Steve brings us a story that may put the lie to the idea that Gen Z has, broadly speaking, the attention span of a goldfish. Because one teacher is offering a class on personal finances to sold-out registrations and standing room only attendance. NO WOKE ALLOWED! Maybe the problem isn’t their attention span at all. Maybe Gen Z is, like all of us, looking to learn about USEFUL things taught in an INTERESTING way?
Join our elite squad of anti-elitists by becoming a Citizen Producer today: https://billwhittlecom.wpenginepowered.com/register/
23 replies on “Things They Want To Learn”
I ended up with a history minor in college along with the engineering major. I didn’t intend to, going in, but the history teacher in my freshman year was so entertaining, I had to take all his courses. Since then, my wife and both of my sons took at least a year of his courses and enjoyed them as well. He’s retired now and attending international events featuring ancient weaponry such as trebuchets.
Im kind of fascinated by medieval weapons, armor,etc. I know the difference between trebichets,catapults, scorpions, and manogonels. Also the Difference between ransuers, spetums, and partisans. (And a lot of pole weapons)
Have a long tooth dagger, bastard sword, long sword, rapier, short sword, two two handed swords, claymore sword, spiked horsemans flail, and my zombie apocalypse weapon of choice, my war hammer.
Have you seen the annual trebuchet contests? They’re a blast from the past. You would also enjoy the series by an author I know, Tom Vetter. He weaves the weaponry into the narrative, which is medieval anyway. Check him out at tomvetterbooks.com.
Scott: I had a pair of Clark’s sandals that I wore for over 20 years. I wore them out, basically they broke apart. I have never found another sandal that lasted like those. Of course being in Canada most sandals only get about 4-5 months usage, even if you are foolhardy and try walking on the icy sidewalks in April. I have seen KEEN shoes before, they just were never in my price range. There are over 20 stores that sell them here. I think I might have to consider getting a pair, because 20 years for one pair of sandals, that I wore until they split apart is a good investment at my age. They might outlast me.
Weird, I had to turn off my VPN to post.
My greatest teacher was my high school chemistry/physics teacher. We learned how to make wine and distill the ETOH from it. We had competitions to see who could make the best black powder and gun cotton (he drew the line at nitroglycerin!). You had to be, virtually, on you death bed before you would consider missing one of his classes. I have 6 years of college on top of 12 years of public school and he was by far the best teacher I ever had. I learned how to learn because he made it fun, interesting and in many ways, practical! Of course I had my last class with him 51 years ago!
Since history came up in this show and Daily Wire doesn’t seem to have a comment section, I’ll put this here. It pains me greatly to dispute Bill on history but in the What We Saw episode Playa Giron Bill states that President Kennedy’s father had been Mayor of Boston, this is an error. It was his maternal grandfather John (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald, Rose’s father, who had been Mayor of Boston. Joseph P. Kennedy never was, he was a banker businessman.
This is one of your best R/A’s.
This highlights the differences between education and indoctrination. Those differences share much in common with the difference between talking at people and talking with people.
My little sister used to be terrible about this. She would listen to people not to hear what they were saying but to try to figure out what she was going to say when it was ‘her turn’. This makes for terrible conversation. Rather than respond, amplify or contribute to what someone else was saying, rather than agree with, disagree with or use some instance in her personal experience to contribute to the conversation — She would be trying to figure out what she could say that would make her look good, or at least what she thought would make her look good.
She doesn’t need to do that. She’s very smart, she was the DBA (Database Administrator) for a major defense contractor for decades. That’s a job you don’t rise to by being a dummy.
She’s also a very good, kind hearted person. (She got upset yesterday when I cleaned out the sparrow nests in my martin house, destroyed the sparrow eggs and burned all their nesting materials. “Poor little sparrows” she said. Sparrows are vermin.)
In short, she has no reason to try to elevate herself in someone else’s eyes. Odds are very good she is as smart and as good as them anyway. She’s a way, way nicer person than me.
It took a long time to get this across to her. At least part of the reason for that is she wasn’t listening to what I said, she was trying to figure out what she was going to say.
It’s kind of a weird phenomenon. People who have the merit to think of themselves as being as good as anyone else sometimes do not embrace that image of themselves. It’s almost as if they have some sort of inferiority complex when in fact there’s nothing inferior about them. On the other hand … People who are total douchebags almost always think they’re way better than anyone else. It is a quirk of the human condition and it’s something I’m always aware of and looking for.
A subset of those douchebags is people who do listen to what you have to say but with the express purpose of finding something to criticize you over. That’s not just garden variety douchebaggery, it’s the mark of a childish, undeveloped intellect.
