Those good-bad study habits
This NY Times article discusses some research on good study habits that indicates that several of the time-honored recommendations don’t hold water. Apparently it’s better to switch venues rather than stick to one tried-and-true setting, and to vary subject matter rather than focus on a single skill at a time.
I’m not surprised. I was an excellent student in my day, but I was a poster child for bad study habits.
I was a nightowl and procrastinator. I abhorred silence, needing a radio or TV for company, and sometimes even a friend on the phone. My desk was just a storage bin for paper; I did my real work sprawled on bed or floor. I took frequent restless breaks for food and drink. And I was a notorious last-minute crammer for exams.
The latter was my particular specialty in college, via the mechanism of the all-nighter or even the multiple sequential all-nighter (not recommended). With a laser concentration enhanced by the knowledge that it was the last possible opportunity, I would absorb the material in one big gulp, the better to spit it out the next day.
As for exams, as soon as the bluebook was on the desk before me and my poised pen was energized by the word “begin,” I entered a zone of focused intensity. Time seemed to both stop and move at lightning speed as I became an automaton, watching my pen write words that seemed to flow without any special will on my part. Almost before I knew it, the exam would be over.
A week or two later I’d received my bluebook back, with the addition of professorial commentary and a grade. I’d read what I had written with interest, as though seeing it for the first time.
Not bad, I’d think. Not half-bad. But who was it who’d written it?
My son and i don’t study, never did… we LIVE…
Knowing life is a part of living, not a project to be finished and not taken up again…
Only the immortal have that convenience…
My Harvard Rhodes scholar Assistant Prof. of English observed, several weeks into my freshman college year, that I wrote pretty well but seldom had anything substantive to say in my weekly essays. So one Friday night by 9pm I had completed my usual, on Chaucer, which would yield the usual B. I then thought of his critique, pulled my only-ever allnighter in what turned out to be my discovery of the Wandering Jew theme. Wrote and typed the paper, staggered to breakfast, returned and reread it. It was awful, run-ons, sentence fragments, loose connections, but too late…went to the tutorial, read it best I could. Stony silence. Got an F.
Went back to my old ways, got Bs.
Your bluebook description sounds strikingly familiar to my own efforts in college. It wasn’t really the best manner for longterm retention, but it certainly was effective for me in “Required” areas of study. It would be as if someone opened the tap to my recent cramming vault, and it would all come pouring out. Later, I would be surprised by some of what I had written, and I was mostly a straight-A student. Not that I would recommend the process to others.
I was a last minute crammer also…only in science, math, and engineering.
One of my favorite sayings was and still is: “I work better under pressure.”
I don’t know how anyone can go through physics by the cramming method. It just plain doesn’t work; especially at the upper levels. My junior level Electrodynamic Theory course is the case in point. There’s just too much highly complex material, both physics and math, to absorb in a single night, or even two or three before an exam.
I tell the students this, but every year one doesn’t believe me until they receive their 30/100 grade. When they show up in my office they always claim, “But I studied so hard for two days!” I then ask, “And how much did you do in the three weeks prior to that?” That’s when it sinks in
physicsguy: I certainly never took physics at the college level. And the cramming method was very ineffective for math and languages (that’s why those subjects were/are often the topics of my student anxiety dreams). But for many other subjects the technique was rather effective.
Hehehe…. There is a benefit to being an omnivorous reader from a collector family… a lot of the stuff they’re “debunking” is from prior waves of education fads. (The notion that there’s a “style” of teaching that makes for good teachers is especially amusing, since my three best teachers had totally different styles, and the three worst teachers had styles that traced the best…..)
Never belived that such thing as best method to learn actually existed. Different people obviously have different psychological make up, so should use different ways of learning. The most prominent feature is type of memory: what is easy to memorize, and what is not. Some can remember a page of textbook up to the text layout and typos, other – only the main idea. Some can grasp all important things the fist time they hear them, other need many repeats.
