it. Most highly selective schools have at least some open courses where you can watch the lectures and evaluate the homework and exams yourself. It’s not harder, the only reason to go is the networking later.
I’m going to have to pretty strongly disagree that regional accreditation means the undergraduate material is about the same based on the experience of numerous people I know, both professors and students. My son LOL when he saw what his university was awarding credit for from the college he took classes at during high school and I know numerous other people who had similar experiences. Even within highly selective schools, there can be great variation. While it would be nice if accreditation and credit transfer agreements meant there was some level of equivalency or standardization, it just doesn’t seem to be the case in my experience.
I agree about the networking opportunities you can get from elite schools (and some companies only recruit at elite schools), although I think students can get into excellent grad schools from a variety of undergrads if they do research and connect with their profs. Numerous small LACs are known as feeder schools for top academic grad programs. Having gone to an elite university for grad school, I wouldn’t actually recommend it for undergrad for most students if the goal is a PhD. But there are cases where I would, such as for someone profoundly gifted in math or someone who already completed numerous high level college classes in their field while in high school.
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13 hours ago, Roadrunner said:
@Frances yes, I don’t know what to make of this quarter system. Some semester classes are squeezed into quarters, but I think maybe not all (?). I can’t tell. The sheer number of classes required in physics to graduate is overwhelming. Engineering seems the same. Just overwhelming. It seems insane compared to a semester school. But maybe I am not seeing everything in a right light.
I think the year long intro level series classes my son took (bio, chem, physics, calculus, organic chemistry, etc) would have been a year long under either system, although my son did say they quantity and depth of material covered was much greater on the quarter system, although it likely depends on what semester school it is being compared to. One difference was that for most of the intro level classes at the university there were different levels (regular, honors, majors only) while at the LAC everyone was in the same intro class, regardless of whether they had taken and passed AP Chem or taken high school chemistry at a small, rural high school. It was great for him during high school because he hadn’t had much formal science, although lots of informal, so profs starting at the beginning was ideal for him. Also, grad classes were not an option at the LAC and he started taking them his sophomore year at university.
While most of his other classes seemed to be semester classes squeezed into quarters. They always seemed to finish entire textbooks in his upper level social science classes and his humanities classes would read and discuss numerous books and he would have to write 3-4 papers per class.
Personally, I think it is great but insanely intense for students who are interested in lots of things and want the challenge. My son chose the trifecta of STEM major, humanities focused honors college, and high level social science electives. It was honestly astounding to me what he packed into his four years and I’m not sure I would have survived it. He most definitely got his money’s worth (although he wasn’t actually paying tuition). He often said he thought he was taking college level classes when he was at the LAC, but he realized later they were more like high school when he TAd for intro level general science classes at the university that he had taken at the LAC.
But there was just no credit equivalency at all. Despite the intro science classes being at a much lower level, the LAC didn’t allow students to get out of them using AP credits, while the university did. Although they did encourage STEM majors to instead take the honors or majors only intro classes rather than skipping them with AP or IB credits. And he LOL when he saw how much credit his university gave for intro bio classes at the LAC because he knew from experience how little material the LAC classes covered in comparison to the general intro bio classes at the university.
Edited to add that although it might not seem like it, I’m a product of and huge fan of LACs. We were willing to pay major $ for our son attend any of the highly selective ones he was admitted to where we would have been full pay due to them only offering financial aid. But he ultimately chose a different path.
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5 hours ago, Roadrunner said:
I think the sort of grading that includes attendance and quizzes and such is most likely found at small LACs. I personally wouldn’t mind that sort of cuddling, but yes, the university my kid attends does none of it at least in his major. The stress levels during this exam week are off the roof. So much is riding on one grade. I kept telling him the smaller LACs would have given him a better GPA and less stress, but he wanted this crazy.
I think it goes way beyond small LACs and also includes lots of community colleges, regional state universities, small private universities, etc. And several of the most elite LACs are known for very difficult grading. Even among the most prestigious universities, there have been several that have long been known to be much more difficult to get into than to do well at while others have always had a reputation for harsh grading.
I do think one thing that makes universities like your son’s more challenging is the quarter system. I do think students generally get exposed to much more learning on the quarter system. My son took semester classes at the local LAC during high school and then went to a university on the quarter system. He said every quarter class he took covered more material in more depth than any of his semester classes at the LAC. And while he was taking 12-15 classes per year at the university, the normal load at the LAC was eight. There literally was no comparison between the two for the amount of material he had to master and learn in one year.
