The 2021 Early-Retirement Update
Are college classes too difficult?
Books to the ceiling,
Books to the sky,
My pile of books is a mile high.
How I love them! How I need them!
I'll have a long beard by the time I read them.
-- Arnold Lobel
We are not professional anything except academics. Seek advice from real professionals before making any financial or other life-changing decisions.
Sympathetic Police Know What It’s Like To Have A Bad Day And Kill 8 People https://t.co/O6MCzgA4Ii pic.twitter.com/agbbcv3S1h
— The Onion (@TheOnion) March 17, 2021
The 2021 Early-Retirement Update
Are college classes too difficult?
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
March 20, 2021 at 10:19 pm
I really enjoyed the early retirement update, except for how defensive he was at the end. He was not only having to overcome his own expectations, but also some pretty strong beliefs held by a lot of people about what early retirement means. But I do enjoy learning the easy way about how you can deal with changing realities.
**
I am surprised to read that students are less likely to show up for lectures covering the more difficult topics. Seems crazy. Of course I showed up to all the lectures because I sure didn’t have any skills in knowing which ones were safe to miss, so can I really talk?
On the other hand, my favorite undergrad professor was the one who would assign a chapter and then pick the most complicated topic in the chapter to do an entire lecture on. (He taught astronomy and physics.) Well, he also made multiple-choice tests that I could barely pass, so I quickly learned to just audit his classes, but still. So much better than just saying all the obvious stuff from the book again.
Apparently, going to college to learn stuff is not normal (except stuff for a specific career), though that may not be quite as true at liberal arts colleges like the one I went to. But I never learned how to strategically take courses pass/fail to save my GPA or to pick the courses I already knew the most about. I was spending too much money for that! Also, the amount of work to pass was almost as much as the amount I would do trying to make an A, but of course I would be less motivated for a pass/fail class, so that just seemed dangerous to me.
March 20, 2021 at 11:13 pm
My friend shared the Karen Chee clip with the comment that it was well done but more vulnerable and I cannot handle any vulnerability right now with how I’m feeling about the rash of amped up racist violence this week, but Amber Ruffin’s “How did we get here?” segment was good and even made me laugh. I didn’t think anything could make me laugh about this week, not today, so my hat is off to her because it was much needed.
That early retirement post was intriguing to me given conversations in the past few years. A fair number of people (of a certain demographic, certainly) have dismissed the need to plan for good healthcare in early retirement, and dismissed those of us who were concerned about planning for it, actively presuming they’d be able to get all the healthcare they needed if they ever needed it. I was never comfortable with that assumption and thought it was only a matter of time before someone was caught by surprise by how bodies can require way more help than we expected.
March 21, 2021 at 6:55 am
Yeah, amber ruffins entire set of how did we get here should be required watching. She’s the first thing I watch/do on Saturday mornings so I’m often a week behind on linking her here.