I never was (and still am not) a good student at all. If it is busy work I tend to just ignore it or do such a poor job of it that I fail. Since a great deal of school work is that (ostensibly to bump grades up) I think I I had a 2.51 for my undergrad work and I never fully went back for graduate work – long story.
However on projects and tests I rarely made anything other than perfects in the hard sciences – I was perfect on my science ACT, one off on my math, and effectively flunked my verbal (I’m dyslexic so reading/writing is tough for me).
In my professional life I did well enough to get a research position at Oak Ridge National Labs as an undergrad at East Tennessee State University (and anyone in research should know how tough that is to do) and my publication tract over those 5 years there (now five years away) is better than most 10 year tenured professors – I can still pretty much go into any graduate program I want too, well assuming I wanted too (I did not like academics). I’m now senior management for most projects and spend my technical time on “hard problems”.
For the science/math classes I never studied, never went to class, and floated trough everything but Formal Languages and Computability – but that was a second year grad course I took as a junior. Indeed, for our senior/grad level combo course computer architecture class I did the grad level work, went to the first day of class, the midterm, did most of the at home projects, and answered one question on the final. That ensure me a 91. Out of 32 classes I went to three.
For the English, History, and similar classes they all required memorizing things and I can’t do it – I can recall all sorts of things like dates and events, but I can’t match the two up. Without spell checkers my writing looks like a five year old wrote it (and do not get me started on my handwriting). FOr the most part I’m strong enough dyslexic that I do quite well at it, but that still means it is mostly failing. As such they were repeated ad nauseum until I finally lucked up on a D (minimum passing).
Absolutely right. Chemistry is exactly the same. It’s madness even to try cramming. Both subjects place a premium on working steadily because the subject matter compounds quickly, so that someone who doesn’t work in week N will be totally lost in week N+1, which presupposes mastery of week N material.
Funny you should mention a three week lead time, because three weeks before exams I’d advise students that, if they hadn’t kept up, it was time to panic. If they left it any later, they might as well relax and accept the inevitable train wreck.
For the humanities, I found that intuiting what the exam questions would be, choosing my topic for papers early, and acquiring the books and other materials early on was itself a major leg up. After that the books mostly sat on my desk until late in the course and just before the exam, when I would cram and do well. You learn just enough merely finding the sources to have cuphooks to attach the cups to as the teacher lectures and people discuss things.
In physics and math, the repetition is necessary, however. Sometimes you do not fully understand something even as you are grinding out the answers and getting good homework grades. I relied too long on my “hey, I’m a brilliant guy” – well, sort of – “I can wrap this up at the end.” Case in point: Honors Physics midterm had an average grade of 26. 23 was passing. I got an 18, and got the message. The test was designed to be out of range, but to measure whether we had any clue how to even start solving the problem, and what we might try. I barely caught up by the end of the course.
My wife, a librarian, was a dutiful and excellent student, keeping up as each course progressed. We resolved to teach our children both methods, figuring the more arrows in the quiver the better. Mixed success with that, but I generally recommend it.
I’m not convinced that there is a best way to study. I’m not an all-nighter kind of gal – my one experience strikingly resembled Tom’s…NoDoze made me sick and I staggered to a vertebrate zoology exam with muddled thoughts that yielded a grade of D.
I went on to get my DVM: I went to bed every night at 9:30, finals week or not:)!
I once had a student slump to the floor – out cold – during a final exam. Had to call the paramedics, ambulance, flashing lights, stretcher, the works, because I couldn’t revive him and he looked like he might check out. The paramedics (judging by their demeanor, and their haste in hustling him to the ambulance) apparently agreed. (He was kept in hospital for a couple days, and nicely enough, later dropped by to say thanks.)
Turns out a couple of days of No-Doze isn’t such a good idea.
