First, BB and now this. You are me.
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I was a garbage student with really good SAT scores and would have been better off if colleges hadn’t let me in.
Pretending to be a college student took a bunch of time and mental energy that could have been much better applied to my main focuses of grinding poker and smoking weed.
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Not to put too fine a point on it,
that part is obviously a joke because present-company-excluded but in my experience, all the stuff about “taking tests well” and what not is said by kinda smart kids with good grades, from good homes with good parental support, to people like me because they can’t wrap their brains around the concept. I don’t think it serves society well to conflate having advantages and privileges and support and not being able to cope with getting flexed on by misfit deviants like myself, with not having advantages and privileges and support.
It’s like, yeah, that kid didn’t hypothetically, potentially ace the SAT because everything is wrong with everything, but, you didn’t simply because you’re fucking average.
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I pretty much coasted through high school on my way to college. Everything came to me very easily then.
When I got to Penn State, it was a totally different world and the mixture of severe anxiety and depression led to a horrible experience. I never wanted to go to class. I was deathly afraid of taking exams. I barely wanted to leave my dorm. My weight skyrocketed and I was extremely unhealthy. Like feeling chest pains while lying down unhealthy.
I really should have gone to a smaller university or at least took a gap year to work a bit before going to college.
As for standardized testing being biased? It probably is due to the fact that people in higher income classes can afford prep classes and tutors while those who don’t have the same opportunities can’t and thus do worse. Honestly, I didn’t even know that people studied for the SAT and didn’t bother preparing. Not sure if I would have gone to a more prestigious school if I did anyway. But maybe I would’ve gone to a more comfortable learning environment.
Anybody who talks about what score they got on their SAT or ACT past 18 is an asshole anyway. It’s like people bragging about their IQ. If you’re an insufferable douchebag, who gives a shit about it?
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Yeah I’m serious about ‘present company included’ don’t nobody get big mad at me.
I post with you all because of the aforementioned ‘deviant misfit’ vibes.
You mean, like, unprompted when you’re introduced at dinner parties or in your bio on OKCupid?
I guess that’s an exception.
I mean how are you supposed to find love if you aren’t including your standardized test scores in your OKCupid profile?
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I had average high school grades (bunch of AP classes tho), high SATs, and my GPA went up a lot in college.
I’d need to see a lot more about the results of this policy, but I think it will push self-directed, somewhat iconoclastic people out of better colleges. (Sure, you read difficult books on your own in HS, but what about that nightly reading report on Lord of the Flies?) I didn’t see HS homework as very important and half assed a lot of it. I knew smart kids with average grades and not so smart kids with high grades.
If I had a kid today I’d probably be a tiger mom out of concern for current evaluative practices. My parents weren’t that focused on my HS education. My brother was a HS dropout (now with an MS in CS making a lot at big corp) and my parents left me alone to do HS as I saw fit. My SAT prep was buying and working through a prep book and taking some old tests (after noticing the Princeton Review fake tests weren’t nearly as good as the actual old tests). Total prep cost, like $40.
I have a lot of conflicting thoughts about education and “culture”, but the people I know who “culturally” believe that education is really, really important (mostly asians and indians of my personal friends, some jews, but most of the jews I know seem to have “assimilated” into current low US standards) tend to do well in the system. Education isn’t simple, and believing it’s really important seems to correlate strongly with doing well at it.
itt Simplicitus shits on Lord Of The Flies
lemme guess Catcher Of The Ryes sucks shit too?
Lord of the Flies was propaganda and a lie. Have never read Catcher in the Rye.
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"…I like the way it breaks down into fiction and nonfiction. In other words, these people are lying, and these people are telling the truth. That’s the way the world should be. “
There are two nerds up thread who would totally lose their shit over your sample size of one.
