Trying to Stop being Clever

Still thinking about education, it's funny; when I was a kid, I didn't care about grades. I didn't put in any effort to raise or maintain grades. I didn't even pay attention to what they were. There are a couple of factoids I retained from my middle school years, and they're not anything to be proud of. Now, back in college since 1995, I started out getting good grades. I took classes that interested me, and I had little trouble getting As in them.  Then I started taking general ed classes, with a goal of eventually getting a degree. These classes started to challenge me. Political Science, Economics: these took real effort to succeed in. But once I did, and then I got back into taking classes I liked (I had decided to major in music by then), I once again had an easy time maintaining my grades; Music Fundamentals was very enlightening and enthralling. The other music classes didn't feel like as much of a challenge as some of the gen ed classes because music is

In a world with 8 billion people, or in a country with 330 million, it's impossible for everyone to get everything they (think they) want. We're always going to have some reason to grumble, even if we have to make something up. For many, complaining is part of our personality. We can't take every dissatisfaction in our lives and treat it as a life-or-death issue. I think personalized news feeds are one of the worst things we can do to a nation. If we're not all seeing the same stories, we'll never be on the same page. In the interest of not losing their users, websites filter out anything we aren't predetermined to want to see, to keep us comfortable and scrolling and seeing their ads. This shields us from the uncomfortable fact that things are going on that we don't like, and that people, who are otherwise just like us, have different opinions than us. I've blogged before about how we need a common enemy to rally us together, to unite for our own good.

Thinking about school this morning, for some reason I started to compare myself to my parents. I'm not a college graduate. Soon I will have an undergraduate degree, but not even the higher one, just the lowest, easiest one to get: the Associate Degree. I guess I will officially be an associate.  While I tend to look down on this degree as barely significant in the grand scheme, I am wrangling a little bit of pride in the accomplishment. That's when I started to compare myself to my parents. With an Associate degree, I've essentially matched my father's level of education; he earned his AS long ago, and had some supplemental education classes, I believe. So, technically, I have a broader general education than he received from school, because of the concentration of core/GE classes required between the Arts and Sciences degrees. In the "school of life" I believe I also have a broader education than him, because he has limited his experiences to mainly things he