History

Larry shared this on Facebook about something he thought of while on TwitterX, so I thought I’d put it here on the blog. -Jack


Because I’ve been arguing with morons today on twitter who don’t know anything at all about history, it brought to mind this memory.

As a kid I was a massive history nerd. I devoured books, a few a week, and the best thing in the world was library loan. I went to a shit tier rural public school K-8 (my 8th grade class of 20 kids, half of us could speak English, and only half of those could read), but that didn’t matter because I read so much on my own anyway that made up pretty much the entirety of my early education.

When I went to high school (I lived so far out in the sticks that was an hour and a half bus ride every morning, which was actually awesome for me, because that was time I didn’t have to work with cows, and could read more books) I was actually super pumped for history class… and they all turned out to be super lame, because we’d spend 45 minutes tops talking about a topic that I’d already read an entire book about.

And the other kids were friggin STUPID. Like holy moly, dumb. Yes, this was the California Public Penal Academy For Gifted Drive By Shooters, but still. Nobody gave a crap. They paid no attention. They were bored. They just didn’t care. Fuck school. Let’s get high. (my high school also had the second highest teenage pregnancy rate in America my senior year, so we had that going for us too)

Thirty something years later and I get to watch these exact same mouth breathers bitch on Twitter about how they didn’t learn about (topic X) so clearly that’s a conspiracy by the man to keep them down.

Most of the history teachers I had knew less than I did about most of the topics and it was pretty obvious they were just phoning it in because their real job was coaching. Total waste of time.

I had one amazing history teacher though. Mr. Guerra. Great guy, actually loved history, was obviously totally burned out by teaching listless dorks the same thing over and over for twenty years with them being too dumb to listen, but he tried. I loved his class because he actually knew stuff and liked to research the stuff he didn’t know.

Every Friday Mr. Guerra would have a trivia game about the topic of the week. He’d break the class into two halves and we’d compete Jeopardy style. Winning side got bonus points for the test.

How much of a nerd was I? After the first few sessions he had to make a new rule. Larry can’t answer every single question. He can only answer every other question. When that was insufficient it was Larry can only answer one out of every four questions. Eventually he just gave me permission to just skip class and screw around on Fridays.
One of the best educational experiences I actually had in high school was the few days we had on the war in the Pacific, but not because I learned anything about the topic. Instead, Mr. Guerra recognized that was my favorite nerd fixation at the time so he asked me if I’d like to actually teach the class for a few days. I jumped at the chance… and realized that wow, high school kids are fucking stupid and apathetic, and it shattered any illusion I ever had that I might want to be a teacher… which was has been great for me long term. 😀

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51 thoughts on “History”

  1. I was just thinking about this, as it happens. One of the things I’m most proud of in my life is taking my kids OUT of school and home schooling them instead. All the way to university in one case.

    It was difficult. Having to look after kids and teach them as a man, its tough. Easier to work construction or whatever. But I did it, and they both did extremely well, much better than their peers who got dragged through the system.

    Schools are an abusive environment. Don’t believe the hype, home school your little ones.

  2. Heck, I went to a school system that was considered “good” in the 1970s, and they still manage to completely strike out in teaching American history.

    Basically, they took the first semester to teach up to about 1860, skipping the Civil War (because we were in the middle of desegregation and it was sensitive). Second semester started in 1866, slogging along until they reached WWI. They blew through that in about a week, then skipped ahead and covered the Great Depression up to 1938. WWII? – they blew through THAT in another week. By that point, it was near the end of that year, so they spend about another couple of weeks catching up to the 1960s, and blew off everything after that.

    I was a military nut, so by the point I entered high school, I knew more about WWII than all of the teachers, combined. This was a big school for the time, too – 2100 students. The only history teacher who was any good was a literal expert on the Civil War – which he couldn’t teach any more.

