For a tragedy-less college student, there is nothing worse than utterly failing an exam. Having to hear some know-it-all’s advice on how not to do that again sucks as well. One always hopes to learn deep lessons from one’s mistakes. Oddly, the more mature a brain is, the quicker it learns not to ever do that again.
Which is all to say I know from experience (read: I’m a pain-in-the-ass, know-it-all b**ch) that undergrads have to see their exam-failing lives pass before their eyes a few times before they figure out how to never have a day like that again.
WorldWideLearn’s blog has an advice-filled post up about how not to torpedo yourself with one badly executed exam moment. Taking advice, learning one’s Social Security Number, and mastering the art of acquiring free beer, food, and furniture are some of the key bits of priceless information college students are expected to take away from their higher educations.
Studying for the California Bar exam? Have an extra $1000 burning a hole in your freshly-law-degreed butt-pocket? Then by all means check out BarMax: California Edition. One of the only iPhone apps to cost that much money, its creator, Mike Ghaffary, a JD/MBA ‘06 Harvard grad, says it has everything one might require to study up for the bar.
Ghaffary has an MBA and as of December 2009, is a member of the California Bar; so he’s got that whole I’m business savvy and I studied for and conquered the bar exam thing going for him.
As with all things iPhone, it’s portable and weighs a lot less than the fifty pounds of books you’d be buying and dragging around town if you were to go the dead-tree route. So handy! Also, if you contact BarMax, they’ll send you a free trial version so you can evaluate the materials before forking over a decade’s worth of ramen money.
BarMax: California Edition, available now in the iPhone’s App Store for $999.99, is a study guide for the California Bar Exam. Harvard lawyers oversaw development of the app, which weighs in at 1 GB and includes outlines, lectures, a study calendar, and real questions and essays from previous exams. The only comparable app available now is from BarBri, but you must be enrolled in the company’s $3000 to $4000 classes to use most of the features.
TechCrunch reports that Mike Ghaffary, a former law student and current director of business development at TrialPay, envisioned BarMax as an alternative to BarBri’s pricey classes and digital offerings. Ghaffary partnered with successful app developers in Los Angeles, and enlisted some fellow Harvard Law alumni to guide development. More…
In case you missed it the first time, CourseSmart’s eTextbooks App for the iPhone is working the tablet-device angle for the gadget-licking college students. Their backs will have fewer problems (less textbook carrying) but they’ll all have freakish thumb issues down the line (there is no need to punish the buttons! And slow down!).
Here’s a quick video showcasing the college student experience with eTextbooks on tablet devices. It’s cool. (If you’re into that sort of thing.)
There are days when one must finally succumb to reality and admit that despite the intense need and desire to beat the To Do List into submission, the day that was once full of productivity possibility is FUBAR to the fullest extent of that term and Plan B is the only viable option.
Below please find Plan B (what I do when everything goes all to hell). It’s a re-post. Not good at reading between the lines? Please see FUBAR above and apply it to my day.
Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.
This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.
My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.
A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.
I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.
I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.
My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.
I can’t make a single intelligent point of commentary about Obama’s speech to the school kids without the risk of writing reams of unprofessional lines regarding the hysterical fishwife portion of the GOP. Until the Republicans went off their nut, I had not been aware that Socialist bastards are in the habit of telling kids that the adults in their lives can only take them so far and much of the responsibility for getting stuff done in life falls on a person’s own shoulders. I tell my kids that stuff all the time! Son of a—does that make me a Socialist Bastard Mommy?! Crap.
Please read for yourself the Socialist Evil that’s apparently afoot in the White House:
But at the end of the day, we can have the most dedicated teachers, the most supportive parents, and the best schools in the world – and none of it will matter unless all of you fulfill your responsibilities. Unless you show up to those schools; pay attention to those teachers; listen to your parents, grandparents and other adults; and put in the hard work it takes to succeed.
And that’s what I want to focus on today: the responsibility each of you has for your education. I want to start with the responsibility you have to yourself.
Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has something to offer. And you have a responsibility to yourself to discover what that is. That’s the opportunity an education can provide. More…
I’m so relieved that the Seattle Public Schools didn’t start the school year until today (Wednesday), and my daughter therefore missed hearing the President tell her that she is ultimately the person responsible for her life. Dodged that bullet. I’ll be certain to immediately cease and desist with all speeches directed toward my offspring in which I give them the same message.
Starting today, I will take full responsibility for my kids’ education and every other aspect of their lives. I will do their homework, I will take their SATs, I will get them into a top tier college, I will choose their classes, I will interview all potential mates, and I will do all interning, interviewing, and career-goaling.