So has anyone else noticed that pretty much everyone on the Left generally falls into those categories of douchebaggery? *
The way this applies to the school thing discussed in this video is that there are demonstrably a lot of young people hungry for real instruction. Those young people are not stupid, if you talk at them in an effort to indoctrinate them rather than educate them — They’ll go along with what you’re saying in order to get good grades. This will give you the false impression you’re succeeding even though you really are not.
As Steve makes a clear point of, given the opportunity to learn genuinely useful information those same young people will jump at the chance. In proportionately large numbers.
I would go so far as to say that if you audited any given class you’d find the Leftist indoctrinators talking at their students not with them. You’d probably also find that the better teachers who are trying to convey genuine information do a lot more talking with than at their students.
That tells us that there is a large target audience for Conservative values among the younger generations. What we need to do is be mindful of talking with not at them.
(*There are people who claim to be on the Right who do that too, but they’re not really genuine Conservatives. They are Leftists if not in doctrine then in tactics and mentality. They just for whatever reason landed in Conservatism by accident.
This is a type, it’s the same sort of problemed personality masked with a different doctrine. You can’t get through that mask with them anymore than you can with a genuine Leftist spouting Leftist doctrines. SSDD because — When your nominal ‘friend’ employs the same underhanded, sneaky tactics and trite fallacies as your enemies do, he’s not really your friend and he’s not really on your side.
He’s on his own side, inside his own unreachable bubble. Which is egocentrism and egocentrism is a symptom of the failure to mature. Children are all egocentric to some degree, normal people grow out of that unless something prevents that growth.
He’ll be convinced that you’re egocentric too, which is just another failure to mature. He’ll think he’s better than other people even though he’s clearly not and he can’t see that. He probably cannot see his own false sense of superiority either. That’s not real superiority, it’s an inferiority complex hiding behind the mask. You will see this behavior a lot in addicts who still abuse substances, or who have ceased using substances but still exhibit the arrested mental and social development of an addict.
Drug and alcohol counselors and people who have a need to are trained to look for this kind of thing. This behavior is due to the fact that while they may be “clean” they have refused to address the personality issues that made them addicts in the first place.
This behavior is not strictly confined to addicts but is most easily recognized in them. Other people may do this sort of thing too. If they don’t have a substance abuse history they’re usually much more clever at masking this but it’s still there. The reasons why they do them is not important to others. It’s enough to know about this kind of thing and understand what’s happening when you run across this. )
How about a class that would teach the students how to be free of their conditioning. Oh wait, we can’t have that. The pillars of civilazation (religion, government, business & society) all require thet the people be conditioned in order to maintain their control over the masses. Sorry bad idea. We will just continue to destroy the minds of the children so we can control them.
Are you saying that any conditioning is bad simply because it’s conditioning? I would disagree strongly with that. There’s good, advantageous conditioning and there’s bad, disadvantageous conditioning.
Remove the good conditioning and what you get is mayhem and chaos. Accentuate the bad conditioning and what you get is the problems we are now facing as a species. Problems that may destroy humanity.
For example;
People are conditioned not to kill each other in anger or for personal gain. Those whom that conditioning has failed have no such inhibition. We do not admire their independent spirit for shrugging off such conditioning. We call them criminals and punish them. Even then and though it does so poorly, that punishment is meant to reinforce the conditioning not to go around denying others the life that they would not have denied to themselves.
If they do things like that, it is justice for them to suffer the same thing they have done to others. That’s the meaning of the word ‘justice’, that you suffer the wrong or for the wrong you have done to others. This concept of ‘justice’ is also a result of conditioning.
Places where that conditioning is not predominant do not automatically spring from savagery to a modern, civil form of organization. I’ve been some places in the world where savagery is predominant and open. You do not want that sort of thing here, take my word for it or not.
Children are conditioned to be quiet and attentive in classrooms. Or at least they were back when I was going to school. Today, where that conditioning no longer obtains genuine education has become nearly impossible.
The problem is not that “the pillars of civilization” are negative conditioning. The problem is what we choose to be the pillars of our civilization. What you say, if I understand you correctly and I’m willing to allow that I may not have gotten your correct meaning, sounds all grand and lofty. In practice it’s just the opposite if applied to any and all conditioning.
That is the same lofty sounding caliber of nonsense as “Men can throw off their manhood and become women”. I don’t agree with that kind of thinking at all in either case, yours or that one. It’s a destructive viewpoint.
Education is in itself a form of conditioning. One ‘conditions’ one’s mind to think rationally, quickly, usefully, etc. It seems you have some unspoken/unwritten definition of that word that is guiding your incomplete commentary.
If schools were actually interested in teaching real life skills, they would have already been doing so. How to change them from progressive indoctrination centers is the real question and challenge.
When I was writing marketing copy for a very wide variety of products and services, some very technical, someone at a business meeting remarked that I must know a lot about the product. I said that I often do a lot of research but the key to selling is knowing enough to connect your customer and his or her needs to the product. In order to do that, you first have to sell yourself.