  3. History taught by both teachers and professors is heavily abridged, same for just about any other subject

    Right now, it’s a Time of Plenty, so the lack of people with skills coming out of both school and college is “acceptable” because we care more about their degree than their actual knowledge

    Don’t let school get in the way of your education, same for everyone else whether it be a child or adult

    The question now is, where to start and which is still accurate or more complete? What’s easier to learn and just how long will you be spending to learn it before it becomes a bothersome chore?

    Becoming a polymath even with all of today’s technology to make learning easier and faster and more accessible, is HARD, getting skilled and knowledgeable about even one subject is HARD

    As much as people go Butlerian Jihad this, should be noted that Mentats were mostly rich people’s personal servants and that the training was long and harsh and from a really really young age….so I can guess there’s a good reason to try out cybernetics

    Now if only you can protect your mind being hacked, because with today’s technocrats, I don’t think Netrunners will be a possibility and would be too expensive and time consuming compared to low tech options like going off grid

    Would really like to just download the text and see it all, like photographic memory

    1. Do you mean, ‘Don’t let education get in the way of learning’?

      Because education is what they do on the outside. Learning is what you do on the inside.

  4. I and my siblings were adults before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and we grew up with the knowledge that the Soviet Union was a brutal dictatorship. It was also understood that Marxism, whatever it’s form was inherently, totalitarian. But somehow even though they lived with that as a reality, some of my siblings are claiming they are “Social Democrats”.
    My brothers and sisters are arguably above average compared to the norm of the populace and still the truth eludes them on so many things. Basically if you list the lies of the
    mainstream media, they believe that’s the way it is to them.
    It’s appalling and disappointing to me.
    Heinlein said “A generation that ignores history has no past , and no future”.
    But they do have a future.
    They have Orwell’s iconographic boot , stomping on their face, forever.
    And they are dragging the rest of us down with them.

    1. All you have to do is use a different name or word and go on and pretend at “moderation” and you can fool people

      It’s why Soft Power is the real power

      Especially when a society becomes way too “civilized” and things like combat, hunting and even self-defense become more and more socially unacceptable. Putting aside crazy drug addicted hobos with dirty syringes, fiery but mostly peaceful protests, gangsters robbing, killing and exporting locals alongside gang warfare…..those just end with society “pitying” The Jokers of the world

      No Arkham asylum, no no, they’re not gonna break out of Arkham, they’ll just be let out because Hugo Strange is some psycho analyst or some crap

      Senator Steven Armstrong would unironically be considered a hero across the world. As odd as it sounds.

    2. Why you young whippersnapper I was in school when the Berlin Wall went UP. And you better believe the nuns laid down the word on THAT…

    3. }}} Nott the Hoople

      I assert that THE defining characteristic of liberals — the quality you absolutely MUST have to self-define as one — is a lack of WISDOM.

      Intellect, measured by IQ — is the capacity to learn from *books*.

      Wisdom, measured by, lets call it the “WQ”, for which there is no standardized test, is the capacity to learn from *experience*.

      So, people who refer to liberals as “stupid” are usually using the wrong term — the correct term is “Fool”.

      And yes, there are wise idiots — think of the old man on a porch who knows little beyond the boundaries of his property, but you ask him about how people will respond if you do ‘x’, hits it right on the head.

      There are also intelligent fools — just look at Noam Chomsky. The man is clearly a genius in certain arenas, but a dunderhead of the first rate when it comes to economics.

      But for self-defined liberals, I believe the quality that most marks them is, if there was a WQ test, they would consistently fall into the lowest 1/3rd of the bell curve that resulted.

      This is how it is that, no matter how often an idea fails, utterly, they still think it might be made to work. They literally CANNOT learn from experience.

      Marxism is the prime example of this. It has never worked on any scale beyond the village/kibbutz/commune level, but that doesn’t stop them from thinking it can be scaled up further.

      1. Communism only failed because the Wrong People were in charge. If the Right People are put in charge next time, we will achieve the Workers Paradise!

        Who are the Right People?

