Teaching us about the "real world"

[Racket_Man]

My dad used to try and teach me manual labor that way. He'd give me some randomly pointless task like take all the firewood off the wall and throw it into a pile, and then restack it. For no reason. Not to air it out or move it to a better spot. Just because he felt I needed to have a good notion of what manual labor was like so I could make it in the real world.

But all it wound up doing was telling me "Oh, manual labor is STUPID work. Ok, manual labor is what you do for absolutely no reason!" and I had an overall resentment in life for any overly physically demanding job.

I quoted this because I have in the past had some non-personal experience with this.

25 years ago I was an AM for a Pizza Hut in a wealthly area (Ya know when a 2 car garage was "summin it" and the houses were at least 300 to 400K.) the parents (fathers were usually some Sr VP) "made" their childern get a "job" at PH to get them some experience in the "real world". most of these kids (not all though) did not make it more than 2 weeks. just too stressful and hard on them.

Got to hear wonderful phrases like

"Oh the MAID does all of the veggie grating and cooking for us. WHY DO I have to do that here????"

"OH I am only here for beer money"

"OH my Dad wants me to learn the value of a dollar." (while stating how much "allowence" he gets a week)

"OH my Daddy is going to buy me a Corvette this summer if I work for a while" (and yes he did come driving up in a brand spankin new Corvette a few weeks after he quit lasted about 3 months)

"I really DO NOT WANNA BE HERE but DADDY IS MAKING ME WORK SO I KNOW WHAT MANUAL LABOR IS!!!!!"

[insertNameHere]

Oh I forgot my favorite conversation from college. A girl was pissed at me because my dad is a cop and that must be the only reason I manged to get a warning for doing something stupid in my truck.

Her mother taught at the university, because of this she did not have to pay tuition, which a single semester of is significantly more than when i actually did get a ticket and our insurance went up for the next 5-10 years.

I really think I would have rather had much more "free" money then the POSSIBILITY of avoiding a ticket, that is really just as good as anyone else. Actually, since my dad has been around for about 25 years he is well known on departments other than his which depending on who it is can be an instant ticket along with extra citations instead of a "say hello to your father for me"


I really think she would benefit from understanding the real world a little bit better. and um I wish daddy would buy me a sports car too since I graduated college, ain't gonna happen.

[smileyeagle1021]

25 years ago I was an AM for a Pizza Hut in a wealthly area (Ya know when a 2 car garage was "summin it" and the houses were at least 300 to 400K.) the parents (fathers were usually some Sr VP) "made" their childern get a "job" at PH to get them some experience in the "real world". most of these kids (not all though) did not make it more than 2 weeks. just too stressful and hard on them.

Oh, when I worked at Carl's Jr. I hated those people. I was there because I was saving up for my senior trip, for college, and to pay for my car, and of course a little spending money. My mother actually didn't want me to work, she had no problem paying everything for me. I decided that while I would not turn down her charity when I needed it (which I have needed more often than I'd like), I was not going to abuse it by taking it when I could just as easily do something for myself.
Needless to say, nearly half the people I worked with that were also in school never lasted more than a month, and the only reason they were there was because their parents forced them to get a job so they could have "experience". And a huge number of them would bitch that fast food was beneath them, fast food was for the poor kids, they should be in something much more high class, like the mall in a retail place

[Boozy]

The only way a parent is going to teach their child "the value of hard work" is to make that hard work valuable to them. They have to cut their children's allowance off.

There's no point in buying your son a Corvette after he works part-time for a few months. That doesn't teach him the value of a dollar.

How the hell do rich people get rich when they're so dumb all the time?

[Stormraven]

Part of it is the desire to give their children 'what they never had'. It was a fairly common thing in the late 19th century for a family to go 'from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations'. Meaning that the grandfather was working as a laborer or blue collar worker, the dad got rich through a combination of his efforts and his father's, and the son, raised with 'what they never had' spent it all and had to go back to blue collar work.

[Fryk]

There's no point in buying your son a Corvette after he works part-time for a few months. That doesn't teach him the value of a dollar.

I always wondered if these parents failed math. The value of a dollar?? Your kid worked for 3 months at minimum wage! That'd be (estimated at) maybe $3000. So you've taught them that a Corvette should cost about $3000??

[Giggle Goose]

"Oh the MAID does all of the veggie grating and cooking for us. WHY DO I have to do that here????"

"OH I am only here for beer money"

"OH my Dad wants me to learn the value of a dollar." (while stating how much "allowence" he gets a week)

"OH my Daddy is going to buy me a Corvette this summer if I work for a while" (and yes he did come driving up in a brand spankin new Corvette a few weeks after he quit lasted about 3 months)

"I really DO NOT WANNA BE HERE but DADDY IS MAKING ME WORK SO I KNOW WHAT MANUAL LABOR IS!!!!!"

