Kid's should be building rockets...

Yup. As someone who's recently graduated high school (it's been almost a year....time sure does fly), I agree completely. The amount of useless drivel we're forced to learn is disgusting.
 
Define "useless drivel". What is useless to you may be facinating to someone else. Now, if you're talking about James Joyce, I'm with you. :D

BTW, how is your history. What happened 68 years ago today?
 
90% of public education is driven by politics and funding, actual education prior to college in minimal as compared to how other countries educate their children.

The drive to prepare children for college supersedes all else, including the millions who will never attend college. The burden of educating those HS graduates, or dropouts, for the workplace is placed on their future employers, if they are lucky enough to actually get a job.

Public education is little more than another huge bureaucracy that at best, sort of accomplishes it's mission, but would do much better if only it was given more money.

-John
 
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Ghery said:
Define "useless drivel". What is useless to you may be facinating to someone else. Now, if you're talking about James Joyce, I'm with you. :D

BTW, how is your history. What happened 68 years ago today?
Click to expand...

D-Day, of course! Well, 68 years yesterday.

And useless drivel...like oh, I don't know, analyzing the sex scene in The Handmaid's Tale in class? That count? It does in my book :)
 
Maybe "Kid's" should be rewarded with rockets after learning when, and when not, to use an apostrophe. :rofl:
 
:devil::devil::devil:
Here's some devil's advocacy and my STEM disillusioned two dollars to get some discussion going... That article is all feel good stuff. And did I mentioned we sh-tcanned the space shuttle? It's getting awfully hard to recruit now for NASA. More of that in a second.

The article's line is tired. I managed to go into STEM as a product of that very outdated system of education. So it's not that architecturally-driven of a challenge like it's being suggested by the boy/girls scouts of America and NASA camp. It's simply a matter of rational incentives. The dream of graduating high school, getting a factory job and living a modest life is dead.. That's not being debated. But that job was easy; STEM is HARD drudgery for the median. STEM doesn't pay to live well in this country in aggregate. That's the problem. Only people who are vocationally inclined to make such drudgery their passion consider that deficit worthwhile, at which point it is no longer drudgery to them and so are willing to get subpar compensation for that kind of work.

That's why women still ended up not going into science after all the girls scout cookies and PBS commercials... It wasn't the man putting them down. It was because they still adhere to the gender roles that said: "you want that house in the cul de sac and the uppermiddle lifestyle living, and breaking your intellectual back for 55K and a sausage fest of a workplace is not as efficient as riding that elliptical machine like it's your job in college and laying on your back for the right man and getting a nursing degree that pays more for less education, for extra play money and weekends at the lake with the rest of the boobs-for-xmas well-to-do crowd". Hell, throw 'female pilot' in that pot too for good measure. Nothing like an entire gender to dilute the value of your life's work to that of a hobby, easily disposed of for the social value of being a soccer "mommy". Dang, that's two clichés in one rant. Im getting better. :D

Much of STEM work pays crap for the nature of quantitative work, which baffles me to this day. So, you do that because you have the same avocation that the dumb-ss regional airline pilot has to fly behind an autopilot for the ROI of a whole decade and a half of crappy layover living and no weekends and holidays. It has to be, because the money isn't there.

Everybody justified going into STEM watching statistical outliers set the tone at college fairs for what they thought they were going to do. Astronauts, NASA project managers. But in the end the work was so mundane and constricting, the pay would be the only way to make it worthwhile. When Americans saw there was no money behind STEM, the collective bailed on it. They do nursing instead and socially place jobs that center around defrauding tax payers and foreign governments on a casino table, as the epitome of "apex work" in the Country. Conversely, foreigners do the data mining babysitting. One day they too will grow tired of running a compensation deficit and get "entitled" like Americans supposedly are.
How u like them apples?...