Occam’s Beard Says:
PhysicsGuy said: I don’t know how anyone can go through physics by the cramming method. It just plain doesn’t work; especially at the upper levels. My junior level Electrodynamic Theory course is the case in point. There’s just too much highly complex material, both physics and math, to absorb in a single night, or even two or three before an exam.
Absolutely right. Chemistry is exactly the same. It’s madness even to try cramming. Both subjects place a premium on working steadily because the subject matter compounds quickly, so that someone who doesn’t work in week N will be totally lost in week N+1, which presupposes mastery of week N material.
Funny you should mention a three week lead time, because three weeks before exams I’d advise students that, if they hadn’t kept up, it was time to panic. If they left it any later, they might as well relax and accept the inevitable train wreck.
Guess it’s different strokes for different folks. I’m not saying I never studied technical subjects between exams…but I put off really focusing on them until just before exams. Until then, my knowledge was VERY superficial.
Seemed to work for me…I made A’s and B’s in Quantitative Analysis, Electromagnetic and Nuclear Physics, and Advanced Calculus at Rice U. my sophomore year. Later graduated with honors in Ch. Eng.
One of my classmates was so danged smart, he hardly studied anything at ALL. He learned the basic 2 or 3 laws/equations of electromagnetics for a final exam…filled a bluebook with derivations of needed specific formulae in the first few minutes (for him), did the calculations for the exam problems and made a 100% after leaving the 3 hr exam an hour early.
My study habits were just like Neo’s. I guess I paid enough attention in class to get the relevant facts so that when the cramming sessions started, my adrenaline-stimulated creativity took over. I also learned that if you were short on facts, you could meander off in another direction and make connections that impressed the teacher.
Math was another story. I never studied it in high school. It all just came to me. But when I hit college calculus, I didn’t know how to study it. It was a real trauma to get a D on a test, but I had no idea how to improve things. Something similar happened in organic chem. I did fine till we had to put nitrogen on the benzene ring. I just did not know how to study the reactions.
In a matter of days, I am returning to full time school to earn my second bachelor’s degree – the first was granted in 1985, when I was the traditional college age. I will be turning 50 next year – so this experience will be very different.
One thing that I simply cannot abide, and will not tolerate, is earning this degree at the expense of my health. In other words – no all nighters and no excessive stress. I’m curious to see if my ten years of project management and working and writing for attorneys in a high volume, deadline driven environment will translate into my being a very efficient student. I CANNOT, CANNOT stand last minute rushes – didn’t like them in the work environment, and I don’t think I’ll like them better in the academic environment. I like front loading my efforts, getting a good, early start…then coasting at the end while the rest of my co-workers were still tearing their hair out.
We’ll see. My friends that are of my age want me to start a blog so I can report on my view of college the second time around at twice the age of the first time around.
I remember a fellow student who was notorious for cramming and worrying about whether or not she had studied enough. She would approach me before an exam and asked how long I had studied. I am somewhat ashamed to say I always exagerated greatly just to see her wig out. I know, not very nice, but she was such a pain.
That’s how I used to teach, e.g., thermodynamics: by teaching students how to derive all necessary relations from the total differential of free energy — no need to tax the memory at all. Construct the relevant products of intensive with extensive variables, differentiate, impose the appropriate conditions (e.g., constant temperature), simplify, rearrange, integrate, plug in the numbers, grind, and you’re done. The joy of this derivation approach is that it’s easy to extend to figure out cases you’ve never seen before. Once you learn to use this derivation method, most problems in most subjects are actually pretty easy.
You were badly taught. All of the gazillion named reactions fall into one of about a half dozen categories. Understand the mechanisms of those, and the relative electronegativity of atoms/groups, and almost everything else pretty much drops out. Electron-donating substituents on a ring promote attack by electrophilic reagents, and conversely. (Valence shell electrons are like water sloshing around rhymically in a pan; substituents make the pan deeper or shallower at a given position and ones related to it by the sloshing.) Properly taught, it’s pretty easy, actually.
