What would you teach in the school of life?
 

Just navel-gazing at the notion that I wouldn't give up my college info, in the other thread... got me to thinking what value it had in general, and what I didn't know going into "real life" -- what they didn't teach me.

Life 101 syllabus

What would be the topics of any particular class?

- Mortgages, how they really work
- Some People Are Just Looking To Screw You
- Personality Types: How and Why Not to Be an Asshole

Credit Cards, Who Benefits, Who Pays. Compulsory course, Passing grade required before graduation. No Exceptions, no excuses.

The Importance of Showing Up On Time.
-- Know when you're expected
-- Plan ahead
-- Allow time for Sleep and other unexpected delays

Knowledge 101
- identify what you know and what you don't know.
- how to handle this knew found information
- identify what you can do and what you should trust others to do for you
- how to identify those that are worthy of your trust

Dads vs Jobs 101

- the number of "dads" must be equal or less than the number of jobs.
- how to properly ensure that this rule is always followed

*maybe substituted for:

-"Two Dads" rule 101
- there cannot be two dads in the family while you still seek support from your dad. if this rule is broken, your dad must kill you, thus returning balance to the universe.

How To Work for a Horse's Ass.

(This was inspired by my soon-to-be 18 nephew, who quit his part-time job at Chick-Fil-A a couple years back. When I asked him why, he said, "The manager was a horse's ass.")

(He's reporting to Ft. Benning, GA this weekend to start basic training. I wonder if he'll start pining for Chick-Fil-A at some point.)

Kill Your TV: how to cultivate an appreciation for the arts, and why it matters.

20" rims vs. Health Insurance: How to understand and evaluate critical decision.

Life beyond the internet
-- How to communicate without a computer (speech, writing, body language)
-- English (grammar, spelling, punctuation, capitalization)
-- How to distinguish what few things deserve an immediate response and what can actually wait until morning
-- Yes, they *would* print it on the internet *even if* it wasn't true
-- Extra Credit: Compare and contrast video games and other satisfactory forms of entertainment that don't require electricity

Priceless.

How To Raise Kids, Because They Don't Come With An Owner's Manual, And Every One Is Unique

Relationships: If The Good Doesn't Outweigh The Bad, Get The F Out.

Either this is now a History requirement, or it just became compulsory. I can't decide which.

An Appreciation of Time Scales
-- The Miracle of Compound Interest and Why It Works
-- Leaving 10 minutes early versus Doing 50mph in a School Zone
-- 4 years in school versus 40 years at work
-- The Myth of Studying Faster
-- Pacing yourself, or How to Make the Money Last Until Payday
-- Extra Credit: Imagine yourself as an "old person". Describe yourself in detail. Bonus points if you choose an age greater than 35.

Cutting the Cord: Your children are grown and need to fight their own fights - EVEN WHEN THEY ARE 18! Taught by numerous college administrators.

Just because you're stupid doesn't mean you have a right to sue: An indepth look at how we should use the legal system and how the legal system should not be used when we don't know how to use a cup and spill all over ourselves.

BigV, I love the credit card class idea. I wish I took that when I was 18. I am forever hounding students not to fall into the credit card trap. They think I'm full of shit until its too late.

--Everything is NOT About You

--Why Everything is NOT About You

--That Really Nice, Shy Person You Are Dating Is Probably A Serial Killer

The Little Man in the Canoe and you
-If you want to get her don't bite, flick, pinch, or otherwise abuse.
-If you want to keep her, the little man must be happy.

Self-Expression 101. Topics covered:
-- tattoos: nursing homes will one day be full of old ladies with those tribal thingies on their saggy asses. Many of these ladies will also have forked tongues. Just so you know.

-- Finding Yourself: sure, go ahead and backpack across Tibet. But the mirrors over there show the same thing as the one in your bedroom.

-- Your favorite band will one day be an object of ridicule. If anyone remembers them. (coincides with tattoo section)

-- Your poetry sucks. So do your lame ass drawings of elves.

-- Even if they don't suck, no one cares. Really, get over yourself.

noodle-you've pretty much killed all my dreams...damn you.

How To Pick A Major That You Might Actually Use One Day

How To Accept The Fact That You Might Not Get The Job You Want Just Because You Have A Degree

Birth Control 101. (I am really thinking about teaching this one -- with Planned Parenthood)

No, Opening Up a Box Isn't Cooking -- basic knife skills, spices and their uses, eating green things won't kill you

Professionalism 101 - I Don't Have to Like You, I Just Have to Work with You

mine too. i speak from firsthand experience, for the most part. :lol:
well, not the tibet part.

Thank you.

