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Failed One
Nov. 29th, 2006 06:51 pmToday I hung out a lot with college academic counselors. One brought up the situation where a student comes into your office after having just figured out, that very day, that their high school had failed them.
I know someone this happened to.
Actually, it happened to me, too, but not in college. It happened in the third grade when I moved from an easier school to a harder school. I had been learning the cursive alphabet, one letter at a time, and had gotten through “p.” In the new school, all work was already being done in cursive. And in ink (for everything but math)! Fortunately, I had been working on my own in a workbook and knew all the other letters, but I did not yet know that you were supposed to connect letters in the same word.
I also was forced into long division prematurely. I remember lying on the hotel bed (we didn't have an apartment yet) with my mom trying to teach me.
And it happened again in science in the eighth grade. My new school was in a district where everyone had a science fair every year starting with kindergarten. And I had barely had any science classes. My seventh grade school was awesome, but even they weren't big on science. I did have anatomy and physiology, but that was an elective.
And when I went to the science fair, I couldn't even understand the titles of some of the science projects, let alone imagine how anyone could have come up with the idea or followed it through. Someone made a cloud in a jar. How do you even get the idea that you can make a cloud yourself?
I learned much later that they often got their ideas from their parents or other similar sources. After all, I went to school in the same school as kids whose parents worked at NASA.
But I never thought of it as my earlier schools having “failed me.” It sounds so dramatic, stated like that.
I don't know what the advice was. I can imagine some of the options. Getting tutoring. Finding a mentor. Dropping a course and backing up and taking a preparatory one.
**
I finished The End, the last book in the “Series of Unfortunate Events.” I loved one of the new characters, but even she failed me in the end. R. said this is common in this series, and of course it is.
All I am going to say is that not enough was explained in my opinion. As my sister said, there is room for more books. But I feel the way I did with “Twin Peaks” and am no longer willing to be strung along.
Perhaps more was explained between the lines than I noticed. And the author did try to explain a lot with a single word. But you know what? If he wouldn't have wasted so much time blathering about semantics and spewing long lists of nouns, he would have had more room in his gigantic book to explain things with actual paragraphs and perhaps even chapters.
I know someone this happened to.
Actually, it happened to me, too, but not in college. It happened in the third grade when I moved from an easier school to a harder school. I had been learning the cursive alphabet, one letter at a time, and had gotten through “p.” In the new school, all work was already being done in cursive. And in ink (for everything but math)! Fortunately, I had been working on my own in a workbook and knew all the other letters, but I did not yet know that you were supposed to connect letters in the same word.
I also was forced into long division prematurely. I remember lying on the hotel bed (we didn't have an apartment yet) with my mom trying to teach me.
And it happened again in science in the eighth grade. My new school was in a district where everyone had a science fair every year starting with kindergarten. And I had barely had any science classes. My seventh grade school was awesome, but even they weren't big on science. I did have anatomy and physiology, but that was an elective.
And when I went to the science fair, I couldn't even understand the titles of some of the science projects, let alone imagine how anyone could have come up with the idea or followed it through. Someone made a cloud in a jar. How do you even get the idea that you can make a cloud yourself?
I learned much later that they often got their ideas from their parents or other similar sources. After all, I went to school in the same school as kids whose parents worked at NASA.
But I never thought of it as my earlier schools having “failed me.” It sounds so dramatic, stated like that.
I don't know what the advice was. I can imagine some of the options. Getting tutoring. Finding a mentor. Dropping a course and backing up and taking a preparatory one.
**
I finished The End, the last book in the “Series of Unfortunate Events.” I loved one of the new characters, but even she failed me in the end. R. said this is common in this series, and of course it is.
All I am going to say is that not enough was explained in my opinion. As my sister said, there is room for more books. But I feel the way I did with “Twin Peaks” and am no longer willing to be strung along.
Perhaps more was explained between the lines than I noticed. And the author did try to explain a lot with a single word. But you know what? If he wouldn't have wasted so much time blathering about semantics and spewing long lists of nouns, he would have had more room in his gigantic book to explain things with actual paragraphs and perhaps even chapters.