Being more verbal than mathematical, I’m not very good at math, certainly not by physical scientist standards, nor was I interested in it then (I was going to synthesize new compounds, dammit, not calculate ’em!). But the very hardest subject I ever took was anatomy. Absolutely no overarching conceptual framework to learn, as outlined above; just a tedious iron-bottom exercise in memorization. Yuk.
I have an entirely different memory…oral exams, the (at least then) Curse of Caltech. I had them starting in sophomore year with one Linus Pauling in the chair for Chemical Bonds and Quantum Mechanics.
When Linus saw you knew the stuff, he moved on until he found a topic in which you were (shall we say) hesitant. Then he came down like a ton of bricks.
And at least four courses featured finals that were oral…two hours of Chinese Water Torture.
But orals in grad school were a no sweat proposition. I had gone through my Hell earlier in my schooling. And giving reports in industry was a breeze by that time.
And that’s how I got my reputation for glibness….
One of my favorite sayings was and still is: “I work better under pressure.”
never say that in a room of fat people with my uncles sense of humor.
Ah, the traditional style… No point in pursuing a topic the student knows well. (I trust you didn’t deprecate valence bond theory in favor of the ligand field or MO approach? /g)
I got my Ph.D. with a Nobel Laureate (who shall remain nameless) who required annual group seminars in front of about 80 people, who sat ringside while the Nobel Laureate administered extremely thorough and sometimes not excessively polite procto exams to any hapless graduate student/ postdoc/ staff member who brought up a topic he didn’t know thoroughly. Once that happened, the seminar tended to take on the aspect of Mike Tyson vs. PeeWee Herman in a steel cage match, with any subsequent feeble responses just amping up the Nobel Laureate even further. Some of those seminars got pretty brutal.
Moral: prepare thoroughly, anticipate and prepare for likely avenues of questioning, don’t speculate, and don’t let anyone take control of your talk. Having seen a number of these autos de fe , I used to sandbag him with the Br’er Rabbit approach, viz., feigning hesitation on a topic I knew frontwards and backwards, in the expectation that he’d chase me on it and I’d nail him. It was kind of fun matching wits with him, actually.
If I had to choose one piece of advice re studying, it would be that when a subject seems difficult find another textbook. It’s amazing how some textbooks speak to some people but don’t make the slightest bit of sense to others.
I had a recurring dream theme throughout college. The night after an intense cramming session and the completion of the exam, my dream would have me standing at the top of a cliff watching facts, figures and formulas zipping past me and tumbling over the edge. Ha, so much for long term retention!
OB:
Yup…I did a calculation (electron density on a site in an orbital) using MO LCAO. Got the right answer – more or less – but Linus came down like ten tons of bricks.
Parting remark to a shaken senior (me): “Well, Charles, after all you are a YOUNG MAN”…with the appropriate sniff.
I “watched” my partner go through his mechanical engineering degree. By “watched”, I mean that he had staked out the dining area of my small apt. for his study space – and was able to study while I went about my business not far away: cooking, on the phone, TV…
Thus I have a sense of how demanding the sciences can be. Whenever my partner got stuck on a math problem, he’d eventually work on it so long the day had gone by and it was time to take a shower. And almost every time – the answer would come to him in the shower. To this day, if he has a tough decision to make, I say “why don’t you take a shower?”
Thus, I’d like to pass that little tip along: if you have a tough problem, take a shower!
Some people are bright, some are inspired, some work hard and some choose a mate that supports them.
btw, school’s a racket and in no way prepares one for life.
I learned a hundred times more the first year running an IT shop of 30 employees than I ever did in 8 years of studying management and technology.
Studying? Studying people. Studying what works and what doesn’t. Listening, listening, listening. Bringing out the best in people – keeping their egos in check. Taking the opportunity to speak whenever my peers and superiors would allow. Occassionally, when they didn’t want to hear – now that’s hard.