But the positive of the quarter system was the massive number of classes he was able to take, including all the numerous ones for his STEM major, all of the middle and upper level humanities classes required by the honors college, the remaining pre-med classes not covered by his major, and lots of upper level undergrad and lower level grad classes that he took just due to interest, including mainly social science classes.
I will say though that at both schools most of his grades were based on exams and papers with only a bit for HW and none for attendance as far as I know. Except for a think he got a few extra credit points once for showing up to a class the day before Thanksgiving.
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18 minutes ago, EKS said:
One important aspect of going to a selective school is that you finally get challenged. When my father went to Caltech back in the late 40s, everyone there was at the top of his high school class. According to my father, it wasn't at all trivial to pass, let alone get As (note that he also got his PhD at Caltech, so he wasn't anywhere near the bottom of the distribution).
So if Yale isn't challenging its students, it's doing them a huge disservice.
I do think places like Caltech, MIT, and maybe U of Chicago are almost in a class by themselves because they require a common core to be completed by all students and I think their admission policies reflect this.
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2 hours ago, Katy said:
I don’t doubt grade inflation is a problem. I’m not sure this is a good example. I doubt the kids who worked hard enough to get into Yale would suddenly be struggling with the work unless they had extenuating circumstances or new health/mental health issues. You don’t get in there without extensive honors or AP classes, which are generally more difficult than undergraduate courses. I absolutely believe STEM classes are more difficult unless the kid’s been in math competitions or using AOPS though.
While this might be generally true at a place like Yale, there are definitely students there and at other Ivy level schools who do not have a background of extensive high level honors and AP classes. There are students from rural high schools that even offer such things. There are students from all sorts of high schools where they don’t offer AP or IB and except for certain classes with certain teachers, there is not much rigor at all. These colleges are trying to get a diverse student body and at least for the Ivies, also fill a large number of sport positions. Even at a place like Yale full of high achieving students, professors could differentiate between students’ performance with a wider range of grades if they desired to do so and the administration allowed it. I was a TA at an Ivy for both undergrad and grad classes for several years as was my husband at a different one, and there was definitely a wide range of abilities and preparation. During my time I had a few students who I was surprised were even at a four year college.
And for a personal example, in some of my graduate level math classes there were people like me who did not major in math as an undergrad and people with math PhDs from other countries and pretty much everything in between.
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12 minutes ago, Condessa said:
When I was at BYU, professors were expected to give out a range of grades to their students, and could get in trouble for not doing so. They might have a class or a term that skewed high or low, but if they consistently gave only mostly high grades, they were assumed to not be teaching the material at a rigorous enough level, and if they consistently gave only mostly low grades, they were assumed to not be teaching the material well enough and offering enough opportunities for additional support for students. Is this not a thing anymore? Was it always unique to my school?
There was an instance where a professor told us that there was going to be a step up in the difficulty of her grading, because her department had made a decision based upon average grades she gave out, so we had fair warning and knew it wasn’t something that complaining to her would help with. Another time a teacher of a notoriously difficult course required for my major (that students often had to take 2 or 3 times to pass) successfully argued to the department head that the level of rigor in his class was appropriate and that he did offer extensive opportunities for extra help that the great majority of students did take advantage of, it was just a really difficult subject for many students in our major. They agreed with him, but decided to start allowing Ds to count as a passing grade for the major for his class only (all other classes required a C to pass).
I think schools that have common sense overarching policies about grades are few and far between unfortunately.
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1 hour ago, elegantlion said:
As for barking dogs, yes, they are annoying. My dog would bark at the neighbor's kids when out. I would get up and bring the dog in. She was mostly an indoor dog anyway. Some people are clueless. Some people shouldn't own animals.
And some people need to be much more aware of the time, experience, and/or money needed to raise certain types of dogs. It’s so sad to see people in over their heads with a dog because ultimately it’s the dog that suffers the most. I’m regularly amazed by some of the breeds first time dog owners will take on and then of course almost always a puppy.
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3 minutes ago, SKL said:
And let's be honest, some of those college diplomas are not going to make the students rich. My kid aspires to be a social worker. She needs a degree for that. Though a hard worker, she's unlikely to be a 4.0 student unless the courses are pretty easy. So should she not bother trying? Don't we really need more social workers in our population? How about teachers?