        We are, of course!
        ———————————
        “I know I’m not smart enough to micromanage the lives of three hundred and twenty million people. You are stupid enough to believe you can.”

  5. I was gifted the attendance of schools where parents were Kennedy Space Center engineers, etc., but there was another factor at play: our teachers had been there and done that. My HS History teacher served as an Army officer in northern Africa during WW2; our Principal had been a B-24 pilot over Europe. Others were veterans from Korea and Vietnam. These were easy to respect – Dad was an aviation machinist with MAG-23. On Guadalcanal. When Henderson Field got its name.
    So, the combination of parents interested in kids learning and faculty which had seen how awful things could be worked very well.

    Today – have your teachers done anything other than attend school?

    1. In evil DeathSantis’ Florida (yeah, being sarcastic there) veterans can teach in public school without an education degree. I think they still have to attend a teaching certificate program, but anyone who learned in the military can sleepwalk through said certification program.

      When my wife was getting her degrees in the early 2000’s, the 2nd easiest degree to get was an Education degree. The easiest was Social Work. Physical Education actually required some skull and body sweat. And it’s only gotten worse.

  6. School isn’t education, and it hasn’t ever been, really.
    What it should be is a place where one is taught how to educate themselves, and to learn how to use the tools to educate themselves properly. That includes how to organize, research, work out, and present one’s ideas in a clear and logical fashion to others no matter the subject, be it history, science, mathematics, et al. Which is not all that dissimilar to trade school or medical school where a degree is just the jumping off point, and the real education happens on the job.

    Sadly, credentialism has messed up this understanding of what a degree actually is.

    1. School isn’t education, and it hasn’t ever been, really.

      The history of the modern public school dates back to the British Empire; the purpose was to teach people to read and write English legibly and do basic math, so that anybody could be employed in “public service” to the Crown, in any clerical or administrative office, anywhere in the world. And if anyone had an accident, died, retired, relocated, etc., they could be easily replaced.

      Later, during the Industrial Revolution, curriculum was “expanded” to include manual skills and better promote conformity, so that people would be better suited for factory and assembly line work.

      When we talk about schools producing “cog in the machine” automatons, that’s not a new concept. That’s all “public education” has ever done, because it’s the only thing it was ever designed to do!

  7. Read an interesting article in TNR about the suburbs are a scam for minorities. The thing that resonated was how the schools so lauded just before the minorities moved in had all suddenly turned to crap. Funny how that works in a school. I was lucky to attend 9 different schools (army brat) and every one but the last made a point of putting those interested or required to learn into classes with like-minded or directed students and they did a good job. Those not interested in learning were not coddled, not shamed and not missed.
    I live in a Cleveland suburb once famous for its public school system. Since I got here about 12 years ago the high school Zillow Great Schools rating has gone from a 10 to a 5 and trending down. The kids have changed but the parents that still want the best have about 7 private schools in the same suburb to send their precious darlings to if they want them to get a ‘good’ education. It’s kind of sad really.

    1. The talent of the teachers doesn’t matter when the students are actively hostile to the process.

      Some can not be taught.
      Some will not be taught.

      1. Alas, yes. When a student’s goal is to get a C so they pass so they “can get out,” it takes a miracle worker to get him/her/it to work harder and take interest in the topic. If the student has decided not to learn?

        *shrugs*

    2. I’ve said before, and I’ll keep saying: Parents and teachers once viewed themselves as a team. PTA (Parent-Teacher Association) meetings were a thing, and everyone was on the same page and supportive of their kids. If we want public schools to improve, we need to get back to that.

      Nowadays, that sense of teamwork and community is gone. When was the last PTA meeting in your district? When was the last school board meeting that was genuinely about educating students instead of partisan politics, removing books, DEI, and other tangential fringe issues?

      Put more simply, when was the last time parents and teachers/administrators saw each other as allies instead of roadblocks at best, enemies at worst?