They are certain to be happier and much more well-adjusted and content if all responsibilities are lifted from their shoulders. And as an added bonus, I get to be the one in charge of the progeny in our house, which is probably what the GOP had in mind all along…
After saving for 18 years, my parents had my college money saved up and ready to mete out for strictly education items only. And still, the first semester’s worth of tuition, dorm costs, and meal cards were a bit of a punch in the abdominal region for all three of us. Oof.
And then came the necessary accoutrements: computer, extra long sheets, phone, textbooks, school supplies, etc. That shopping expedition, which was the absolute bare-bones minimum, I assure you, gave us vomitous feelings. My entire childhood had been strictly budgeted just so my college education would be covered. None of us were used to just laying down thousands of dollars for anything that didn’t fall into the Life or Death category.
It’s easy to fall prey to the Everyone else has a pink furry lamp so I have to have one too! mantra, but try to avoid it.
Loft Bed: It Depends
If you’ve managed to keep the buying under control, then, no, you won’t need a gigantic wooden behemoth that you’ll have to disassemble and try to get rid of nine months from now.
If you brought along enough extra furniture and plastic crap to fill an apartment and are shocked to discover you will be calling upon your Tetris skills to cram it all into half of a tiny square room, then yes, you will be needing a loft bed. Since everyone regrets investing in a loft bed within a few months of buying and building one, you can probably find one cheap on Craigslist.
Dorm-Room Phone: No
Everyone under the age of sixty has a cell phone, so paying for a land line in your room is dumb. It’s also risky if your dorm has big loud parties with all doors open along the hall. There’s always some guy or girl who misses their ex (who is spending the year abroad in outer Mongolia), and feels it is absolutely imperative that they drunk-dial said ex, beg to get back together, and then pass out with the phone off the hook while outer-Mongolia ex is ranting and raving about what a jack-ass the drunk half of the ended relationship is. You will be paying for this
Desk Lamp: Yes
If a lamp doesn’t come standard with the room, get one. Otherwise you’ll be studying by fluorescent ceiling lighting, which will hum and flicker and will foster violent tendencies around two a.m.
Laptop: Yes
This does not require explaining.
Printer: No
It’ll take up too much space, and the ink cartridges suck to replace, and they will always run out ten minutes before a paper is due. Learn to use and love the campus computer labs and the people who work there (use the lab, love the people). You can print stuff out there, and if anything goes haywire (and it will), the Gods of the Computer Lab will be able to help you. This will not be the case if you are crying about a term-paper meltdown in your dorm room.
Linens: Yes
A towel (two if your school is near a beachy area), a washcloth, comforter, and one set of sheets. Make sure the sheets are the right size. For some reason, even though only a non-majority percentage of students at any given college are over six feet tall, they make all dorm beds extra long. Which means that for probably only one year, all American college freshmen have to buy (and then never ever use again) extra long twin bed sheets. Asinine.
Dorm Fridge: Maybe
Only if you or your roommate either can’t share or have a difficult time reading labels or remembering which shelf belongs to whom.
Microwave: No
99% of the other dormies will have one, and if you’re wanting to “cook” anything stinky and offensive, most dorms have a kitchen. Even the lamest and grungiest versions will come equipped with a microwave.
Shower Shoes: Yes
Because dorm hook-ups are way less hot when all involved parties have foot fungus.
Bucket-Thingy to Carry Bathroom Paraphernalia: Yes
It will cost you less than five bucks, and if you don’t bring one, I can guarantee that (a) your room will be the farthest one away from the bathroom, and (b) you will drop your towel in front of a hallway full of people while trying desperately to juggle slippery bottles of shampoo, wet toothbrushes, squishy toothpaste tubes and sharp razors. I don’t care how hot you are, it’s still hard to be sexy while standing there naked, wondering whether squatting or bending over to retrieve the towel and the bathroom items is your best bet.
Running Shoes: Yes
Even if you’d rather walk, forward motion at any speed is the cheapest and best way to get away from your fellow dorm residents for a while and have some time to think and release some stress.
I come from a family of intense readers and researchers who are constantly looking crap up in books. They love and worship the printed word and have a difficult time fathoming why anyone would want to part with a book. When my grandfather retired and was breaking down his lab, he parked in a clearly marked No Parking zone (he lived by his own set of rules), stole a lab cart labeled in large letters with the angry phrasing: Lab Use Only! Do Not Remove!
He took me to his office, commanded me to climb up on his desk and read out to him the titles of every one of his reference texts. Some he had had since the 1930s, when he was a student, and some he had acquired over years of teaching and research. He’d kept everything he deemed useful and “not full of sh*t.” He left the less than brilliant volumes for other researchers, and gifted me with a few dozen gorgeous reference texts and old textbooks. I still have them, and they have their own beautiful book shelf (I do not allow them to mingle with novels, no matter how high the literature content).