I’d take a hundred chemistry exams before applying myself to the preparation it takes to contradict my boss.
You trotted out an LCAO MO calculation before Linus Pauling?
Yow. That took nerve.
(Apologies to non-cognoscenti: Pauling invented valence bond theory, which was made obsolete by the LCAO-MO approach.)
You should’ve followed up by giving Herb Brown a disquisition on non-classical carbonium ions. /g
Depends on one’s life. It’s not full preparation, but neither is experience, as denizens of Third World countries can attest.
The difference between us and all other animals is our ability to convey information verbally, thereby precluding the necessity of every generation acquiring the same information experientially, but rather building on information already acquired.
OB:
What a coincidence…I was a graduate student of Paul Bartlett during the heyday of non-classical carbonium ions. In fact I did an LCAO calculation of the non-classical ion formed by the famous [2.2.1]bicyclic heptyl carbonium ion. That time I was shot down by – yep – Herb C Brown.
Who drew a cap pistol out of his pocket and “Shot (complete with BANG)” Paul Bartlett and Frank Westheimer.
Now that was a Friday Afternoon Seminar to remember…
Wow, that is a coincidence. That was just the first classical (non-classical?) dispute that came to mind.
I was saddened to learn of Frank’s passing a few years ago. He, like Bright Wilson and Konrad Bloch, was a consummate gentleman. (No slight to Paul Bartlett; I didn’t know him.)
Occams’ Beard:
A cousin took a course from a Nobel laureate. Said he wasn’t a good teacher.
Unless you are drop-dead Cal Tech type brilliant, cramming doesn’t work in STEM courses. For one thing, the mind often needs time to work things out.
I found first semester Thermo tough, so I put it on pass fail. I was getting by with a class average 55= C, so I wasn’t afraid of flunking. Before Thanksgiving break, I asked the prof for some extra problems. I went over them on the break and did a short review with the prof on the approaches to the various problems. Not as far as calculating, just setting them up.
As I knew I had the course passed, I didn’t worry about studying in the two weeks between the last day of class and the final. The day before the final, I looked at the material for 30 minutes. I was 15 minutes late for the exam, my calculator conked out, and I aced the final.
Yeah, lifelong procrastinator and crammer and it has KILLED me until very recently. I could get away with it in High School and the Corps, but it does not cut it for Electrical Engineering stuff. I lost probably six months to repeated classes because it took me so long to figure out how to study math and physics without cramming. If the Summer is any indication, I seem to have finally figured it out, but GOOD LORD was it a long walk!
Incidentally, Dr. Pauling is still REVERED at Oregon State, so it’s a bit breathtaking to hear from folks he put through the ringer. That is a truly EVIL testing method!
Re Pauling: When Watson and Crick were working feverishly to solve the structure of DNA, they heard that Pauling had beat them to the punch. They got a copy (pre-pub, I think) of his solution and were delighted to find that the great chemist had forgotten that DNA is an acid.
I think maybe the secret of doing well in math and science has to do with the thrill of puzzle solving. When you bury this under too many facts or formulas that have to be memorized, the learning stops. But the puzzle solvers seek out the relevant information; they don’t have to have it crammed down their throats so they can regurgitate it on an exam. The problem for scientists is to match their ability to handle abstraction with the type of problem they choose to solve so that the endeavor remains fun.
Now after my morning Mokka (espresso and hot chocolate) I can comment…
OB: You’re right about Westheimer: a great chemist and a true gentleman. I asked him for a thesis project, but after a sales pitch he recommended I work with PDBartlett, another fine gentleman and great chemist.
Wilson was a classical physical chemist and friend/collaborator with Linus. They wrote a very good text on quantum chemistry: still can be read with profit, albeit valence bond theory.
Konrad Bloch gave a few guest lectures in Bartlett’s Physical Organic course. Nice guy and clear lecturing.