I, too, have dreams of teaching a similar course to high school students. It will come in three parts, separated by gender:

BOYS:
1.) Why a reversible vasectomy is the best $400 you will ever invest.
2.) Why you will not, in fact, have any control over what she decides to do with the baby.
3.) Why she has the legal right to take all your money and teach your children that you're Satan.

GIRLS:
1.) How to get yourself a prescription for the Pill without your parents knowing
2.) How to find a good adoptive family.
3.) How to ignore your female relatives' sentimental bullshit about "not giving up blood" regardless of how unprepared you are to be a mother.

How to Fail. undergrad and grad levels

How to Forgive. undergrad and grad levels

Understanding Your Motives. undergrad level

The Value of Being Lost. grad level

1-You have your degree and still don't know Jack Shit about life, love or how to survive.
2-You have your Masters and know even less.
3-You have your Doctorate and can't function without a personal assistant.
:rolleyes:

So many good ones but, having grown up in spitting distance of NYC I cannot overstae the importance of:

Great pizza, good pizza, and shitty pizza; How to tell the difference.

Great chinese food, good chinese food, shitty chinese food.

And for upper levels, why you don't eat Japanese food at a chinese restaurant and why you never eat sushi if you are not walking distance from the ocean.

1) Your professors lives are more screwed up than yours, something to keep in mind when they get preachy.

2) Your degree is just a piece of paper, don't let it decide the kind of work you do.

3) Dream a little bit and don't always do as you're told.

--Yes, You Still Have to Deal with Real People
--Beers of the World
--Picking Up a Woman Without Either of You Being Under the Influence of Alcohol

Life isn't fair 101 - Even if you SHOULD be King or Queen of the Universe, you're not. How not to take your bitterness about this fact out on small children, other drivers on the highway, and the clerk at the grocery store.
Extra Credit - Understanding that your teachers are not out to get you because you have to read the textbook or learn how to write a simple English sentence.

Real World 310 - Don't assume that just because someone smiles at you on your first date, they're your soul mate. Slow down. The children you'll never conceive will thank you.

Employment 205 - The boss is always fucked. You still have to be professional, regardless of this. One day, YOU may be the boss. Or not.

Reality 312 - God does not live at the bottom of a fifth of Jim Beam. The world doesn't care if you had a bad childhood. The fact that you COULD have been a contender will not earn you the respect of actual contenders.

How to avoid being scammed.
If it's too good to be true, it probably is.
along those lines,

Advertisements, commercials, and general marketing:
How you are manipulated to buy and use products you don't need. How to read between the lines of ads. How to have a MIND OF YOUR OWN.

Doctors and healthcare: When to seek a second opinion. The truth about HMO's, conventional vs nutritional and alternative medicine, etc. Treat the body as a whole, and don't just put band-aids on your symptoms. The overuse of antibiotics, steroids, and how the pharmaceutical companies are running things.
Never blindly trust any authority.

At the same time, Scams in the natural health care industry: Does homepathy REALLY work? Chiropracters, acupuncturists, herbal supplements- which can help you and which are a scam?

What the garbage you are eating is REALLY doing to your body. How to make better choices and teach your children to eat healthy. Children did not evolve to eat french fries, chicken fingers, pizza, hot dogs and burgers. What you are is what you eat.

Required course for all pet owners:
The truth about commercial pet food, vaccinations and other poisins your pets are subjected to regularly, and how they are contributing to chronic illnesses, general poor health, obesity, behavior problems, etc.

How to REALLY drive: what Driver's Ed didn't tell you. How to avoid instigating road rage in others. How to treat your own road rage.

Don't stress out over things you can't control 101
The left lane is for PASSING 101

Haha! I love self-referential humor.

Why do people get so hung up, especially at the undergrad level, on working inside their major? It makes no sense, College/University isn't intended to be vocational training. However, this perception and the relatively low barrier to an undergraduate education is changing the function of post-secondary schools.


(note: I'm not talking about technical schools, vocational schools and not necessarily community colleges.)

I dunno, at my university your major wasn't terribly important but your college was. Each college had a separate application process in addition to the overall university application. Some majors, like mine, had application processes as well.

I had friends who got screwed because they applied University - College of Communications - Radio-TV-Film, and got accepted to the second but not the third. Except they didn't want to do Journalism or Advertising, so they had to wait a semester and then back out and re-apply to a different college to do something else.

Oh yeah,

How To Realize That Being Turned Down By A College Is Not The End Of The World

As a former employee of a pretty prestigious college, I would occasionally run into students or their parents who had been turned down by that college and who remained unaccountably bitter about it. I'm not saying it's not OK to be disappointed, but when you're halfway through the fall semester of your sophomore year at a university anybody would say is an excellent one, and you're still spitting nails because you didn't get into some other school that you had your heart set on, you really need to get over it.