I have an abundance of higher education under my belt, and the stacks of textbooks to go along with all that learning. If I kept every book, we’d all be killed under piles of books the next time Seattle has an earthquake. I’m perhaps a little more reasonable than my family, and can be fairly harsh when weeding out unnecessary objects from my home. Any book I have never opened as a reference past the term I read it as a required text gets donated to the nearest college or university.
I bought all new textbooks as a freshman because it was all so new and I felt that every moment had to be crisp and perfect in the fall light. After the first year of school, I only bought new books if they were fully related to my major, and I was certain I would be using them as references later on down the line. Everything else I bought used and then sold back or donated. You don’t need new textbooks unless you plan on keeping them as part of your permanent library.
If it will help you to decide, you can stand there in the bookstore and hold the pile of this term’s books straight out in front of you. It will weigh a lot and it will start to hurt pretty quickly. Think about how many times you will move between the ages of eighteen, when you’re a freshman, and thirty, when you’re ready to buy a house and settle down. Between my freshman year and when I moved into my current house at the age of 26, I moved 14 times. Only rocks and weights are heavier than books, people.
If a required book is something you feel sure you won’t ever need to crack again once this term is over, then you might want to consider renting your books or going with the digital textbook wave of the future.
Last week’s post got me thinking about the kid/achievement/parent dynamic. I may have mentioned, once or twice, my absolute fury toward and lack of goodwill for parents who place volumes of pressure the size of planets onto their kids’ shoulders and tell them repeatedly that only the achievements which can be recorded on paper are worthwhile, and that being anything but the top 5% is as good as failing utterly. I escaped having a mother and a father who put that kind of pressure to out-perform my peers on me, but I did have a few grandparents who made sure I was aware that success was all they were interested in.
As an older and wiser thirty-five-year-old, I’ve had some time to ponder the raising I had, and to figure out which bits made me a better person, and which bits made me wish I’d come from an uneducated, low-pressure family that would have been ecstatic if I’d achieved a high school education and a lifetime of honest work days.
Also, now I’m a parent, and since it’s really better to figure out what your parenting philosophy is prior to raising one’s offspring, I’ve been doing some research. You have a little leeway to screw up, because there’s some time to patch it up later. Plus, it’s difficult to impart much wisdom to a tiny person who crawls everywhere, can’t hold up their end of a conversation, and keeps shoving everything smaller than a tennis ball into their mouth. Keep in mind, though, that the more you mess up when they’re little, the more you’ll be scraping off and re-plastering when they’re older, more angry, and a lot less convincible.
Parents reading this should pay attention, and any kids reading this should make their asinine parentals (whether borderline or solidly inside the dumbass box) read it all the way through. Watch them to be sure they’ve really absorbed it.
As I mentioned in the previous post, I was so ready to escape small-town life and be my own person at college, I practically ran across the graduation stage. Sadly, I was excited for college because not only would I be free, I had also convinced myself that college would be similar to high school in that I would be able to skate by on my (slightly) above-average intelligence and my ability to charm every adult in the room. Studying was never something I had had to do very much of, and since I test well (college teaches you your social security number, and public school teaches you how to kick ass on standardized tests), I figured I’d do just as well in college as I had done for the past thirteen years.
It was not to be. Which sucked while it was happening to me, but is really effing funny to look back on and watch cocky little good-grades, non-student me get taken down a notch or three. Academic probation is a painful life lesson to report to your parents over the winter holidays. Even more painful is your very own parents nodding their heads and telling you, their supposed wonder child, that they had known the first semester would end like this. And down I went, five more notches. Ouch.
To be fair, my parents have really good bull**it detectors, and they probably knew the whole time (my entire pre-college career) that I was getting lots of praise for just being me: a slightly charming, well-read kid with a good vocabulary who tests well. Which is to say that my parents knew good and GD well that I was riding my little wave of glory without doing much to actually earn all that praise. They weren’t even all that impressed with my pile of swim team medals and ribbons until I actually started working my ass off trying to be a better swimmer than I’d started out (which I did for me, not for anyone else, and that also made them proud).
When I grew up a smidge and was able to get a little distance on high school and those early college years, it became clear that my parental units were not the types to slobber all over themselves with praise for anything that I hadn’t actually worked hard at achieving. They didn’t even seem to be impressed by place, names, numbers, or ranking; all it ever took was their witnessing of my literal or figurative sweat, and I’d get the look and the hug and the “You did good, kid.”
