What the fuck did you just say? [Student Thread]

[jordancoles]

But for real though, some of those textbooks can get downright absurd considering diluted they get with washed up bullshit

I wouldn't mind the wordy and useless textbook readings if it was backed up with solid paraphrasing from the instructors, but what really bugs me about university at the moment is the lack of support.

During my Addictions degree program I took a course on death and the grieving process. 80% of the class was group discussion for 3 hours once per week about our feelings and current events not related to the assignments/exam and the other 20% was presentations to the class. The instructor had us write "learning journals" weekly where we were required to log our thoughts about the class for that week, but no specific instructions were given. We were allowed to do whatever we felt was right, draw a picture, log a poem, write an essay etc. Then, at midterm, she requested that the class hand in their journals for her to look over them and to see if we were on the right track.

She returned them to us a week or two later and said that of the 50 people in the class, only about 4 were doing the journals correctly. She then laid out her "expectations" by basically saying to 'be more thorough.'
As you can imagine, people were pretty butthurt and complained. However, they basically complained to a wall and we moved on in the course.

On top of our journals, she had assigned textbook readings, but never mentioned them in the classroom at all. She didn't paraphrase or reference it, the book was basically ignored in the classroom. Because of this, no one read it and some people didn't even buy it lol. Turns out the exam was entirely based on textbook, was worth 30% and covered every single chapter including the introduction

Studying for the exam meant reading the entire textbook. Sounds like a lot of teaching took place in the classroom, right?

On the last day of the course, we had a group talk about things we liked/disliked about how it was run, and when confronted she basically told everyone collectively to git fukt and that we should be better learners.

#university

[MagicManICT]

Some of it is just "learning the appropriate language of the field," as every field uses the English language differently. I've never had an issue reading research papers as it's how I think. I had a hell of a time learning to read legal at first because everything has very well defined meanings that may be different than how everyone else uses them in English. The definition might be similar, but the idea expressed is a whole new meaning. I'd bring up some examples, but all I have to do is say "pick up a copy of Scientific American, or any other peer reviewed publication." (Just happens to be one of my favorites as they do mostly physical sciences.)

I hate all the garbage double-speak political correct lingo I constantly hear in the education field. One of my pet peeves is that we no longer call students "students" they're "learners" now for some god-forsaken reason?

Who gives a shit? Show some empathy for your fellow man. Bottom line: it all means the same thing. It's not like we're speaking double good fine here. (Apologies to Orwell for the horrid reference to his invention of double speak.) Some some hoity-toity asshat needs to change what words they use because they don't feel "modern." You do the same shit. Nobody says "pwnd" anymore because it's not "cool." Instead it's "rekt." What's the difference? English is a living language and specific terms used change all the time, sometimes year to year, sometimes generation to generation.

What I find worse is that I first took English in college 25 years ago. The standard then is only slightly close to the standard now. I was reading some of my daughter's papers her freshman year and was "why you doing it this way?" It's a huge pain in the ass, and my struggles with English is that what I was trying to do in college was so much different than the way I was taught to write in grade/prep/high school (and I was in advanced classes then, supposedly to give me a leg up on college so it'd be easier to make good grades).

Point in case: it wasn't the changing of the language that was the problem in "1984." The problem was using the language as one of many tools to manipulate the population into a herd mentality and being shepherded away from actual reality. While we might change how we label things, we still label and stereotype in our personal lives and in the media. Our media might put a lot of spin on news stories, but at least we still (for the most part, there are some "news" sites that barely qualify as fact reporting) get the facts.

[jordancoles]

How do student loans work in America-land btw? Here we have 2 systems, a provincial loan (OSAP in my case) and bank loans. Neither of them are overly good, but bank loans are arguably better in terms of interest and monthly payments.

[loftar]

What's the difference? English is a living language and specific terms used change all the time, sometimes year to year, sometimes generation to generation.

The reason for changing the term does color its meaning, though. I feel similar to what Coles says that many of those changes are influenced by some perceived egalitarian oppressor-oppressed bullshit. We don't have the "learner" thing over here (and I hadn't even heard about it, actually), but there's a similar thing where we don't call employees "employees" anymore, but "co-workers", and I think I have some other examples too, but can't think of them at the moment.

Using the replacement term implicitly validates the underlying assumption that caused the change, and when you disagree with that assumption, it's not too strange to think of the term as bad.

[Onep]

Who gives a shit? Show some empathy for your fellow man. Bottom line: it all means the same thing. It's not like we're speaking double good fine here. (Apologies to Orwell for the horrid reference to his invention of double speak.) Some some hoity-toity asshat needs to change what words they use because they don't feel "modern." You do the same shit. Nobody says "pwnd" anymore because it's not "cool." Instead it's "rekt." What's the difference? English is a living language and specific terms used change all the time, sometimes year to year, sometimes generation to generation.