Her grades will not matter for her to become a social worker. They might matter a bit for getting into an MSW program if that is her goal. But since they are usually self pay, they will likely take all the students they have room for and who can pay. Due to a shortage and desiring more diversity in the cohort to closer mirror clients, my state no longer even requires a college degree for state social work jobs.
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19 minutes ago, SKL said:
So does this mean that my kids will be unemployable if they aren't straight-A students in college?
One more thing to worry about ....
I don’t think most employers care. Setting aside a place like Yale, many of these college students are obsessing about grades because that is what they’ve been conditioned to do for many years by parents, peers, etc. Others are focused on grad or professional school where grades can matter, but usually along with test scores, experience, recommendations, diversity, etc.
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I would assume the Yale profs and TAs are under immense pressure from students to give out As. Even 35 years ago when I was a TA at an Ivy, I had some students who were relentless when it came to trying to get the grade they thought they deserved. I can only imagine it is much, much worse now.
Except for degrees that require passing a national standard exam to use (eg nursing), I’m not sure we can say much about whether or not learning has taken place and what any grade means because there is such significant variation from college to college and class to class. Similar to our high schools, there is no standardization. Some students graduating from college are likely not getting anything beyond or even at the level of a rigorous high school while others at a place like MIT or U of Chicago have to pass a standard core before preceding to upper level classes.
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21 hours ago, SKL said:
40 years ago, BB guns were considered harmless toys. I was shot by BB guns as a kid. I don't recommend it, but it's not something to get dramatic about either.
Pretty sure today's shock collars can deliver more correction than a BB would.
[I wouldn't shoot a dog with a bb gun or anything else, but the fact that it happened 40 years ago and everyone didn't freak out over it doesn't seem strange to me.]
Sorry, they were not considered harmless toys 40 years ago. I was growing up in the rural Midwest then and no one had BB guns because it was understood the damage they could do. Sure, kids did stupid stuff and hurtful stuff and stuff their parents didn’t know about, but shooting BB guns was definitely not part of the culture where I lived.
And as for shock collars, that’s not something I’d ever personally use because I would never acquire a dog where it might be a possibility. If it was, I would assume I was in over my head in terms of the type of dog I could train and handle.
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21 hours ago, Catwoman said:
Sorry, but that’s no defense.
There is NO EXCUSE for shooting an innocent little dog — and a BB gun still hurt that dog and it could have been seriously injured. A bb to its eye, nose, mouth, or any other sensitive area, could have done some real, permanent real damage, not to mention the psychological damage to the dog.
But hey, if you’re also ok with your children SHOOTING at each other “to be dumb,” I guess we will certainly never agree on this.
Scarlett and her ex were both perfectly fine with her ex SHOOTING a small dog (and it’s even worse that the dog was tied up at the time!) I can’t even begin to imagine why you would defend something like that.
This. My uncle lost an eye to a BB gun in his youth when playing with other kids.
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2 hours ago, crazyforlatin said:
Dd has at least 4 friends at Mudd and one who just applied as ED 1. We wouldn’t have been able to afford it but would have considered taking loans for Mudd. Not that it matters, and it could just be the people we know or meet, but not many people know about Mudd or for that matter many of the LACs. To be in debt for a school that doesn’t have the instant name recognition feels bad if I’m in debt. Dd is now at a UC because we can afford the tuition. And I think she likes it because it’s a campus that suits her personality. But deep down I know that the consortium or any other suitable LAC would have been overall better for her. The debt would have been suffocating, but Dd would at the end probably have a better college experience at a small private liberal arts college.
Small liberal arts colleges definitely have a great reputation in academia. When I was at any Ivy for grad school, every prof who found out I went to one for undergrad said that is exactly the type of school they wanted their own child to attend for undergrad.
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Young adult dynamic/situation..thoughts?
in The Chat Board
Posted
It makes me very sad to read your description of your dd#3. While in general I love and admire my mom very much, one of the few things I strongly disagree with her about is when talking about my very difficult sister she always brings up how much she is like both her difficult mom and her difficult MIL (both now deceased). I thinks this serves absolutely no purpose and if it really is true, then in some sense, her and my dad are to blame because it’s a combo of nature (and they knew they had difficult people in their family before having children) or nurture that likely makes her the way she is. At least my mom seems to have sympathy and concern for my sister. I’m sorry, but I just don’t sense any love in your description of your daughter and that must be heart wrenching for her to know her mom feels that way about her.