      All this to say, it’s not just the kids who have changed. The parents still want the best for their kids, but in recent years/decades they’ve both 100% outsourced the task of teaching their kids AND decided they don’t like the methods and subject matter being taught. Getting involved would fix both problems, but instead, they just attack. (To be fair, the school boards and teachers’ unions don’t want the parents involved, either, so they’re also part of the bigger problem.)

      The kids, for their part, sense their parents’ hostility and become hostile themselves, and we’re left with McChuck’s comment, right above this: kids who can’t and/or won’t be taught.

      Once upon a time, “kids who can’t and/or won’t be taught” was an individual-level problem; only certain kids or certain families. That’s no longer the case, as it has expanded to the community/cultural level; every school has good and bad students/families, but only in certain specific communities/districts are bad students/families a systemic issue.

      But anyone who points out that some cultures and demographics might be more prone to these problems than others, is branded as a racist.

    3. Growing up, we had a phase system in school.

      Phase 1 was unteachable because really retarded.
      Phase 2 were the ‘exceptional students,’ yeah functionally retarded.
      Phase 3 was for those that needed a HS diploma for a technical program.
      Phase 4 was for the kids who will do okay in college.
      Phase 5 was for the brainiacs.

      Phase 1 students were at a special ‘daycare’ school as they were too disruptive to even have near regular school.
      Phase 2 students had special classes so they wouldn’t slow down anyone else. Rarely they meshed in with other students in classes like Home Ec and such.
      Phase 3 students had their own classes so they wouldn’t hold back the Phase 4 and 5 students.

      It worked. Of course the high schools also had auto shop, wood shop and metal shop classes.

  8. In my work with kids and teens, I’ve been struck by how even smart, academically inclined kids don’t really “get” it. Sure, the kids that blow off school don’t get it, but also those who were academically inclined found it boring. Usually I dig, and they feel like they have an inch deep instruction, heavily emphasizing dates and headline things. Like, i remember one kid (a high academic achiever). telling my the US Civil War was boring because it was just (I’m going to mess this up, but it’s the general idea) “Slavery and Dread Scott, then Lincoln’s Elected, the Confederacy, the Emancipation Proclamation, and Gettysburg. Then they win and Lincoln’s Shot” I almost choked.

    1. On one hand, that kid knew more than most about the U.S. Civil War.

      On the other hand, his knowledge is, as you said, “inch deep”.

      The common argument I see online about the Civil War is whether or not it was about slavery. One side says it was, the other side says it wasn’t.

      Both sides are falling victim to the “false dichotomy” logical fallacy. Like most things, they’re talking past each other, because like most things, the reality is somewhere in the middle. Slavery was an issue that contributed to hostilities, but it wasn’t the only issue; it was one of many, and on the grand scheme it was a relatively minor one*. The bigger problems were oppressive taxes levied against Southern agriculture, federal laws and policies that made it hard for Southern farms (operations of all sizes, not just the slave-owning mega-plantations you see in movies and documentaries) to survive, and — most importantly, in my opinion — the disagreement over whether a Union of States freely entered could be freely exited.

      Obviously, the South felt they could freely exit a Union they freely entered, and the North — having become dependent on the tax income and interstate trade with the South — felt that the South couldn’t just leave the Union, and if they couldn’t be convinced to stay, then they should be forced to stay. And the North felt strongly enough this way that they were willing to sacrifice at least 10% of the male population of both to enforce their will.

      Of course, none of this is new to anyone who has really studied (more than an inch deep) the Civil War and the events leading up to it. But it’s much simpler to ret-con it into a dispute about Slavery, Racism, Dred Scott, Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation** than it is to delve into the deeper issues.

