Going to college after 10th grade

[lonewolf]

bam, I am not comfortable posting his name without his permission but I believe he was for real. I knew him for several years and knew people who had known him way back when. His prowess and history were legend in the West Texas oil patch.
He was in his fifties when knew him and I swear, I believe he could crush a pair of pliers with his grip.

I remember reading a newspaper article about a guy that had a 15 year long high school & college football career. It was probably the same guy.

Probably, can't be too many of them... He played HS football out around Andrews and Seminole and Big Spring. His company was located in Midland. I knew him in Fort Worth but, as I recall, he lived in Wichita Falls at that time.

[Cooter Brown]

bam, I am not comfortable posting his name without his permission but I believe he was for real. I knew him for several years and knew people who had known him way back when. His prowess and history were legend in the West Texas oil patch.
He was in his fifties when knew him and I swear, I believe he could crush a pair of pliers with his grip.

I remember reading a newspaper article about a guy that had a 15 year long high school & college football career. It was probably the same guy.

[lonewolf]

Leaving high school after 2 years!? HA!....I went to high school for 7 years. bEAT tHat.

I can't beat it Squak, but I knew a guy in Texas about thirty years ago who I believe can challege your academic longevity.

He played six years of HS football at various schools in the west Texas oil patch prior to WWII, (He was a Texas HS legend. Schools recruited his daddy to work in the oil fields around their town and nobody was fussy about counting years as long as they kept winning state championships) He played four years at West Point (which did not count against college eligibility in those days), four years at University of Texas and several years in the pros before going back to the oil patch where he started a successful service company.

Who was that?

bam, I am not comfortable posting his name without his permission but I believe he was for real. I knew him for several years and knew people who had known him way back when. His prowess and history were legend in the West Texas oil patch.
He was in his fifties when knew him and I swear, I believe he could crush a pair of pliers with his grip.

[bambam]

Leaving high school after 2 years!? HA!....I went to high school for 7 years. bEAT tHat.

I can't beat it Squak, but I knew a guy in Texas about thirty years ago who I believe can challege your academic longevity.

He played six years of HS football at various schools in the west Texas oil patch prior to WWII, (He was a Texas HS legend. Schools recruited his daddy to work in the oil fields around their town and nobody was fussy about counting years as long as they kept winning state championships) He played four years at West Point (which did not count against college eligibility in those days), four years at University of Texas and several years in the pros before going back to the oil patch where he started a successful service company.

Who was that?

[bambam]

Talk about retaining stuff like that, go up to the next 100 adults you see in the street downtown (any town) and ask them what a a subtrahend is. I'm pretty sure the vast majority will give you a blank stare, even though it's something that they were all taught at one time fairly early in their schooling.

Doh, I majored in math and I had to look up subtrahend. Not something we used much in college math courses.

[lonewolf]

Leaving high school after 2 years!? HA!....I went to high school for 7 years. bEAT tHat.

I can't beat it Squak, but I knew a guy in Texas about thirty years ago who I believe can challege your academic longevity.

He played six years of HS football at various schools in the west Texas oil patch prior to WWII, (He was a Texas HS legend. Schools recruited his daddy to work in the oil fields around their town and nobody was fussy about counting years as long as they kept winning state championships) He played four years at West Point (which did not count against college eligibility in those days), four years at University of Texas and several years in the pros before going back to the oil patch where he started a successful service company.

[Marlow]

I'm still too emotionally stunted to sit quietly when I often should.

You too?!

[Mennisco]

If my parents hadn't refused [repeatedly] to allow me to be accelerated, and if I hadn't gone through the silly 13 grades in Ontario, and if I hadn't become so bored with school by 7th grade that I'd remembered there might be a payoff, I'd have entered college by no later than end of 10th grade. Probably a good thing I didn't - I'm still too emotionally stunted to sit quietly when I often should.

:wink:

[SQUACKEE]

Leaving high school after 2 years!? HA!....I went to high school for 7 years. bEAT tHat.

[26mi235]

There is a myriad of non-calculus math subjects that students can/should learn in high school. A REALLY good handle on algebra and geometry, linear algebra (matrices and vectors), functions, number systems (rational, real, transcendental, etc...), complex numbers, and so forth.

We did cover all that in HS, before Calculus I and Differential Equations, and as long as it had real (in a humanities sense) numbers, I was fine. The problem arose in my first college class, Number Theory, which had NO numbers, just thetas and rhos and omicrons!

I think that unless the student is VERY GOOD (a real math whiz, as opposed to a very bright and motivated student), taking the above-HS-math classes in math will involve a more practical version of the courses and not the rigorous math of upper-class college math classes. As a result, the formality of classes like number theory is a very big jump and looks entirely different than what they had been doing before, whereas if they had taken Calc, DiffEq, etc in college they would have had more of a ramp up to the math theory. I felt like I did not have a real firm grasp on math until I took my grad micro and probability/stat courses. Suddenly things like 'sets of measure zero' [a lot of Analysis stuff, complex numbers,...] were very natural things that were important pieces of concepts in micro I was working at grasping.

By the way, I am not sure that my daughter is a natural for HS students taking college advanced math (i.e., beyond calc) because of the jump and the difference between math whiz and bright/motivated student.

[tandfman]

I agree with all of that, of course.

[Marlow]

Talk about retaining stuff like that, go up to the next 100 adults you see in the street downtown (any town) and ask them what a a subtrahend is.. . . isosceles.

The nice thing about teaching English is that they may forget the term 'dangling modifier' or 'pronoun-antecedent disagreement', but if they don't learn the concept, they will be at a distinct disadvantage in the business world, if (when) they have to write clear effective communications. At the higher echelons there is a premium placed on good writing skills. Being a good writer says, "I'm intelligent, well-educated, and I care how others perceive me."

[tandfman]

Talk about retaining stuff like that, go up to the next 100 adults you see in the street downtown (any town) and ask them what a a subtrahend is. I'm pretty sure the vast majority will give you a blank stare, even though it's something that they were all taught at one time fairly early in their schooling.

And if you do not teach high school geometry, tell me the last time you used the word (or even saw the word) isosceles.

I am not saying that these are useless elements of one's education, but there really are some things that most of us can get through life without, even though they are regarded as essential parts of the curriculum in elementary and secondary schools.

[Marlow]

There is a myriad of non-calculus math subjects that students can/should learn in high school. A REALLY good handle on algebra and geometry, linear algebra (matrices and vectors), functions, number systems (rational, real, transcendental, etc...), complex numbers, and so forth.

We did cover all that in HS, before Calculus I and Differential Equations, and as long as it had real (in a humanities sense) numbers, I was fine. The problem arose in my first college class, Number Theory, which had NO numbers, just thetas and rhos and omicrons!

[Pego]

There is a myriad of non-calculus math subjects that students can/should learn in high school. A REALLY good handle on algebra and geometry, linear algebra (matrices and vectors), functions, number systems (rational, real, transcendental, etc...), complex numbers, and so forth.

This is exactly the kind of math I recall absorbing in the fifties' Czechoslovakia. The ceiling was quadratic equations, analytical geometry and a solid level trigonometry. We did not get to calculus, that was already part of a college curriculum.

Not that I retained too much of it .