And that, people, is good and decent parenting. Loving your kids unconditionally for who they are, not for their scores and grades; seeing through their bull**it; and praising them not for their high placement or numbers, but for the work they did to get from point A to point B; and, most importantly, being content and satisfied with them when they are happy, not when they’re doing triple back-jumps through hoops on no sleep because they’re killing themselves to achieve awesomely high paper numbers so they can be ranked in the top 5% of some ridiculous and cruelly scored game of life.
Here comes the I’m a parent so I know of what I speak and I practice what I preach so listen up pal part: My daughter is seven, and is currently into gymnastics. At the end of the ten-week term, they have a Show Day and the parents come and watch the kids perform the skills they’ve learned, and at the end the kids all receive an identical pretend gold medal (which 99% of the kids believe is real gold).
After all of the parental applauding, my kid ran up to me, eyes shining with fake-gold-medal joy, hugged me violently and said, “Mommy! Aren’t you so proud of me for getting a medal?!” I said, “Nope.” I told her I was super happy for her that she had a medal because it was obvious that having something that cool and shiny was making her euphoric, but that I was proud of her because she had shown up to every class, had always tried her hardest, had worked to get better at her gymnastics skills, and had tried new things, even the stuff that scared the crap out of her.
I could see the little wheels turning in her head, trying to work out what her weird Mom meant. On the one hand it makes things easier on her: all she has to do is try and actually work at stuff. On the other hand, it makes things tougher on her: she’ll actually have to work because I, like my own parents, have a magnificent BS detector, and will know it when she’s riding the wave of charm and innate abilities.
Not everyone heads off to a four-year higher learning institution right after high school. Some people forgo the awesomeness of freshman year in the dorms so they can save thousands of dollars learning how to become a stellar college student amid the relative safety of a community college before launching themselves full-bore into the larger and less safety-netted world of the four-year college or university.
I was dead-set on escaping my tiny hometown as soon as I turned in my rented cap and gown and was handed my official high school diploma. (They gave us blank rolled-up sheets of paper at the ceremony, and threatened us, on pain of death and of not ever officially graduating, if we failed to return our dorky graduation get-ups. Did they seriously believe that we would steal something so polyester and hideous?) I thought I would explode with anticipation for my higher education adventure, and had to talk myself into enjoying my last, fully free summer vacation, because all I wanted to do was dive head first into college life.
I had done pretty well in high school, considering I only bothered to carry my books home when I had a homework assignment that would take me longer then the five minutes before class the day it was due. I managed to get into a good school, and figured I was golden from there on out. This plan did not work out. I was shocked to discover, after receiving a ‘B’, a ‘C’, a ‘D’ and an ‘F’ for my first semester’s “efforts,” that there was an outside chance I was going to have to crack a book and study in college. Crap.
It sucked, it was humbling and painful, and it was horrifically expensive. My parents made just enough to not qualify for any help with my tuition costs, but not nearly enough to pay for my education outright. They had been saving since I was an infant, and I can’t tell you how shi**y it feels to tell your good, kind, hard-working parents that their dumbass kid just wasted several thousand of their hard-earned dollars trying to avoid the inevitable learning process that is a college education.
It would have been so much easier on everyone’s heads, hearts and savings accounts if I had skipped the dorm experience and had instead gone to a community college for a year or two. I would have had smaller classes, less of that dehumanizing I’m-a-number feeling, more attention from instructors, and a slew of accessible staff and tutors who would have liked nothing more than to help me help myself.
For any high school students out there who would prefer to get really great at being a college student before hitting the four-year campus of their matriculation dreams, then please consider spending a year or two at a solid, accredited community college, and transferring to what will then be a more easily conquerable four-year college or university.
So much excitement about the iPhone! CourseSmart just announced the release of its free eTextbooks application on the App Store. The eTextbooks App allows student and instructor subscribers to access their CourseSmart eTextbooks whenever and wherever they want.
“We’ve seen significant demand from student customers for the ability to get required textbook content in electronic form on an iPhone or iPod touch,” said Frank Lyman, executive vice president of CourseSmart. “It’s important to students to be able to access textbook content in color with the same page layout as a printed textbook and now the eTextbooks App allows them to do that.”
According to the press release, the iPhone App:
Provides any time, anywhere access to the eTextbooks students have purchased online at www.coursesmart.com[link].
–Enables students to easily browse, search, and read thousands of textbooks from their iPhone or iPod touch.
–Preserves the carefully laid out pages giving students quick and easy access to not only the full text but essential content such as diagrams, illustrations and charts.
–Allows students to “stack” all of their textbooks in the “My eTextbooks” personal, online library.
–Students can search for a topic within a single book or across their entire eTextbook stack, view text notes, access the table of contents, zoom in on text, graphs, and scroll through or jump to individual pages.