      ———
      * – During the lead-up to the War, slavery was being rendered economically unfeasible by technology and industry, so it was already on its way out. Machinery was quickly becoming cheaper to buy, cheaper to operate, and cheaper to maintain than an equivalent workforce of slaves, and smaller farms could hire, rent, or cost-share with other small farms. Ergo, it wasn’t as politically important as U.S. History classes make it out to be.
      ** – Another point they don’t teach in schools anymore: Lincoln had the Emancipation Proclamation in-hand for some time before he signed and issued it. He waited until it would cause the most strategic harm to the South — adding insult to injury, and all that — and ONLY the South; slave-holding areas under Union control were exempted. All the “moral issue” arguments go right out the window with those two points; if it were a moral issue, Lincoln would have signed it immediately and with no exemptions.

      1. Hard disagree on that; if you look at the Confederate constitution vs the US constitution, for example, the main differences are that the states are given more power relative to the national government, except on the matter of slavery, wherein abolition at either the state or national level is outright prohibited.

        You might also want to look up the reception that the Cleburne letter, which proposed recruiting blacks and freeing them in return for their service, got from the high command of the Army of Tennessee and the Confederate government. It was, ah, not well-recieved.

      2. Interestingly, serfdom in Russia was becoming more factory oriented, and sort of worked in that environment as a viable labor system. Now, whether that could have been shifted to North America is an open question, and someone else can write that alternate history novel.

      3. ” if it were a moral issue, Lincoln would have signed it immediately and with no exemptions.”

        This is not how the real world works. You have to convince people and, if you are in the middle of a war, you have to be strategic. Signing a proclamation immediately and with no exemptions actually just ends with you being booted out of office and the status quo remaining.

      4. Yeah, and they didn’t teach that slaves in the North weren’t finally freed by law until 1868. And that there were still slaves in the North after the War.

        One of the big reasons for the Civil War was the North’s control of the South’s ability to sell food and raw materials directly to other nations. Which was, come to think of it, one of the causes of the Revolutionary War.

        One of the other was the North’s attempt to stop the South’s industrialization, enacting laws and regulations much like what England did to the Colonies pre-Revolutionary War (and was also one of the major causes of said RevWar.)

          1. Beans has a good point. The factors (agents) in England contracting for cotton did so directly for the English government, which landed any southern state participating in violation of the Constitution, which restricts that activity to the Federales.

        1. The Democrats boogered their 1860 convention.

          They split their votes among three candidates, and lost to a guy who got 40% of the popular vote.

          They perhaps would not have left if they had managed to run a single candidate and won.

          A talking point is ‘just trying to peaceably leave’. Problems are that a) the constitution was a peace treaty b) it did not explicitly describe a process for leaving c) therefore to walk away with a peace treaty in effect you would need to negotiate usch a replacement agreement with the politicians that you disagree with enough to leave the polity over it.

          The Democrats voluntarily pulled a lot of people out of congress. That was a series of choices.

          No matter how much the tyrannical northerners card might be played, the Republicans were not perfect puppet masters, and their opponents had choices, which they made.

          1. In fairness, if you look at the numbers, Lincoln would have won the election in the electoral college even if everyone who didn’t vote for him had coalesced behind a single candidate–the Republican party had a majority of the vote in almost every state where it took all the electoral votes, the exceptions being California and Oregon. A “fusion” candidate would have managed to get only 130 out of 303 electoral votes, despite getting sixty percent of the popular vote.

            (Worth noting, by the way, is that nobody voted for Lincoln in any state that ended up seceding except for Virginia, which, given polling practices at the time, was probably the result of voter intimidation.)

          2. After the 1860 election, the North was only one Senator short of complete majority control over the federal government. The South had seen what they could subject them to even without complete control. They didn’t see their situation getting anything but worse under the existing political structure.

          3. @Imaginos: That’s not quite an accurate representation of the situation. Republicans only had thirty Senate seats once all the dust settled in the 1860 election, which, since there were sixty-eight total Senate seats in play, meant they were five votes short of a Senate majority.

            And, frankly, when one looks at the political dynamics of the preceding two decades, one does not feel particularly sorry for the slave states–the federal government had basically been putting its thumb on the scale in their favor since at least the run-up to the Mexican War, and the moment that looked like it might change they flipped their lids.