Throw in another Great Man, R. B. Woodward, in synthetic organic and you realize that Harvard had a terrific Chemistry Department. And the bench was deep…I learn MO from Bill Lipscomb while there.
Did you ever meet my adviser from undergrad, J. D. (Jack) Roberts. He was the guy who turned me on to theoretical physical organic.
Gringo: I taken courses – for credit – from six (6) Nobelists at Caltech and Harvard. Interestingly they were all good to great to unbelievably great (Feynman) teachers. I always believed the main reason was they knew The Book (past work and research) thoroughly.
ExPat: Yeah, in addition to forgetting stuff he crammed into us (hydration of the main chains: he shudda known because DNA is a bitch to dry), he actually – IIRCC – postulated THREE chains in DNA.
BTW, later on I went on a double date with Jim Watson…we were two guys dating two girls who were roommates at Radcliffe grad school in biology. Jim was a cradle-robber at that point. His friend was a Czech gal with a extraordinarily developed bust line (ahem…don’t hit me, Neo) and I was seeing an Iranian woman who eventually finished with both a PhD and an MD. Later she was put up against the wall – literally – and shot for running a school to train female MDs and RNs in Tehran.
Oh well, back to work in the teaching racket…
I agree very much with Expat, in that its puzzle solving, while most doing it are incremental steppers, not even formulating a puzzle to solve, but attempting to flesh out details in whats already known, as if it was equivalent. they actually are scared of some idea that would solve something!!!!
I am working on an AI extension. the extension expands current GA concepts into a self organization/morphological paradigm. Its core is abstracting certain biological functions and making sense of their real functions (not just their grainy operations) in synoptic space to fuel the simulations.
my problem?
I am not allowed to produce in this area (or other areas). that is, since i was prevented from scaling the educational tower for aesthetic gender/multi cultural reasons/equality of outcome… I am only a information scientist with 28 years experience, and no ability to present my work anywhere.
[so i tend to work things out, sacrifice my life, persevere, then sit there watching someone else figure it out a few years later]
I generally get three forms of help, which generally amount to no help, and wasting my time.
1) the person who loves the concept of creating something and so do not want to look at what is in the pot that is solved and can be done, instead they impose the desire i solve some problem they like (and they dont want to hear no, physics, chemistry, cost problems).
2)the wealthy person that through a logn ardous slog figures out that he is not an entry level ground up investor type, but only really invests in later developed things. so they discover what they are, i end up being put off for a long time with a false carrot overhead.
3) academics and others who challenge you for answers. the problem is that after a while you realize that what they are doing is what they did to you when you were a child. give you problems that they think are not solvable, but are close enough to the issues so that they seem productive. they don’t really expect you to come back with a answer or solution. when you do, they act like the dog who chases cars, but never worked out what to do with one if they caught one.
I can generate large scale power from waste heat of power plants… [but its large scale, so its not accessible to me]
i have new tools to study convective flow
new mathematical models and software code
tons of photographic art… drawings…
been producing copiously all my life…
self taught, as there is no way to learn at the rate i do and be in classes… autodidact
and a lot of the commentary here doesnt apply… since we are the ones who know the material way before we even enter the class, and the class is generally a formality to get a stamp or seal that others will then agree signifies knowlege.
funny thing is that autodidacts are ignored in any discourse today. especially in things like innovation, where the idea is to guide (or NUDGE) the innovations to happen withing approved channels (like russia or germany).
independent acquisition of capital by a white male for disruptive technology is really a no no.
