College Student Whiners

This little list of the top 5 reasons why its bad to be an engineering student sure shines a lot of light on today’s generation of snot-nosed whiners:

5. Awful Textbooks
Thick, dry, black and white manuscripts are rarely a source of inspiration and sometimes can cause loads of confusion. 

 No nice pictures to keep my attention.  Why in the world did I try to become an engineer?

4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging
During each class, a professor that would rather be tending to his research will waltz up to a blackboard or overhead projector and scribble out equations for an hour without uttering a single sentence to create some excitement.

Why won’t these people entertain me?  I’m expected to know what they are talking about without them patting my peaked little head every 2 seconds?  The horror!

3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
College students may not have a sense for how to build their resume and they might be clueless about the variety of career opportunities that await them. Unfortunately, some academic advisers do little more than post fliers about internships and hand out a checklist of classes to take.

 Here I is – a college student – and I don’t even know how to pad my resume with useless stuff that might sound good to some poor employer who will be responsible for actually educating me once I’m done with my fun-filled college days.  But these counselor people are supposed to soothe my fevered brow with individual understanding of MY situation and give ME all the answers to how the rest of my life is supposed to work out.  All those other students?  They are on their own.

2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
Brilliant engineering students may earn surprisingly low grades while slackers in other departments score straight As for writing book reports and throwing together papers about their favorite zombie films.  Many of the brightest students may struggle while mediocre scholars can earn top scores because they have a larger group of supportive friends to or more time to dedicate to studying.

I want my gold star!  This stuff is hard, and I can’t stand it any more!   I’ll tell my mommie on you.

1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
Nearly every homework assignment and test question is a math problem. Only a few courses require creativity or offer hands-on experience.

They actually expect me to learn this stuff.  What unmitigated gall.

Illegal, Non-English Speaking, But Gifted

The Denver Public Schools continue down the path of “diversity” and degrading standards:

 More minority and poor students in Denver are being classified as highly gifted under a new system that gives extra credit to children who are economically disadvantaged or nonnative English speakers.

“It’s a much more holistic look at the kid,” said Diana Howard, principal at Polaris at Ebert, the district’s sole elementary school for the highly gifted and talented. “I wanted this system to look at much more than test scores. This is going to have a huge impact.”

All you need to hear is the world holistic.  That means its a mush-brained bunch of hippie-dippy crap dreamed up by someone who smoked a lot of dope in the 1970s and wants to implemented the stoned standard for all activities.

Here’s how it used to be done:

 Denver is the only district in the metro area that has a program specifically for “highly gifted and talented students.”

To determine who gets into the program, the district previously relied on oral tests that measure a student’s reasoning and IQ.

Here’s the new diverse way of determing that every child is above average:

To make things more equitable, the district now relies on a sum of measures to determine eligibility into the highly gifted program — cognitive tests, annual assessments, reading tests and teacher nominations. Next year, the district will consider artwork and writings.

Also, students get extra points toward entry into the program if English is their second language or if they receive federal meal benefits — a measure of poverty.

 Isn’t that special?  Can you imagine just how entitled these non-special, non English-speaking, non-gifted students will be once they graduate from this gifted program (assuming that everyone graduates of course – otherwise it might harm the student’s self-esteem)?

The money quote that encapsulates the whole thing:

We want to find the gifts that these children have, not exclude them,” she said.