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wait
ok
For more than 50 years the real-life story of Sione, Mano and their friends was little known outside of Tonga… until Dutch historian and best-selling author Rutger Bregman stumbled across it on the internet. He flew across the world to meet Mano and made the story the cornerstone of his new book, Humankind: A Hopeful History.*
Rutger Bregman: And I just couldn’t understand how this had not become, you know, one of the most famous stories of the 20th Century. I just couldn’t understand it, because it’s just extraordinary, six kids on an island for 15 months. And they survived, how?*
Like millions of others, Bregman had read the fictional tale of marooned schoolboys, Lord of the Flies, which for generations has been taught in high schools around the world.*
The novel—later made into a film—is a nightmarish account of a group of British boys stranded on an uninhabited island. They divide into two competing tribes and descend into violence—culminating in mayhem and murder.*
Rutger Bregman: This is really old theory in Western culture, that our civilization is just a thin veneer, just a thin layer. And that when something bad happens—say there is a natural disaster or you shipwreck on an island and you have the freedom to establish your own society—that people reveal who they really are. You know, people deep down are just selfish.*
Holly Williams: And you’re saying that basic idea, underlying the novel, Lord of the Flies, is wrong? You’re saying that would never happen?*
*Rutger Bregman: Well, if tens of millions of children around the globe still have to read Lord of the Flies in school today, I think they also deserve to know about this one time in all of world history when real kids shipwrecked on a real island, because that’s a very different story.
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Tatou and his friends were six in total. Lord Of The Flies was like 100 dudes of different ages.
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Tatou and his friends were, uh, friends. The LOTF dudes were not friends, and many were complete strangers to one another.
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Tatou and his friends already lived on an island, which would make being stranded on a similar, formerly inhabited, island significantly easier. It would still suck don’t get me wrong, but not like some Brits on an uninhabited Pacific island.
That’s just off the top of my head. And here’s the thing, Rutger Bregmen has written books and given TED talks! He’s styled on billionaires and clowned Tucker Carlson, but he can’t catch what a loser wastoid dirtbag like myself noticed immediately, but that’s ok. It would not only be unjust but a logistical nightmare if the world wasn’t setup this way.
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They have been probing people’s butts. Clearly Earth is a sex tourism destination.
Lord of the Flies sucks though. Unnecessarily detailed descriptions of scenery that detract from the story and among the worst endings I’ve ever read.
Actually liked this one more than most people seem to.
itt Eyebooger shits on descriptions of flora and fauna
Read somewhere that the author was a miserable bastard.
The only place I’d trust an honest takedown of CITR is right here on UnstuckPolitics dot com. Otherwise it’s breathtakingly stupid shit like this:
By then “The Catcher in the Rye” was already well on the way to the status it has long enjoyed as an essential document of American adolescence – the novel that every high school English teacher reflexively puts on every summer reading list – but I couldn’t see what all the excitement was about. I shared Caulfield’s contempt for “phonies” as well as his sense of being different and his loneliness, but he seemed to me just about as phony as those he criticized as well as an unregenerate whiner and egotist. It was easy enough to identify with his adolescent angst, but his puerile attitudinizing was something else altogether.
That was then. This is half a century later. “The Catcher in the Rye” is now, you’ll be told just about anywhere you ask, an “American classic,” right up there with the book that was published the following year, Ernest Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea.” They are two of the most durable and beloved books in American literature and, by any reasonable critical standard, two of the worst. Rereading “The Catcher in the Rye” after all those years was almost literally a painful experience: The combination of Salinger’s execrable prose and Caulfield’s jejune narcissism produced effects comparable to mainlining castor oil.
Dude was so affronted at seeing himself reflected in Ol’ Holden that he thought it preferable to believe that a book must suck if you don’t like the main character. And somebody paid him to write that!
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Regarding fighting kangaroos, the type of roo matters. A male Red kangaroo is no joke, they can be 6 ft tall and 200lb of muscle. A female Eastern Grey is not a problem. They’re not generally aggressive but they will attack if cornered. I go hiking in the Adelaide Hills at night fairly frequently. The roos there are accustomed to people and mostly ignore them, but I’ve had them growl at me if I walk too close to them and startle them. I’m not worried about being attacked by greys up there but if it was reds I’d be a bit more careful.
btw, the animal which most commonly attacks people in Australia would have to be the Australian magpie.
They nest in spring and if you walk too close to their nests they may swoop at you. I’d guess that more or less every (mainlander) Australian has been swooped by a magpie at some point. Usually they start with warning swoops, making little or no contact, but if you piss them off enough they will start pecking at your head and sometimes eyes. People have had injuries like detached retinas and (because magpie beaks are dirty) infections and even anaphylactic shock.
In an interesting case of divergent evolution, Tasmanian magpies do not swoop. Only mainland birds learnt this behaviour. Perhaps this has to do with different populations of predators back in the day.
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