You cannot justify calling having calculus and trig problems standard because they generally were only touched upon in the curriculem at that time.
How much homework do you bring home a day?
Study Hall???
IIRC it was generally considered the norm to have 20minutes per class homework.If you recall any really old movies you see the boy carring the girls books home.Those things were heavy I’ll tell you.
As the father of 2 I can tell you that neither would bring home books because their homework was done in school.
That carries on into college because my son still doesn’t bring homework home. He is on the Deans List by the way.
Has it ocurred to you yet that the workload may be easier.
Throw away your calculator and see how many you can do.
Just for fun see if you can find a slide rule and try that.
It was a whole different world Kiddo
And I neglected to mention segregation. “Colored” waiting rooms in bus and train stations. “Whites Only” water fountains and restrooms. “Coloreds” to the back of the bus. Black men, full grown, routinely called “Boy” by whites. Black women routinely called “Girls” by whites. As in, “I have a boy to do the lawn and a girl who comes in to clean twice a week.” I never attended school with a black person and don’t remember seeing any in college. This was Texas in the fifties.
Very good point, justwannano. I wonder how many students today can find a square root without their calculator. I remember having to do all that simple math on scratch paper.
And don’t forget pre-computer research for a paper. And then having to write that paper longhand. Do they still use “Bluebooks”?
Peace,
mangeorge
Luxury! Why, when I was your age, we didn’t have any of them fancy-schmancy slide rules. We had to work out math problems by moving the rocks around the outside of Stonehenge. And weeeeeeeeee liked it!
Usuaully a few hours per night, but sometimes I just brush it off. I usually do well enough on the tests and other high end works do be able to simply ignore my homework. I learn the stuff in class, I don’t see the point in so much homework sometimes. I, however, am Not the norm. I may seem like i’m bragging, but i’m not, this is the truth.
What the heck is IIRC?
The standard in my district is 30 minutes of hw per class per day.
Your point? Those were the freaking movies!!! and I suppose you think the matrix is real too!
If I was actually dumb enough to carry all my books around school i’d have around 40 pounds of paper on my back.
Well, most professors that I have met don’t even give homework, but they assign aprx 100 pages of reading a night per class.
No.
I rarely use my calculator in my calculus class.
Then again… if I had a TI 89…
Is it a challenge to find square roots which are integers?
FTR: Every age had its own challenges. I think sciene and mathematics are taught earlier now than in the past, but literature, art, music and the humanities in general are not dealt with as thoroughly. I also believe that evaluation methods are much more quantitative now, due to class sizes, etc. This tends to emphasize taxonimic and recognition skills while de-emphasizing deeper analysis.
The best lack all conviction
The worst are full of passionate intensity.
*
I, for one, am extremely grateful that I am alive now. I would rather live now than at any time in the past. My kids will have it even better.
Reading my mom’s high school yearbook (she graduated in 1953) I was disturbed to see that every single female student said her future goal was to be a “wife and mother”. Except my mom. She declared she wanted to be a “grease monkey”.
When my mom went to college (Illinios State University) her drafting professor was furious that she had enrolled in his class. On the first day of school, he announced, “Everyone check your schedules. Be sure you’re supposed to be in this class.” Silence. “Check your schedules again. Someone is not supposed to be in this class.” Silence. Finally, he walked up to my mom’s table and said, “Let me see your schedule”. She was the first female student, ever, to take drafting at ISU.
I’m a nurse, a traditionally female profession, but I could be a doctor or a nuclear physicist or anything else I want to be. I have choices. I have a future. Although I’ve been a “traditional” sort of wife for ten years, I don’t have to be. My husband and I are partners; we’re a team. I don’t feel subjugated to him.
I don’t worry about whether or not I’m allowed to wear white shoes after Labor Day. I can wear jeans and scrubs and tee-shirts. (Thank goodness I don’t have to wear a white dress and one of those stupid hats to work- nursing has changed a lot, too.) I can dress up if I want, but I don’t have to. I don’t have to go to church. I don’t have to look down on people who aren’t in the same income bracket as me, or who aren’t the same color as me. My kids play with children of all races and backgrounds; there is so much to learn from people of other cultures. (I recently perfected my tortilla-making technique, and I’m almost purely Swedish. :))
The 1950’s might be a nice time for reminiscing. I just wouldn’t want to live there.
Thanks for all of the replie. Is it possible that we are at the end of a fashion cycle? Thay maybe the sweatpants/sneaker/backwards baseball cap thing is dying out? As for the talk about education being better now than in the 50’s-I don’t buy it-my dad attended public highscool, and I still have his HS notebooks-he took LATIN in HS, also geography and advanced mathematics. I seem to recall several well-publicised incidents where college freshpersons? were tested in basic points of geography-after 12 years of the best American education (in the 90’s) many had trouble locating Hong Kong, Australia, Japan, on a blank globe!
