[X] My Assistant

[belleraphon1]

Well said Stu! I had the same thrill from Voyager and Galileo. And on top of that there is Ganymede and Callisto... forgive me folks, but there is something very intriguing to me about the sublimating seltzer surface of Callisto, and the tectonics on Ganymede...... and how the freak does Callisto have an ocean when it formed too cold to differentiate.?

We stand to learn do much...

Craig ... 72 in 2025

[vjkane]

Craig ... 72 in 2025

I wonder if this board has a bi-modal age distribution? Those of us in our 50s who got hooked with Viking and Voyager and those in their 20s & 30s who got hooked with the recent wealth of missions.

[brellis]

I'm tempted to outline the path of my education, but Doug'll get mad, hehe

[helvick]

This is way off topic but we are in Chit Chat so I'm going to ramble on a bit.

Doug's US system seems similar in overall structure to my kids schooling (who live in South Africa, not here in Ireland which makes PTA meetings a bit tricky) apart from the flexibility in High School - they have a fairly rigidly defined schedule all the way to the end of "high school" but it departs from 1 teacher for all subjects at about the same point. They have lots of options but the school sizes are not large enough for them to be able to have any real control over their own timetable.


My own secondary education in Ireland in the 80's was reasonably similar and again highly rigid in terms of schedule. I had primary school with some kindergarten-esque years from age 4-6 followed by 6 years (1st to 6th class) in primary school. Secondary school was generally a 5 year gig starting with an intermediate phase from what was termed 1st year to 3rd year with an official state exam at the end generally covering a range of 7-9 subjects depending on your school but I've known kids to do up to 11 subjects and I'm sure some do more. That's followed by a 2 year final phase normally called 5th year and 6th year. The missing 4th year cropped up in some schools who opted for a 3 year final phase where they actually took the time to try and broaden the kids education a bit but that was quite rare in my day. Again the final two years were followed by a formal state exam and the average number of subjects covered would be 7 however some over achievers push that number up quite a bit higher.

College entrance in Ireland is entirely gated on performance in that final national High School ecam so getting into desirable courses requires very high grades in a diverse range of subjects - in my day you could scrape into an Engineering course with A's in science and maths subjects along with minimal marks in some language\humanities subjects but these days a desirable course (which Engineering is not I should add) requires straight A's covering at least two major areas.

The biggest educational shock I ever had was attempting to deal with the demands of being an undergrad at University - I still hadn't outgrown the laziness of my earlier youth _and_ I found myself more often than not in a class with people who made me feel stupid for the first time in my life (it wasn't their fault, they were generally very nice, just outrageously clever). I had to work hard at intellectual stuff for the first time in my life and the struggle that ensued was a humbling but I believe ultimately a vital experience. My undergraduate college years were not that dissimilar to school in terms of lecture schedules - those were fixed in terms of whatever chosen degree one was pursuing for the most part and you either attended (and succeeded) or failed to pitch up (and failed). I sailed a very thin line in terms of what was an acceptable level of absence in my 4 years in College, I still got through it and graduated but my final result stands out as the single worst academic performance of my life. Personally I reckon I should have left school, got a job, struggled for 5-10 years with that and _then_ gone to University. Had I done that I'm pretty sure I'd never have missed a lecture, seminar, workshop or tutorial and I certainly wouldn't have been the last one trudging up the aisle at the graduation ceremony (we were called in order of merit in my day).