LMAO ain't it the truth...when I was a senior in HS I had to train this girl at the restaurant I was hostessing at. Apparently, this girl had crashed her mom's Benz or something during a party when she didn't have a license, and her mom was making her get a job to "teach her a lesson." Except that her MOM would always call in sick for her, or call ME or one of my coworkers if her wittle precious wanted to swith shifts with me. At that point, she's no help at all! Luckily, I graduated and got a part-time job elsewhere when I moved out, but I heard she didn't last too long after that.

As for the OP, I think the instructor may be referring to those kids whose parents pay for their college and just think college is a 24/7 party. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of responsible kids who were grateful to have help from their parents and took their studies seriously, but I'm talking about the kids who would come to class hungover all the time and whine that their parents weren't sending them enough money. Those are the kids that the OP's instructor is probably ranting about. Even so, that's no excuse to punish the whole class because of a group of ungrateful brats.

[muses_nightmare]

As for the OP, I think the instructor may be referring to those kids whose parents pay for their college and just think college is a 24/7 party. Don't get me wrong, I know plenty of responsible kids who were grateful to have help from their parents and took their studies seriously, but I'm talking about the kids who would come to class hungover all the time and whine that their parents weren't sending them enough money. Those are the kids that the OP's instructor is probably ranting about. Even so, that's no excuse to punish the whole class because of a group of ungrateful brats.

Actually most of us are older, I don't think anyone is under 20, and the average age is like 23 - 24. I haven't seen anyone who just lives off mommy and daddy or whatever. I'm one of the lucky ones in that my mom is paying for me, including my half of living expenses, but she's not just filling my account with money, and we aren't rich, and I've told her that if I needed to get a job I would, she doesn't want me getting a job because she wants me to concentrate on school.

Our classes are quite small (average about 14 people, usually less), and we're all a pretty tight knit group at school. When my instructor rants he talks about the entire class like we aren't doing work, and like we don't know what work is. The people he seems to not like aren't people who don't do their work, and their work is actually pretty good from what I've seen. He's just decided he doesn't like them. He's done this with every class we've had with him (which has been like 3). I do hope something comes of the complaint against him, because I know if they ask me about it I'm going to tell them exactly what I think of him.

[jackfaire]

Part of it is the desire to give their children 'what they never had'. .

Interesting twist on that until I was 11 my family was poor. My dad graduated college that year and after he was hired by a large corporation we shot up to upper middle class.

Part of my hesitancy to go to college, "because that is what your supposed to do" is that my dad himself went to college and acheived the "American Dream" and ended his life miserable.

[insertNameHere]

By the time I had a professor who was actually offering a lesson about the real world I took the easy way out because I figured he was full of shit like the rest of the profs who gave their BS real world lessons that turned into figuring out how to manipulate their grading to not have to work so hard and still get an A. In retrospect the things the last prof was offering would have really helped if I wasn't so overwhelmed with stuff from my major and him requiring more work for a 3credit hour class than my 9hours of 400 level coursework combined

[jackfaire]

It was a college professor that agreed with my decision to drop out and focus on working and writing. She never said squat about the "Real World"

[smileyeagle1021]

I've had exactly three professors who have talked about "the real world" that I've taken seriously. One was an accounting professor who had retired two years earlier from a 25 year career working for the state of Utah (teaching governmental accounting), the second was a tax accounting teacher who owned her own CPA firm preparing individual tax returns, the third was a cost accounting professor who owned his own consulting company that came up with costing systems for companies.
Funnily enough, the real world each of them described sounded nothing like the real world any of my other professors would describe... fancy that

[muses_nightmare]

Funnily enough, the real world each of them described sounded nothing like the real world any of my other professors would describe... fancy that

Yep, one of my instructors is like that. He has serious experience in design, and was one of the Art Directors on a pretty big magazine (Adbusters if you're curious), and his idea of real world experience is us going out to get inspiration at book stores, galleries etc. Something I can totally get on board with, because staring at a computer seems to suck any ideas away from the realm of useful. He encourages us to have a life rather than lock ourselves away during the 11 weeks we're in school (one instructor actually told us to tell our friends we're busy for that time, seriously)

[Wingates_Hellsing]

I had a "real world" teacher that I believed once. He was our new TV/Multimedia teacher who had been hired relatively fresh off his career first as a camera man for various TV news channels/networks (which he bounced around among) and then as a freelance camera man.

This guy always had his 'rant/lecture of the day' about how what we were learning applies and things that we should know/ are interesting.

[jackfaire]

I had a professor in Ineterpersonal Relationships class (filled the communications requirement) who would use the show Friends to demonstrate various principles she was trying to teach us.