Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Parenting arms race article

Whoa. This is too familiar for me. I wasted a lot of time carousing with my short-term memory.

Absolutely, IF you can smash the rules and still win the game, by all means do so, however, don't enter the game knowing the rules, be unable to change the rules, and then whimper and whine about how you wasted your time. You signed up for this crap you're whining about.

Once again, we all make our own bed, be prepared to sleep in it. If you've got difficult challenges, I can sympathize and respect that, however, if you can't get yourself out of them don't expect anyone else to be able to do so either. YOU are responsible for YOUR happiness. Until your kids are adults, YOU are responsible for educating them, giving them wisdom to navigate the world, and teaching them to take care of themselves. Don't expect the rest of the world to have a ready made remedy to your special needs, you're going to have to create that world because nobody else is going to do it for you nor should you expect them to.

You have to do *something*, silly.

And I didn't say "win the game", I said "break the game".

One of mine (scathingly) responded to a graduate student who was foolish enough to ask it...


Do you want me to TELL you what will be on the test??



The grad student in question went and wanted, very clearly, for the floor to open up underneath him and swallow him into a sinkhole at that moment.

Two weeks later, while I was TA-ing gen chem for him, a freshman student asked the precise same question. He shot me a sly look (because I suspect he knew that I'd heard the story already), and less scathingly, though still with a downright wolfish grin, informed the student that paying attention in class, reading the textbook, and doing the homework might provide some helpful clues for this endeavor.

Ahhh, good times. Theoretical physical chemist, incidentally. The first incident was in a statistical mechanics course populated by Chem and Physics PhD students, and the second was in the off-sequence majors Gen Chem class at a large western university. He was old-school. Loved his sense of humor, and I always found him friendly and helpful... but even my DH was terrified of him, and claims that I was the only person ever to "get" Dr. Z completely. I was his favorite TA of all time, apparently. Worked for me-- he wrote me a heckuva letter of recommendation later.

Hmm.

The correct answer is "Yes."

Followed by a pause.

After the pause, you then follow up with "Would you be so kind as to do that for me?"

:rofl: Yeah.... no, probably not. The implication was very clearly that if such a thing were necessary, well... maybe P-Chem isn't the right place for you...

Clearly you didn't know Dr. Z.

A far kinder, gentler faculty member (once IAEC spokesperson, and a perfect British gentleman in every way) took one equally foolhardy ChemE senior to task for daring to ask in one of my upper division electives;

"So you keep using this term 'Ksp.' Could you just tell me what that is, exactly?"



Dr. British went ballistic, explaining that this (Trace Analysis) was a 600-level CHEMISTRY course, and that ChemE could damned well keep their undergraduates where they belonged if they didn't know any freshman chemistry, because this was a 400-level class even for them, and last time he checked, solubility products were covered in some detail in not one, but THREE prerequisite courses over the course of three separate years of preparatory classes leading to the class, and that if the student were truly curious, he could perhaps consult with any one of the two dozen graduate students whose TIME he was wasting with such a question, since any and all of us could answer it without even breaking a sweat, but that sure... he could spend ten minutes of class time on it... SURE. WHY. NOT?? (He was livid.)

The graduate students applauded when he ran out of breath, by the way. We weren't any happier than he was that those ignoramuses were in our class and wasting time with that kind of ill-prepared idiocy. WE all sat on one side of the room, and rolled our eyes collectively anytime one of the ChemE's raised their hands. It was invariably something that demonstrated that they had little business taking the course. The upshot is that this question was asked AFTER a twenty minute discussion of the merits of using a carrier to precipitate a trace analyte. So clearly understanding this concept was pretty key to the material under discussion for the previous 20 minutes. With that one question, this student demonstrated that he had NO grasp on what had just been discussed at some length, in some mathematical and theoretical detail (sufficient to jog pretty much anyone's memory, I'd have thought-- there was an audible GASP of disbelief from the grad students when it was asked).


The point of this obvious tangent is that this kind of problem has pretty far reaching consequences even into PhD training. Stupid people make us all a little dumber when they infiltrate. That's not to say that most TigerCubs are stupid... just like that Chem E student was clearly not stupid, or he'd never have made it through statics to bedevil me or my classmates... but still... he clearly had no business being in a 400-level chemistry class, no matter what he (or his department or adviser) may have thought.... it was memorable only because of Dr. British's uncharacteristically volatile response to it-- the type of thing was quite routine in a lot of my 600-level elective classes, I'm afraid.

Needless to say, the ChemE's weren't invited to the grad student study and homework sessions. Ha.

Maybe I'm just too much of an economist, but I think tuition should be scaled inversely to GPA in upper year classes as a rule after adjusting for income (which is effectively just an argument for extensive merit scholarships). There's a strong public policy argument for having a well-educated citizenry, granted, but the achievement of that aim shouldn't come at the expense of maintaining high standards for grad school bound candidates.

Breaking the game accomplishes nothing positive though and it's simply someone not liking the game so rather than finding a different game, they ruin it for others which the game is a positive experience for. That's simply childish behavior found on elementary school playgrounds.

You would not make a very good nihilist.

I recommend that you never try to spread pain and suffering.

You don't seem very good at it.