Wednesday, August 10, 2016

waste

I don't think promoting your friends 'music' is a very useful practice its a waste of this space which could be used for real articles on higher education like this one.


- unknown sender



11 comments:

  1. Thanks for this. I will make that link clickable when I get on a computer, but also feel free to send me any commentary you'd like about the article and a user name. Cheers.

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  2. I am not the original poster.

    Here is a clickable link.

    Commentary: apparently, "realbarticles" are videos.

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  3. Well, I think there's room for both (STEAM and all that; besides, it's summer vacation for many of us, and Cal's music videos are cool).

    Commentary: I didn't actually watch the video (text remains my preferred form of information transfer, in part because I don't have the fastest internet connection), but it appears to encourage parents to talk to their students about the possible consequences of (over)indulging in alcohol before heading off to college. That strikes me as a good idea, but as with sexual assault, education efforts need to start much earlier than age 18 to be effective. Like a number of college presidents, I'd also be in favor of lowering the drinking age, in hopes of decreasing both the forbidden-fruit appeal of drinking and the unintended consequences of the higher drinking age (e.g. pre-gaming before dry events, abandoning dangerously-drunk friends in perilous situations for fear of getting in trouble because the potential rescuers are also drunk).

    In short, as with many things, I tend to feel both we and our students would be better off if the students were treated as the (emerging) adults they are (and if they had been treated as the earlier-in-the-emerging-process adults they were in high school, and even before).

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    Replies
    1. Hmm. . .there's supposed to be a link to the Amethyst Initiatve above (in reference to college presidents who believe the drinking age should be lowered), but it isn't working. Let's try again.

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  4. That's a real buzzkill.

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  5. * friend's
    * "music"
    * . It's
    * waste of space that

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  6. Am I the only one here old enough to remember back to the mid-'70s, when a number of states lowered their drinking age to 18 or 19? (The idea at the time was that, if a person was old enough to be drafted and die in Vietnam, they were old enough to drink.) The drunk-driving-fatality rates for 18-to-21-year-olds promptly went WAY up. So far up, that Congress threatened to withhold federal highway funds from states that didn't raise their drinking age back to 21. Hence the current legal age.

    Late adolescents are foolish enough even when they're sober. I see nothing to be gained by allowing them to legally make themselves even more foolish.

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    Replies
    1. You're not the only one.

      A hybrid is to make the "drinking age" different from the "purchasing age". The legal guardians of a minor over a certain age may supply that minor with a reasonable amount of alcohol to be consumed in their presence. So, e.g., a 14-year-old could legally partake in a small glass of wine at the family dinner. It of course helps if said guardians model responsible consumption rather than drinking as an excuse to crazygonuts.

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  7. Thanks, OPH. I don't think I'm all that old, until I start counting on my fingers and realize that my own kids are almost as old as the typical brand-new proffie.

    Probably the kids who do know something about responsible drinking by the time they get to college are the very ones whose parents taught them at home how to go about it in a civilized manner.

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