Law school seems it’s own confusing beast to me… part of the university system, but also very much its own thing… I don’t know if the same questions apply there, since the ends of a law degree is pretty well-defined and self-evident… Less so with a history PhD or an english PhD, at least as far as society seems to go.
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Yeah, law schools in the US have their own history and the first were not part of other colleges or universities. And legal education in other countries is different. The base law degree in most countries is a Bachelor of Laws, and is an undergraduate level program. The US, for whatever reason, made the base law degree a graduate program. Probably gatekeeping.
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So much gatekeeping in America… it’s endless. 
Yeah, lots of lawyer have history BAs, which I guess makes a kind of sense - historians get excellent training in research and making arguments and connections, which I can see as being useful for a lawyer…
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Someday. An LLM and JDS are in my retirement activity possibilities. Or teaching at a community college.
Really? A lot of the ones I know are political science, including me. I started out as business but was so bored I couldn’t make myself get decent grades
Boredom is the mind killer
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There was a wide variety of undergrad degrees in my class, but because I was in the part time program, we had a lot of non-traditional students. One of my classmates was even a professor of theology at a different university while he was going to law school. We also had three cops, a whole bunch of paralegals, one PhD chemist, and a bunch of other pharmaceutical employees. That’s a pretty common law school track in New Jersey, actually. Lots of big pharma here and they hire a lot of lawyers. We also had at least two people who came from the IT world.
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I have (and will continue to) maintained that my med school class was a failed experiment. We had a ridiculous number of jocks and varied degrees. English, History, Theology, even a couple of 19-year-olds without degrees who had just taken the pre-recs. Never saw anything like it in the classes I interacted with over those 4 years. It made for interesting conversations, but also a higher-than-expected failure rate. Probably why it was not repeated.
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That draft explicitly promoted the San Francisco Unified School District’s policy of banishing Algebra I from middle school—a policy grounded in the belief that teaching the subject only in high school would give all students the same opportunities for future success.
Might be misunderstanding this, but if Alg I is not taught until 9th grade, there is no way to get to calculus I or even pre-calc in HS. Am I wrong? This sounds like more “we must teach on the convoy theory and not allow any more gifted students to advance.” Not a teacher by any means, but I see the results of failing to keep bright students engaged and challenged, as they grow bored and disenchanted with the whole educational process. Then I see them presented as disciplinary problems or “He has got to have ADHD!” When I try to explain that, no, he’s just bored, they usually do not believe me.
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Definitely an issue. I’ve seen the situation where there simply weren’t enough students to fill an algebra class in a middle school so more advanced students were bussed to the high school for algebra or trig. Another option is to double-up some classes to get to more advanced math. Heck; some friends of my son started taking community college classes as 8th graders and had completed 3 levels of calculus by their junior year of high school.
All of that said, not having a more normal pathway to Calculus in high school really screws over any students who might want to pursue engineering or other math-heavy college programs.
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I did that (not math, but college chemistry classes in HS) Had half of my major classes done before my freshman year. But that was having a college within walking/biking distance of my HS. Not everybody has that option. I have grown increasingly frustrated and distressed by the defunding of education across the country. My generation did an excellent job of fucking up the world. These kids are going to have to figure out how to fix that. Thay have no IQ points or hands to spare. And we seem to be determined to handicap them as much as possible.
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I was an academically precocious child. I taught myself to read at age 4 from my parents reading to me, the Electric Company, and Sesame Street. When I started first grade, the school wanted to advance me straight to second grade because I already knew what they were teaching in first. My parents wouldn’t allow it because I was already small for my age and they were worried about socialization issues. Luckily, by the time I started junior high, there was a gifted and talented program, so I did take algebra in junior high, and calculus in high school. I find it incredibly depressing that such programs are on the outs. My high school calculus teacher (appropriately named Mrs. Newton) taught that class like it was a college class, and a lot of straight A students struggled to get a B in her class. But when I got to college, I placed out of the first semester of calc and was able to mostly sleep through the second semester because I’d already had all that. Mrs. Newton got forced out of teaching the college prep courses a couple of years after I graduated because parents started complaining that the Bs and Cs she was giving their kids were keeping them out of Harvard, Princeton, MIT, etc.
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Teaching is another one of those professions where more and more really good folks are getting to the “why the hell am I putting up with this shit?” stage and moving on. And once again, although the kids suffer immediately, we all suffer in the long term. God, I hate this timeline.
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Teaching is another one of those professions where more and more really good folks are getting to the “why the hell am I putting up with this shit?” stage and moving on.
I saw your comments on the unions thread. Teaching (even at university level) is another field where the love for the job and the students is somehow supposed to outweigh the crap. Which is why I had to leave.
On the other topic: I took pre-calc and calculus in high school and don’t know how I could have read physics without that. The big physics classes had a lot of pre-med students without so much math background and they really struggled.
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Every year, Katalin Karikó met with her University of Pennsylvania department chair to update him on her quest to treat disease with messenger RNA — fragile, inflammatory genetic molecules that were so difficult to work with that most scientists thought it was a waste of time.
Every year, he listened to her passionate description of the science for a few minutes, then chastised her for not contributing to the department’s all-important metric: “dollars per net square footage” of lab space.
The bottom line: Penn had rejected Karikó for a tenure-track position years earlier because she failed to secure funds for her research, and she still hadn’t managed to come up with any.
Her account illustrates the competitive, constantly churning treadmill of academic science, where success is defined by money and the publication of studies in scientific journals — neither of which occurs without the other. Scientists can’t conduct their experiments without money for chemicals, lab animals, and other supplies, yet in order to secure that funding, they have to provide the results of experiments. Which requires money.
The result is that many successful scientists learn to practice what is called grantsmanship, namely publishing safe, incremental advances to keep the funds coming.
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In the first few months of Arkansas’ voucher program, a new document reveals, thousands of students have spent millions of taxpayer dollars to attend mostly religious private schools. And many of those students were already in private schools to begin with , making their use of taxpayer dollars a drain on the minimal resources currently available to public schools throughout the state.
That’s the takeaway from the first annual Education Freedom Account report given to the state legislature.
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The local conservative busybody recently posted on his “just sharing interesting articles” Facebook page an ad for a sale of Tuttle Twins books. I had no idea what this books were, but what I found was somehow worse than expected:
Not only are they poorly written blatant libertarian propaganda, they’re also racist and the author is so far up his own ass he seems to miss the points of the works he’s trying to simplify or demonstrating points that sell socialism quite well. It’s infuriating how books like these can continue to sell because a segment of the country wants teach their children that freedom and free thinking are a result of following a specific path.
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This may not belong here because it’s positive news, in my opinion, but I don’t know where else it could go. The LSAT is dropping the logic games section as part of a settlement of a lawsuit from blind test takers who argued that section discriminated against them. These logic games on the LSAT are a nightmare. You cannot solve them without drawing a grid and mapping everything out, unless you’re some sort of savant.
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This is absolutely true, not being able to diagram would be brutal. I liked the logic game part and was good at it but it needed to go a long time ago.
Not sad to hear this might negatively impact the test prep companies either. Too many of those are exploitative and also skew the scores in favor of people who have that kinda money. Those programs are expensive
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Agreed. I would be in favor of the whole test going away, to be honest. There are schools now that accept either the GRE or the LSAT.
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