            (One is honestly reminded a little of the change in attitude Democrats have had towards SCOTUS since it stopped rubber-stamping the progressive wish list.)

          4. According to Wikipedia, the 1861 senate at the time of secession consisted of 30 Democrats, 29 Republicans, 1 Unionist and 8 vacant seats. If the Unionist voted with the Republicans, the Senate was deadlocked and the Vice President cast the deciding vote.

            I know Wikipedia is not entirely trustworthy, but for matters of historical fact like who sat in the Senate it should be good enough.

          5. The article says they were the result of delays or deadlocks in several state legislatures, and not uncommon at the time. After the secession, there were more than 20 vacancies. Enough that the Senate’s quorum limit had to be reduced in order to allow votes to be legally valid.

    2. Of course fiction written by politcos is boring. Once you rewrite a significantly more complicated conflict of the federal government refusing to do its explicit job and federal policy/legislation consciously being made to attack part of the union and turn a minority population to an underclass to just “slavery” you’ve cut the antagonist’s entire motivation.

  9. Funny story:
    In second grade, I realised that the punishment for not turning in my homework was detention and detention meant being confined to the library.

    By 7th grade I had yet to turn in a single homework assignment, but I had read the EncyclopĂŚdia Britannica cover to cover. My teachers despaired until I sat nationally normed exams with predictable results.

    1. That was me in school, too. Turned in very little homework, aced all tests (standardized and home-brew).

      A few teachers thought I might be cheating, but most realized by my in-class participation that I really did know the material forward and backward. Plus, you can’t look up answers or get study guides for tests the teachers write themselves. 😉

  10. I’m that kid who tried to disguise his voice on the phone calling the Encyclopedia sales # to sound like an adult ordering a newer, updated version. When they showed up my Mom was a sucker for the scam and always ordered new ones. I spent ALOT of time in the bathroom, hiding from feeding cows and horses, reading encyclopedias. My legs would go numb but my brain was in high gear. Later in life I understood what happened. I was an addict. I admit it. I was addicted to information intake. I still am. It’s not an easy thing to admit at age 66 that you are an addict. It’s how my brain worked then and still does. I was the kid who after acing High School geometry as a sophomore, became the substitute geometry teacher for the next two years. The “real” substitute when Mr. Swanson was gone spent that period in the teacher’s lounge smoking and drinking coffee. Not that I was Mr. Sooper Dooper in all things. Chemistry? That periodic chart of the elements? F that. Same with more artistic endeavors. At least until I discovered Norm Abrams. Anyway, I feel ya.

  11. I was fortunate in that many of my teachers had been around in the lead-up to and served in WWII. Having a German teacher talk about life at Heidelberg in 1936 and the Nazi influence was a blast as was having a headmaster who had been dropped into Arnhem and a Dean (3 i.c of the school) who had served with the Gurkhas in the far East.

    Their ethos was summed up in two sentences from the Dean. ‘Gentlemen, we are here to teach you to think. We are not here to teach you what to think.’.

    1. Had good veterans who were teachers also.

      One, a math teacher, was an Army photographer in Europe whose job was to take photos of really bad things, like work and concentration camps. Which we found out when some idiot in math class started spouting out about how the Holocaust didn’t happen (late 70’s, so, yeah, Eisenhower was right about that.) The next math class wasn’t about math and we got to see some of his collection of photos.

      Another, journalism teacher (back when journalism was mostly real journalism) was a veteran of Korea and he shut down a lot of bullscat about said war, including the garbage from MASH. And his insights into how horrible the NORKs and ChiComs were towards their own people, let alone any South Korean or foreigner was, well, horrible.

      Good teachers. Already becoming far too scarce and being replaced by socialistic idjits from the 60’s and 70’s.