How Diversity Punishes Asians, Poor Whites and Lots of Others
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html
Asians, unlike blacks and Hispanics, receive no boost in admissions. Indeed, the opposite is often the case, as the quota-like mentality that leads college administrators to conclude they may have “too many” Asians. Despite the much lower number of Asians in the general high-school population, high-achieving Asian students — those, for instance, with SAT scores in the high 700s — are much more numerous than comparably high-achieving blacks and Hispanics, often by a factor of ten or more. Thinking as they do in racial balancing and racial quota terms, college admissions officers at the most competitive institutions almost always set the bar for admitting Asians far above that for Hispanics and even farther above that for admitting blacks.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Consistent with other studies, though in much greater detail, Espenshade and Radford show the substantial admissions boost, particularly at the private colleges in their study, which Hispanic students get over whites, and the enormous advantage over whites given to blacks. They also show how Asians must do substantially better than whites in order to reap the same probabilities of acceptance to these same highly competitive private colleges. On an “other things equal basis,” where adjustments are made for a variety of background factors, being Hispanic conferred an admissions boost over being white (for those who applied in 1997) equivalent to 130 SAT points (out of 1600), while being black rather than white conferred a 310 SAT point advantage. Asians, however, suffered an admissions penalty compared to whites equivalent to 140 SAT points.
The box students checked off on the racial question on their application was thus shown to have an extraordinary effect on a student’s chances of gaining admission to the highly competitive private schools in the NSCE database. To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.
once my family moved from the inner city to the suburbs i went from being a progressive darling example of modern teaching (Because they didnt teach me, and no one would think that poor refugee kids in slums would self teach), and then became a example of white suburban privilege.
Since then, i was not able to get admittance, scholarships, funding, etc…
My sister has many degrees, being female there were a lot of scholarships. you cant make one for boys without making one for women, but you can make one for women without making one for men.
the idea was to equalize and homogenize the hallways. which is why there is 60% female in the halls.
my son also has his degree. how so? his mom has American Indian blood. so he was able to graduate with honors as a diversity plus.
Espenshade and Radford in their survey found the actual situation to be much more troubling. At the private institutions in their study whites from lower-class backgrounds incurred a huge admissions disadvantage not only in comparison to lower-class minority students, but compared to whites from middle-class and upper-middle-class backgrounds as well. The lower-class whites proved to be all-around losers. When equally matched for background factors (including SAT scores and high school GPAs), the better-off whites were more than three times as likely to be accepted as the poorest whites (.28 vs. .08 admissions probability). Having money in the family greatly improved a white applicant’s admissions chances, lack of money greatly reduced it. The opposite class trend was seen among non-whites, where the poorer the applicant the greater the probability of acceptance when all other factors are taken into account. Class-based affirmative action does exist within the three non-white ethno-racial groupings, but among the whites the groups advanced are those with money.
one side of my family was educated and lost everything they had as refugees of hitler and stalin. the other side of my family was smart, but common farm/miners where my grandparents were almost illiterate.
even among the poor we were not liked since both families were janitors, maintenance and superintendents.
I was first born here… i was the first to buy a new car, and to get into a prestigious school (Bronx science) early… was educated in arts sciences and deportment, rhetoric, and all kinds of extra stuff that you get laughed at if you mention.
when i complained that as a child, outside the family, it was hit or miss to get access to stuff… they said, be like we were back home in “the old country”. soviet scientists had no equipment either. they did with pencil and paper. Its your mind and work that counts, not the funding, and machines. you don’t need the money to work, you only need your mind. and so I did…. but it was all wasted… my brains help no one. my work does not please… my ideas sit unused, till someone else does them, then awards and money come there way… you can get the answers on paper, but it’s a endless series of hollow empty victories (to which if you make a claim, your now nuts after the fact).
the school system prior to bronx science gave me passes to keep me out of classes. so while otehr kids toiled for grades, i was doing science experiments in the labs (and that was grade school), writing music and composing in the music room (despite being more 50% deaf, i made first string soloist), or sitting around the library studying.
the agreement was that i had to pass the tests..
they experimented on me all the time…
[which is why i have a deep hate for social engineers who don’t get permission for their life ruining games!]
family was too poor to pay for school. i would travel to Manhattan to hang out in front of the Barnes an noble when the kids sold their textbooks back. i offered them more than the book store for them, which was less than what they would sell them for.
today, i am old, broken… salary stagnant… no money to change it.. a great marraige, good family which is almost all gone…
and a file cabinet of science work and designs, piles of images, paintings and drawings… all destined for the trash.
they fall all over you if your a woman or a minority, but if your like me… they want you to just go away.