Well, maybe the clothes in the 50’s were cooler - certainly dressier - but the hairstyles? No thanks! Most young women today cannot even conceive of only washing their hair once or twice a week, or having a standing appointment at a beauty parlor to get their hair washed and set. And the undergarments? Anyone who complains that pantyhose are uncomfortable has obviously never worn a girdle! Or a long-line bra - do they even still make those?
Not to mention that in the 50’s there were no soft contact lenses, no MRI’s or CAT scans, no birth control pills, no (fill in one thing that has made your life easier or saved the life of a loved one - it won’t take you long to think of something!)
“The analyst went barking up the wrong tree, of course. I never should have mentioned unicorns to a Freudian.” – Dottie (“Jumpers” by Tom Stoppard)
I would have tooken latin if it was offered at my school. The reason they don’t offer it is because it’s a dead language. No one uses it, and it’s pretty much useless(except for chopping up words and deriving their meanings).
What kind of mathematics?
Most high schools in my area offer Algebra, Geometry, Algebra 2, Trigonometry/precalculus, Ap Calculus AB(1) AP Calculus BC(2), and AP statistics.
Geography? Seriously, how useful is that? I know where the major countries of the world are. I’m not gonna care what the name of every little island in the phillipines are.
Concerning the college freshmen test; Most collegians do not take geography, but rather they take the hardcore sciences: Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
Well, now, Bored, you’re changing subjects. First you complained that it is more difficult, today. Now you dismiss the work that was done “then” as being irrelevant. If it were irrelevant, it would not make it easier to do. The amount and difficulty of the work for most high school kids has probably not changed that much and you’re going to have to come up with much better arguments to convince us otherwise.
As to your dismissal of Latin and Geography, you have simply displayed for the whole world to see that you may be a competent budding techno-geek, but you have no understanding of anything outside your little mathematical world.
Latin is dead and is (possibly) less useful now than forty years ago. However, mastery of Latin prepares one to take on a large number of other languages; not just the obvious Romance languages, but all of the different Indo-European languages in that learning to think “outside the Englisgh box” prepares one to more readily understand how languages are put together.
A knowledge of Latin also allows one to read a huge amount of History, Philosophy, Theology, and the earliest treatises in that upstart body of knowledge we call “Science.” It does not help the tunnel-visioned “find the next fact without understanding the context” geek, but the people who have the wit and breadth of vision to actually create the new ideas can learn much from it.
Geography was never “learning the capitals of countries.” Geography provided an understanding of who owned (or at least controlled) which resources that we would fight over in the next war and the obstacles to extracting and shipping those resources or defending those resources from assault. It provided the knowledge of which ethnic and religious groups lived in adjacent regions or were intermixed in areas where they might decide to fight. For people who feel that a citizen of the world should have a knowledge of the world, this was useful stuff. For people whose only goal is their next grade or paystub, it is probably less meaningful.
All personnel are hereby prohibited from showing up to work in clothing that is unsuitable to doing physical labor in (non-durable dry clean only fabrics, for instance), or from wearing garments obviously derived from sadomasochistic culture (neck ties, pantyhose, high heels, etc).
Please observe the following guidelines:
Pants or skirts and tops shall be of durable cotton or linen blend, with comfortably placed pockets and with garment design such as to reduce as much as possible unnecessary pulling and limitations of range of motion. A comfortable worker is a productive worker.
Shoes shall be lightweight and flat with adequate arch support, shall be securely affixed to the foot, and shall provide adequate ventilation.
Unnecessary clothing accessories that bind or reduce freedom of movement or require ongoing attention to maintain are actively discouraged.
Within these parameters, please feel free to select clothing you find suitable to yourself on a daily basis.
I wasn’t complaining. If you read my original argument I was basically calling the 50’s people stupid(with reference to their Science and mathmatical skill), and because of the increased difficulty of today’s High schools we are not(Ok, we are, but not to that extent.)
However, you are correct in a sense. I should have made myself clearer.
That was an uncalled for Insult. Intelligent, but in a 3rd graderish sort of way.
FYI I hate math.
Any langauge will do that, INCLUDING ENGLISH. English is composed distantly, from all the romance langauges. Anyway, Latin was basically ditched in favor of the romance languages for their practical use. I however, would still like to take Latin, but unfortunitly I can’t get a class.
English is the one langauge that totally defies language organization.
And once again all langauages will do that.(fyi, at least in my district foriegn language is required for graduation)
Oh, and i’m sure you couldn’t find translations.(this excludes of course poetry which may use the langauge’s form for expresion.)
What boosts the IQ higher? Geography or applied mathmatics? Applied mathmatics isn’t something you can pick up from the general society.
I don’t give a damn about my grades. I care about what I learn. Usually they go hand in hand, but not this semester…
