Re: schools banning homework

morrisjcroy@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
The students should have done their "homework" about the field, before
even thinking about enrolling in it at a college/university. These
days there isn't any excuse for not doing some "homework" a priori.
(ie. Google is their best friend, along with one's own common sense).

And put all those high school career counsellors out of work? Not a chance.


I've heard stories over the years about some high school guidance
counselors being the really crappy teachers who were really good at
"gaming" the system and playing politics. Basically if they couldn't
get a job as a principal/vice-principal, the 2nd best job was to be a
guidance counselor.

When I was in high school, I was under the impression that the counsellors had to have special qualifications.

I've heard that getting a principal/vice-
principal job these days requires having a master's degree in
education (specializing in administration), typically done in the
evening at a local university over several years.

I knew some colleagues who studied for the part-time B. Ed.s. Some of them worked on them for something like ten years.



Many of my students had little or no imagination about what they wanted to
do and likely chose our department because they didn't know what else to do
or Mommy and Daddy told them to do that.


I got that impression too of my previous students. I'm not really
sure why some folks chose to major in the hard sciences or
engineering, considering these degrees had a reputation for being hard
and very time consuming.

Some of my students seemed to think that our department was like the high schoo shop classes they took. Many were disappointed when they found out they actually had to think once in a while.

The drunk partying slacker types I knew of
many years ago in college, typically chose an "easy" major like
psychology, political science, business, history, etc ...

Most of the ones I knew held out for arts--usually psychology or sociology. They seldom worked in those fields, but so long as they got a degree, who cared?

Some folks
who had half a clue about doing math, majored in economics. (I wonder
how many places still have a major in "home economics").

Isn't it now called domestic ecology or some such politically correct name?


I heard that psychology had pure multiple-guess exams, well into
junior year. I've noticed at some places these days, the tests and
exams for courses on partial differential equations for engineers
actually had the first page or two full of multiple-guess questions.
(I'm not sure why multiple-guess stuff is showing up in engineering
type courses at that level).

I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what many of my students wrote. At least by showing their work, I could determine what they were doing and whether they got the right idea.

(Multiple-guess PDE exams? Huh?)



At the Mensa meetings I've attended in the past, I got the impression
many of the regulars were folks who were either "test smart" and/or
"book smart".

Based on some of the discussions, I wondered how some of the people in
attendance managed to pass their exams.


Some folks may be only "test smart" and very little else? I knew of a
few folks who were like that.

Possibly.


One guy I knew of decided to put his "test smarts" to make money.
Basically he started a workshop on how to write and get high scores on
exams like the LSAT, MCAT, GMAT, GRE, SAT, etc ... I suppose these
workshops he was holding were similar to the "cram schools" common in
places like Japan, except catering to college students who were
applying to law, medical, business, etc ... type graduate schools.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cram_school
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juku

To convince potential customers of his "credentials", he himself would
write these particular exams several times every year and make public
all his test scores. Apparently he had enough customers where it
essentially became his full time job, and that he hired a few other
people to hold the cram workshops due to demand (ie. other
instructors who also had high test scores, and who also wrote these
exams several times a year).

I've seen the ads for places like Sylvan. Kind of the same thing, I suppose.


I've heard stories over the years that it's possible to "raise" one's
IQ score on various IQ tests, by simply practicing old tests. Some
research experiments done where some "below-100 IQ" folks, actually
practiced a bunch of old IQ test exams diligently for several months
and then writing an actual IQ exam and getting a really high score.
(I don't have a reference offhand). This seems to throw out notion
that IQ is a fixed value for a particular person.

I wrote the GRE twice: once when I was 23 and the second time when I was 40. My scores increased significantly during that time. Part of it was because I'd had a lot of time to practice my mental skills as I'd had two masters degrees by the time I sat the second exam.



I don't think I've ever met anybody in Mensa who was really "street
smart". Most of the "street smart" folks I knew of when I was
younger, typically were folks who ended up joining street gangs and/or
organized crime type of groups.

Most of the members I knew weren't much different than those who weren't.


I wasn't around long enough to have become familiar with the general
atmosphere in Mensa. Perhaps I was unlucky to have come across
several groups which were filled with a high disproportion of semi-
eccentric and eccentric types (ie. too many bad apples).


Over the years, I met only a small number of the local members, which might not be an accurate sample.
.

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