What I find worse is that I first took English in college 25 years ago. The standard then is only slightly close to the standard now. I was reading some of my daughter's papers her freshman year and was "why you doing it this way?" It's a huge pain in the ass, and my struggles with English is that what I was trying to do in college was so much different than the way I was taught to write in grade/prep/high school (and I was in advanced classes then, supposedly to give me a leg up on college so it'd be easier to make good grades).

Point in case: it wasn't the changing of the language that was the problem in "1984." The problem was using the language as one of many tools to manipulate the population into a herd mentality and being shepherded away from actual reality. While we might change how we label things, we still label and stereotype in our personal lives and in the media. Our media might put a lot of spin on news stories, but at least we still (for the most part, there are some "news" sites that barely qualify as fact reporting) get the facts.

What does this have to do with empathy? We're moving from specific to general. We're losing information for no reason. It's akin to instead of calling people male or female we just call them human. Yes, there are reasons to use that specification, but in a class that is specifically relating to teachers and their students, it seems a pointless reductionism. Perhaps instead of humans, we should call them organisms, lest we insult those who identify as non-humans.

We're changing specific terms for increasingly ambiguous terms in the effort to protect feelings. If that's what you mean by empathy, then fuck that. Using increasingly round-a-bout ways to say the same thing doesn't change the intention or meaning, it simply changes the way you say it.

[jordancoles]

Perhaps instead of humans, we should call them organisms, lest we insult those who identify as non-humans.

That's coming, btw
I'm predicting by 2024

We'll be molecules by 2028 though, because some people will be offended that organism sounds too similar to orgasm and that's not how we should be raising our kids in 2028

2031 we'll all be atoms though, because the word molecule triggers abuse victims

[Onep]

Perhaps instead of humans, we should call them organisms, lest we insult those who identify as non-humans.

That's coming, btw
I'm predicting by 2024

We'll be molecules by 2028 though, because some people will be offended that organism sounds too similar to orgasm and that's not how we should be raising our kids in 2028

2031 we'll all be atoms though, because the word molecule triggers abuse victims

Electron here. Fuck you.

[Adder1234]

Thankfully, Calvin sums it all up so neatly:

I totally get this. I'm still only in highschool, but in my advanced english class earlier in the year, we had to write a 6 page essay on the Jane Austin novel, Emma. We only got told what the essay was about on the day of the examination and we had two and a half hours to write it. I absolutely hated the book so I only read about a quarter of it. Instead I looked up the key themes in the novel, studied them for a week before hand and when I got to the essay, I wrote down a whole bunch of long words I remembered the teacher using to describe the novel, added a few of the themes I read about and I was done.
A month later I got my results; I was top of my class and had wrote "one of the most complex and comprehensive essays" that the teacher had ever seen on the novel. My teacher also said that I must have "read and reread the novel several times to gain such a level of understanding."
Honestly I still don't understand half of what I wrote.

[jordancoles]

I totally get this. I'm still only in highschool, but in my advanced english class earlier in the year, we had to write a 6 page essay on the Jane Austin novel, Emma. We only got told what the essay was about on the day of the examination and we had two and a half hours to write it. I absolutely hated the book so I only read about a quarter of it. Instead I looked up the key themes in the novel, studied them for a week before hand and when I got to the essay, I wrote down a whole bunch of long words I remembered the teacher using to describe the novel, added a few of the themes I read about and I was done.
A month later I got my results; I was top of my class and had wrote "one of the most complex and comprehensive essays" that the teacher had ever seen on the novel. My teacher also said that I must have "read and reread the novel several times to gain such a level of understanding."
Honestly I still don't understand half of what I wrote.

A tip for if you go on to higher education:
You will be required to read through peer-reviewed articles and research papers that are 50, 60, 200 pages long. It is not realistic to read these word for word, so it's very possible to skim the introduction, check out some of the cool graphs and then read the closing statements.

For the extra gifted, you can read the first line and the last line of both the intro and the conclusion paragraphs and then cite the entire article like a boss

[ricky]

How do student loans work in America-land btw? Here we have 2 systems, a provincial loan (OSAP in my case) and bank loans. Neither of them are overly good, but bank loans are arguably better in terms of interest and monthly payments.

There's bank loans and federal loans. For the most part you want to entirely avoid bank loans, they'll fuck you over. Federal loans are marginally better due to lower interest rates, plus you don't start accruing interest or have to make a payment until you get your degree or drop out. Unfortunately, federal loans are only available to the least financially fit.

There are however absolute shittons of federal, private, and public grants that you can get your hands on with just a little bit of work. FAFSA, for instance