The really amazing thing was that they felt compelled to unload on me about it. What did they think happened in the admissions office? "Yeah, this one looks great. But send his file over to Systems & Networking so Steve can check it out. We don't want to admit anybody without his say-so."

As an optional seminar to Steve's course,

If You Plan on Grad School, No One Gives a Crap Where You Did Your Undergrad Work

also, The Perpetual Student: Someday, You'll Wish For That 401k.

While your spouse is slaving away at an hourly job to feed the kids and pay the rent, you are in your 25th year of schooling, working on a dissertation entitled "Pre-Kievan Slavic Tribal Headgear and Its Impact on Catuvellaunian Oral History From 43-26 B.C."

Get a damn job. Maybe your kids would like to go to college someday?

Caveat to Clodfobble's course: Some prestigous schools will turn down excellent students for no other reason than that they came from a podunk school where the snooty, elite school's grad department didn't think the student got a good enough background for their royal highnesses. Happened to an outstanding student of mine at Fort Lewis College - straight A student and 800 scores on his GRE's. Colorado State University wouldn't accept him for one of their more prestigous programs just because he went to FLC. I don't what the aggies up at CSU were thinking. Buncha hicks!

The legacy of Al Yates, Ivy League wannabe. He and the ag board had delusions of grandeur, and completely gutted an industrial/agricultural vocational program that was world-renowned in favor of liberal arts greatness that they are totally unprepared to provide.

The Myth of Originality: dealing with subjects such as "i know you got your tee shirt at the goodwill and it doesn't make you special", "we all like spin magazine and it's obvious that you do too", "the fact that you discovered a band first does not make you interesting, nor the music they create good", "how to come up with an original viewpoint and present it intelligently","how to serve me my goddamn coffee without a hipster sneer and thereby avoid me dragging you across the counter and beating the emo out of you".

heh, sorry, i'm on a rant. this one too:

Masturbation: An Economic Comparison Between It And A $50 Dinner, $20 Shitty Movie, 1.5 Hours Of Uninteresting Conversation, And 0.2 Hours Of Mediocre Sex.

oh, and an important one:

Religion: Why No One Else Cares, Mind Your Own Goddamn Business

The Art of Listening
-- Identify the different levels of listening, from overhearing to attention to concentration
-- Why preparing your reply and active listening are mutually exclusive
-- The Value of Feedback
-- How to ask questions
-- Extra Credit: Show three or more examples of listening that do not require hearing.

Oh yeah, another:

--Searching Around for Gas that's $0.03 Cheaper is Retarded When You Spent $30 on Last Night's Dinner.

Personal Responsibility (Extracurricular, independent study required)
This course is a prerequisite for graduation to Adulthood.
-- Identifying "They" and "their" influence in your life
-- The variable reliablility of any mechanical system
-- Introduction to Plan B
-- The Importance and Value of Making a Mistake (prev titled "Acknowledgment")
-- Compare and contrast "Try, try again" and "Knowing when to quit" (prev titled "Balance")
-- How to avoid Neurosis (section waived for all students under 25)
-- Extra Credit: Demonstrate principles of PR in at least five of the following categories: Finance, Sexuality, Charity, Vehicle Maintenance, Physical Fitness, Family Relations, Civics (Local, State or National), Kindness to Strangers, Pet Care.

Idiots and incompetents on the job: recognizing and dealing with. One aspect of class will be identification of such among other students.

Optional material on the origins of such (nepotism, BS ability, school loyalty, EEO concerns).

Here's a fun one:
How to ask your friends and aquaintances to build a deck for you, without pay, because you are broke, while remembering not to talk about
a) Your recent vacation in switzerland
b) How you decided the extra 3 grand was worth it to get the composite decking material
c) How even though you bought the most expensive windows and bathroom fixtures, you felt they were a good value
and
d) That you are returning to switzerland for another go–around two months later and will be ready for them to start building the deck in the fall

Summa Cum Laude if you actually get anyone to build you a deck.

I can't wait for the cost-benefit analysis on that one. Do you go into the detailed comparison of modern on-line sources of, umm, visual stimulation, as compared to the more traditional glossy paper-based products?

I would follow this with:

The gift that keeps on giving: Why STDs will ruin your life
-- No, it's never a good idea
-- Understanding the inclination to lie, when intoxicated, about when you were last tested
-- A mathematical analysis of the Rule of 3 and how screwed you are after last weekend's one-night stand