1) history — I like to be able to relate events to dates and do so in the proper sequence. If your description is “squishy” about the dates*, blurring over those details, I lose context and relationships that I want to have to better understand just what is or was happening. Some historical descriptions are so invested in providing a “narrative” about a particular political family or whatever, so they cite events that might be at least years if not decades apart, and then act like they are closely connected or interrelated (say the decline of Rome and the series of emperors involved over that period). But those events are only related in hindsight, but were not necessarily related so much for the people while living through them, who of course did not know what was coming next. [Civil War 2.0, anyone?]
*I find myself always translating the “X th century” into the “X – 1 hundreds” [18th century = 1700’s, etc.] so I can keep track on a date basis.
2) courses of general background useful for adult life — besides basic finance, perhaps this should now include basic aspects of medicine and what various blood or other testing shows, auto repair, computers and networks, job searches, etc. Exactly what topics to cover to what depth I leave to others to define, as there is probably no well established consensus, beyond general agreement that such “life courses” might be useful to high schoolers. But time is limited and using it for this level of education means other also desired courses are not presented.
And yet, as Keith mentioned below, most of this top level information is available a few clicks away, if you can believe what you see, and are interested enough to make that query when needed.
Dodgeball! Ok, here we go.
I was horrible in gym in general, especially most sports. (not bad at pitching and getting walked a lot, but otherwise….)
As a nerd, I was a target, and was not good at getting people in dodgeball. Most people like me used the “dodge” part and just tried to avoid getting hit. Not me. If they threw at me, No matter how hard, I went to catch it. Got good at it. Did it sting? You bet it did!
But that meant the thrower was out. They hated that. It meant, after a while, they stopped trying to hit and hurt me. They just caught what I threw.
Less pain for me overall. And occasionally, I actually was the winner. Normally catching the ball thrown by the big bully trying to hurt everyone. That was painful, but satisfying.
Lesson to learn? Do the unexpected.
In my desolate part of America, dodge ball was known as killer ball. I loved the game because it required quickness which I had. I too learned to embrace the pain of catching the ball.
We simply called it “kill ball”.
I’m a proud Pegleg Stuyvesant grad- circa 1968.
I never worked harder there and learned more than I did in four years of college, dental school, and law school.
This would have been a welcome and needed added course then. Congrats to my alma mater.
Well Scott, you’ve sold me. Where do I sign up for your course?
Anyone teacher who can manage to make history boring should be fired on the spot! It’s almost criminal.
Great episode fellas!
Amusing anecdote about sales…I was a guitar salesman in a music store in NW Indiana, and downtown Chicago in the early 90’s. I couldn’t grasp the sales ‘technics’ (gimmicks) the owner tried to teach me. I was more like Scott mentioned. Focused on what the person wanted, not what we needed to get off the floor.
Apparently, the method worked pretty well. I managed to sell an old acoustic-electric Gibson bass we had listed at $1200, for $300 and 15 backstage passes for everyone who worked there, as well as the customers that were in the store that day, to Bad Company and Ted Nugent playing across the street. I sold that bass to Derek St Holmes, who was buying it for Mike Lutz…both in Ted Nugent’s band. The thing is, we only paid $75 for the guitar. I didn’t know that at the time.
It’s a longer story overall, but the customers in the store at that time, didn’t ask for it the backstage passes. By thinking of them, they then insisted on my getting any commissions in the future. And it helped that my boss was thrilled we gained public attention from celebs, and made a good profit…lol.
Thanks Gentlemen! A really great episode!
I think it was ten years ago, while I had volunteered to help my oldest son move from his first house to his second, that I learned something positive about how my son’s generation learns. At the time it was not even an approach of which I was aware. The refrigerator didn’t fit the door through which we planned to move it out of the kitchen. Not even blinking, he opened his computer, found out how to take off the door – a very complicated procedure with the ice/water maker ,et al, – followed the directions, and made it look like it was no big deal. I had no clue at that time that so many “instructions” were only a click or two away from what used to be a big stop sign to me.
There is no excuse to not being able to balance your check-book or understand a mortgage. Good information is only a click away with reputable teachers. I try asking how to do things daily.
That was absolutely great. In a just world this would be your most highly viewed episode ever. Great topic, Steve. And excellent discussion all-around.
I said on the PJ thread that I have actually been talking to our local HS Principal, with whom I go to church, to teach a Personal Finance class, along the lines of Dave Ramsey but a little broader.
But I like your ideas as well. Selling and history.
Bill – DW doesn’t give discounts to teachers, which is a big mistake. Your WWS videos should be seen by HS kids. Tell Jeremy to let kids and HS teachers in for a reduced fee.