From where I was sitting as an engineering student, that was a lot of spinning your wheels, education-wise, for Olive Garden wages. Most of my peers cringe at the 8 years I spent attaining a set of engineering credentials and they're right, that was gratuitous torture. I did ok, and like most I was checking a box. That was my fault, because a friend of my father's, who talked to me at the age of 16 when I was pondering the idea of going to Georgia Tech for aero engineering, was himself a guy who had the same degree from the same institution and yet was a restaurant owner from a family business handed down to him; he never used his formal education. So I wasn't all that surprised when I too came to the same fate, degrees in hand...except I didn't have a convenient and healthy family business to comfortably fall on, just these freggin' pieces of paper that allowed me to beg for a 40K job that made me want to jab my eyeballs out. There are niches I could personally attain and get positive ROI on... Problem is there's too many suckers with STEM degrees already that without political connections it's all but improbable to wedge others out of said niche. In essence, the equivalent of winning a beauty pageant is not my idea of healthy planning for developing a career plan worth a lick. Yet, that's what most STEM post docs and degree holders are doing. It's retarded. For the rest, it's Olive Garden living and the not-related-to-degree labor market, which is an effective inefficiency...So much for fiddling with rockets in grade school. It's like the abortion argument. Everybody champions for the life argument, but nobody ever tackles the "yeah but what statistically happens to that kid after birth?". That's a downer, so we don't ask. Feel good politics, just like this article.

STEM doesn't pay enough for the hassle, which is why Americans have been leaving it in droves. Kids can build rockets all they want. Indeed, it builds a generally more quantitative-oriented society if everybody embraced that kind of inclination, but you gotta show Americans the money. This is a country of drifters, opportunists, thiefs, immigrant settlers, patriots, entrepreneurs and rent seekers alike. This ain't an obedient stoic oriental society. Show me the g-d money. It ain't in STEM. A kid in the oil plains of north dakota makes more than most engineering chumps, for the price of risking his fingers at the rig and not needing to know how to count to 10. I'm not saying that laborer's profile makes him better suited to have financial success, considering the youthful exuberance of making 10K a month and not having life skills of any consequence to not squander it. But when median Americans see that contrast, it's damn hard to sell that mundane cubicle/lab drudgery for the money being offered, as worth one's time.

It's the reason I abandoned aero engineering as an employment avenue. If I'm gonna get paid tread-water money to be furloughed with the same frequency as an airline pilot AND an oil worker, I want to actually either make silly money (oil worker) or enjoy the video game controls and the view while I starve (airline pilot).

Staring at a computer doing de facto programming work, not doing any field testing and going to political meetings centered around when the project's gonna close and how I better be talking to the folks in Seattle across the country because we're all getting canned next month, wasn't really worth the academic drudgery endured to get to that position. The idea of switching gears and working on printer toners in order to have steady work sounded as appealing as licking lead paint. I guess I am an entitled American after all... No, check that, I sold my personal freedoms to serve in military capacity (for a bit anyways), I've earned the right to disparage my formal education.

Like an old radar navigator of mine on the BUFF (junior Delta pilot, at the ripe young age of 45, commuting to reserve JFK domicile from the southern US and sleeping in a crew room in his 40s) said one day on the way back from the crew bus: "America's a great country....as long as you've got money". YogiBerra couldn't have put it better. Show me the money, cause I ain't doing that quantitative drudgery for olive garden money and an airline pilot's definition of "continuous employment". :raspberry:

Just like the pilot shortage, there's no such thing as STEM worker shortage.. the only shortage around here is that of people willing to do that eyeball-gouging job for peanuts. Show me the money and I'll do it. It's why nursing exploded and why people camp out in north dakota to make 10K for a couple years to land flat back on their behind. Avocations are for the self-made or the aloof...

:devil::devil::devil: ;)
 
N801BH said:
I can name that tune in 6 notes...:idea::D
Click to expand...
I knew the line immediately. :rofl:

That song came out when I was in high school and being quite the teenage cynic it had a lot of appeal.
 
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