  12. Ah public school… where you get disciplined for ‘working ahead’… I remember it well. Not fondly. Well.

  13. I have a student right now who insists on “working ahead” (we work in small groups, discussing the questions and figuring out what comes next). The problem is that she isn’t nearly as smart as she thinks she is and she often gets the answers wrong, which wouldn’t happen if she’d slow down and discuss. Then the test arrives and she makes comments on things she doesn’t know how to do along the lines of “this question makes no sense”.

    All well and good to claim that school is holding her back but sometimes teachers actually do know better.

    1. All well and good to claim that school is holding her back but sometimes teachers actually do know better.

      If you’re speeding toward a cliff, a little “holding back” might be a GOOD thing.

      Hopefully she realizes that sooner rather than later.

    2. I had her twin in an aviation class some years ago. “I don’t need to take notes because I know this already.” Complete with eye roll and know-it-all grin. Then complained mightily because the grade was not what was anticipated.

      Knowing all the tech specs for an F-15 will not help you calculate winds aloft and course corrections.

  14. Farther back than I care to remember, I had a middle school History teacher who sent me to the principal’s office because I corrected him on the date something happened. The principal then took me back to class and, in front of the entire class of 20+ students, asked the history teacher why he so vehemently defended his own ignorance. It was glorious.

    In high school, I had an English teacher who probably taught us more about history than the actual History class. He was also the one who (thankfully) poked a hole in my dreams of being a history teacher when he pointed out that as someone who didn’t actually like most of my agemates, spending the next 30 years trapped in a room with teenagers was probably not a good career choice.

  15. Preaching to the choir here. One of the things I got into trouble for the most in school was reading. I’d breeze through a 300 pager a week like clockwork, while also burning through library content at a terrifying pace.

    I was always the quiet kid who kept to himself. That is until the penal colony room did something moderately interesting to get my attention or something patently false was said by a teacher, and I’d take them down with the speed and efficiency of a blitzkrieg. Pretty quickly, especially in my political class, everyone, including the teachers, learned that locking horns with me meant a swift death, and became content to let me quietly read in the corner. Also it’s concerning to me that my political science teacher had a giant Soviet flag on his wall. Honestly I’m shocked we didn’t lock horns more often.

    Looking back, I should’ve just dropped out. Would’ve saved me a devil of a lot of trouble.

  16. If people think things are bad now, wait until teaching becomes automated with AI Large Language Models.

    Kids won’t actually need to write essays or think for themselves, let the AI do it for them, they won’t need to learn anything, just have the AI do the hard part(thinking and learning the material).
    Teachers won’t need to actually teach, not that they do it now, they’ll simply tell the AI to spit out a lesson plan to kids whose AI’s will regurgitate the information.

    You think reading comprehension is becoming a lost skill, wait until the next generation grows up and asks their personal AI’s to summarize reports and any written material for them, including fiction.
    People will no longer read for entertainment or enjoyment and paper books are going the way of the dodo.

  17. Don’t you think it is a little pathetic that someone would brag so hard on being the best history student at a ghetto-ass CA public school?

    1. My school did suck, but the story is still true, and I still love history.
      Do with these factoids as you will and then die salty, fucker. 😀

  18. I was in my late 30’s when I went to College. I ended up taking two History classes. The one was a cakewalk. The Professor (yes a full Professor) said on the first day of class that he didn’t take roll. He said that he’d know who attended and who didn’t. He gave a handout with the dates of quizzes and tests. Well my next class was Fluids, which was kicking my ass and the Study Group met during my History Class. I’d only show up for quizzes and tests. I’d take them and bail out for the Study Group. I survived Fluids (with a B). On the History final I turned in my test, he looked at it and told me that I had an “A”. Then he said that he wished that I would have taken my History book out of the shrink wrap.
    The other History Class was Recent US History. Two of the subjects were the bombings of the Embassy and the Marine Barracks in Lebanon in 83 and the raid on Libya in 86. The instructor was kind of surprised to find out that I was a crewman in the helicopters that flew medevacs in Lebanon and was part of the SAR team in Libya. I got an “A” in that class as well.

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