Policies: High school vs College

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Th and you miss Tuesday and show up Thursday, which happens to be a test day, you are definitely taking the test. Your professor is not giving you "3 days" to make it up.

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And then you learn to make friends in class so someone can give you a heads up that there's a test on Thursday

Or check your email because almost every teacher will send out emails telling you that a test is coming

I think it is less policies that need to change, and the issue is more the teaching.

I taught a section of financial math last year, along with 5 sections of pre calc. I told my financial math class that this was the one math class that they could never say stuff like "I'll never use this in real life", because the stuff from that class would be used almost daily.

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What are some policies that your high school had, that in hindsight, you wish were different so you were better prepared for college and had more realistic expectations?

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My high school had a policy of having plenty of teachers not worth a shite.

Honestly we should repeal truancy laws. All it does is artificially inflate graduation statistics for students who don't want to be there taught by teachers who care even less.

Think of all the money to be saved by reducing all the overhead caused by soon to be truant students.

If a student doesn't want to be there they shouldn't be forced. The taxpayers win .

When my students bitch or whine about being in school, I ask them what would they be doing with their time if their parents let them drop out?

Most say "sleep in"

I'm like WTF?!?!

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When my students bitch or whine about being in school, I ask them what would they be doing with their time if their parents let them drop out?

Most say "sleep in"

I'm like WTF?!?!

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They sound like the perfect experiment for Darwinism. Let the truants stay home. Split up the class into 2 groups, those who come to school, and those who sleep in. Track the results of who goes to college and who gets on welfare. Present the findings to each class thereafter and see how their responses evolve.

One way to address the book conundrum would be to let the previous years students sell their books to next semester's students for at value costs. That way they aren't getting extorted by the book store every semester. It's also a great way to carry forward an investment in books if you don't want to keep them.

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"I'll never use this in real life


I feel this comment would disappear in all math classes if concepts were better applied.

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This. In high school, and many times in college, math was purely done for the sake of math. It was viewed as an abstract concept unto itself, thus students treated it as something irrelevant.

In engineering, at some point, the math becomes applied, showing why you were learning it in the first place. This makes it much more interesting and relevent because rather than being a purely abstract theory, it's not a skill that can be applied in believable circumstances.

We need more teaching of math from this perspective. I can't tell you how many times I've used what I learned in freshman year high school algebra, but I had no idea if I would ever use it when I was taking it.