Too Few Women In Tech? Stop Blaming The Men.
Instead I’m going to tell it like it is. And what it is is this: statistically speaking women have a huge advantage as entrepreneurs, because the press is dying to write about them, and venture capitalists are dying to fund them. Just so no one will point the accusing finger of discrimination at them.
8A program means I can’t get capital
My family pinned their hopes on me to succeed and fund things, like i helped with my sis (by moving out early so that they would have money for her).
I pretty much wasted my life….
History is not even my best subject
Puzzles, physics and math, with Art is what I am best at
All a waste…
Because progressives each nudged my life
And never had the decency to tell me
[So yes, all my life people have told me if I was someone else, it would be ok]
So I wasted it in futility till it’s now pretty hopeless.
Wish I could put up some work so it can be judged, not prejudged.
Charlie,
I haven’t read Pauling and Wilson, because of the valence bond treatment, but do have Bright Wilson’s book “Molecular Vibrations” right here on my bookshelf. Great book, and a great guy.
Never met Woodward; he died a few weeks before I could have.
Bill Lipscomb is another great guy; he was always very supportive of young guys, as was (contra public image) EJ, to whom especially I owe a lot.
Never met Jack Roberts either, although I was originally taught organic chemistry out of …Roberts and Caserio, and enjoyed the book a lot.
Re the Feynmann lectures, as I believe I’ve related previously, I once had an arts don sniff that no one could be considered educated who hadn’t read a series of books she rattled off. Fortunately (mercifully), I had read all of them, but I replied that I’d add the Feynmann lectures on physics to that list. (Which I would.) She looked at me as though I had two heads, but I stand by that statement. Totally accessible to all, exquisite in execution, and critical knowledge to impart. What Shakespeare was to literature, Feynmann was to physics.
Never had any former girlfriends shot (!), but have one apparently in serious contention (i.e., handicapped in the lists for such things) for the Nobel Prize in physics. Does that count? /g
Imagine having married her.
“Hi, honey, I’m home! Had a great day — I got a grant funded today!”
“Hi! I had a good day too! I won the Nobel Prize!”
“Oh.”
Neo, sorry for the chemistry detour. Charlie and I should take it offline. I apologize.
Occam: no need to apologize. Better things for better living, through chemistry.
There was a book out called Better sex through chemistry… 🙂
Never Let Me Go
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kymQcM4ej3w
pajamasmedia.com/blog/never-let-me-go/
In the new film Never Let Me Go, set at an eerie school in an alternate-reality England, a schoolmistress declares to her classroom of wide-eyed young charges: “The tide is not with forward thinking. It never is. No, the tide is with the entrenched mindset!” The children dutifully applaud.
It’s a marrow-chilling moment because the matter that has brought the educator (played by a devastatingly heartless Charlotte Rampling) to a venomous fury is any hint of “subversion,” as she calls it, that might undermine the school’s reason for existence. All of the children who study at the Hailsham school are clones, and they have no value except to become “donors” of vital organs – until, as young adults in their early twenties, they have no vital organs left. At this stage, they are told, their lives “will be complete.” The end.
I never really did a lot of cramming for exams, even in high school. I figured for the most part if I hadn’t learned what I needed to know by the time the exam rolled around, I’d never learn it that way. Of course, most of my university exams were essays – 3 essays in 3 hours – so you either knew the books you were writing about or not.
I didn’t see how one could cram for an English Literature exam, but I did have to resort to Coles Notes cramming for one course I’d neglected all year (a compulsory module that wasn’t my favourite area) and that was my worst grade – it might have even been worse than the history module I bumbled through. Also, the exams were 100% of your grade where I went to uni – no pressure!