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From Each According To His Need

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neverborn

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I wonder what she's going to do when she applies for a job at a pharmacy and they require her to wear scrubs.  Will she complain that its her right to get fuzz in people's prescriptions?  Her right to appear unprofessional?

Just witnessed this today at CVS. My pharmacy tech that pulled my perscription was wearing an ornate hajab with the white labcoat. She honestly looked like one of the Imperial snow troopers from Return of the Jedi. The thing that ticked me off was when she tried to suggest a homeopathic remedy instead of taking the medicine I was prescribed. I did complain about that. I'd be happy if she said chew on some xyz root to help ward off colds but she out and out said the homeopathic was better and would save money.

I live in an area that is about 30% Indian/Pakistani and 30% Chinese. So you quit being shocked after a while the women wearing veils. You'll never see a woman wearing a full burka type getup and working somewhere. Her job is to be home and be a wife, not sell something at a store. It's the "moderate" Muslims you see that wear just the headress and normal clothes.

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I'm pretty used to hijabs too and it doesn't bother me being served by or working together with women who wear them. However in the case I mentioned, safety comes first and this can't be considered as a violation of a womans rights to express her faith.

I agree. If it calls for it safety wise I've got no problem banning loose clothing etc. We used to be required to remove our wedding bands when I did work as an electrician and we were required to be clean shaven (I had a beard before shaving it off) and had to wear the company mandated underwear and jumpsuit in a chemical plant we sub contracted at. The reason for the rings was you don't want ANYTHING that can conduct electricity if you can help it and the whole shaving thing was so we could safely use a breathing apparatus if need be. That plus hard hats. Needless to say, you wouldn't find a Sikh doing that job. I'm just surprised there haven't been more suits.

I know that the hard hat requirement in construction ended up in much controversy in Berlin since so many of the construction workers there are from Turkey or other Arab countries and wear head sraps.

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Hm.... I never thought colleges gave people grades for various "special" needs.

I guess I'm fortunate, my classes don't really take attendence into account for grade. Just how well you do on tests and labs and papers--the grades on those are final and irreversible. :)

Edited by Rainer
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Yes, it is amazing here at (community) college how 10% of my grade in some classes is based on attendance!!

In Australia we don't have college's. We have TAFE schools, which sounds like your American college's. What is the age group to attend college? I was told by one American that it depends on the State you are in. For interest sake here is Australian system of schooling and it applies to all states and Territory:

Age 4 go to kindergarten [i miss hand painting :thumbsup: ]

Age 4/5 to 10/11 go to primary school [prep [or grade 0] to grade 6]

Age 11/12 go to high school [Year 7 to Year 12]

Age 17/18 go to TAFE or University [Course average for TAFE is 1-2 years; degrees can take up to four years [Engineering is longest as far as I know].

You can of course leave school from Year 9 [Age 15/16] by law and go into a trade which means that you will go to TAFE for a little while as well.

Ash :lol:

Edited by Rearden
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When I was in college, I had been hospitalized for a while and, when I came back, found one of my classes (sociology) amde it impossible for me to think rationally about the subject matter. The fault was, in this case, entirely mine, because I was not really in full control of my mental processes. The professor, seeing that I was having trouble coping, told me that it was OK with him if I simpyl read the material on my own time and only came to class for the tests. That way I could absorb the content without getting caught up in a relatively pointless debate, lsoing my temper, and causing problems for the other students.

Oddly enough, i cam out of that class with an A. But it ended up not mattering as I was unable to return to school for my final year.

If there is a moral to this story, I don't honestly know what ti is.

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A little late to the attendance argument, but I thought I would add why colleges do what they do. It is out of pure capitalist desire to keep making money off of the majority of those who are used to high school’s mediocrity. In classes that do not require or enforce attendance, according to several of the teachers I have had over the years, most freshmen miss too many days to keep up with their work. As a result, the students blame the teachers, frats, sororities, sports and everything else, other than themselves, for falling behind. Why? Because they have been taught that nothing is ever their fault. While the problems they run into are of their own making it does create a problem for the rest of the school. Many of the freshmen drop out, or are thrown out, due to low grades, which results in the school taking in less tuition money. This is also why, in many schools, teachers are not required to take roll in 3000 level classes and up. By then the students know why they should go to class.

Students who glided through high school with “C” averages, or lower, are not prepared for the self control that is required to get up for an 8:00am class without a parent screaming at them. If the colleges had not found a way to correct the laziness taught in high school they would not have been able to enlist enough students to stay profitable.

Whenever you are irritated with a teacher who is strict about attendance just imagine how much more your tuition would be if all of those incompetent freshmen and sophomores had dropped out before they learned that their poor choices result in poor consequences.

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The best professor I had was Dr. Rust that was an accounting professor. ... The other was a massive assingment that would easily take two weeks to finish. He said the lesson was a first hand lesson in dealing with rejection and arbitrariness. We worked for what seemed 3 days straight and showed up to class with what we managed to do so far. Each group looked tired but he did compliment us on our hard work and explained that when we get into the real world sometimes our best efforts weren't enough and that results sometimes out of our control. He then proceeded to push the projects into the trash can. Needless to say, we were more than upset.  Some people went to the chancellors office to try and get him fired. The chancellor said quit complaining and go about our way.

I have never, ever been an advocate of teachers that use attendance policies or purposely waste the time of students with examples such as the above, simply to teach them "a life lesson". Both are incredibly insulting. For the college professor, the purpose of the class should be to teach the subject, not waste a student's valuable time. A project that takes three days of your time should absolutely be relevant to the material of the course and it is wholly understandable that students should be up in arms over such an atrocious misuse of their time.

Lisa VanDamme touches on this very arbitrary idea in her lecture "Reclaiming Education". She mentions an example of giving grade-schoolers a test they had no hope of passing, not to test their potential knowledge (as would be appropriate) but simply to teach them the lesson of what it feels like to fail. It's a disgusting practice (but sadly, now fashionable in many public schools) for elementary teachers and completely out of place in a college setting.

If you want students to come to your classes, you need to have a reason for them to do so. You need to be a good lecturer and present information that isn't simply read out of a book. Consistently, I have found that college professors that use attendance policies are "book readers" and have nothing useful to say and additionally, present no real academic challenge to the student. An attendance policy is usually described as "easy points". This is also insulting, as it would imply that the student couldn’t earn a good enough grade based on the merit of his work.

I have a teacher this semester who uses a bonus point system to encourage attendance. At the beginning of each class, she randomly selects about ten students and asks them questions from the previous lecture and the assigned readings. If you get it right, viola, you get a point. (If you don't know the answer, no harm done, you just don't get the point.) She also has a short three to four line writing assignment that asks the student to analyze a small portion of the readings. This is also optional and also worth a bonus point. Still, just about everyone does these assignments. These are rewards for achievement and study and are in-line with the purposes of the course.

Obviously you have to show up to your job, to meetings and sometimes no matter how hard you work, you will be faced with disappointment. The current trend in schools (elementary through collegiate) is this overwhelming need to "teach social behaviour", as if it had been absent for the past 2000 years. Group projects are useful when the goal is to cover a subject that is literally too vast for a single student to cover by himself. But if the goal of the group work is to "learn how to deal with people you don't like", the class is stepping outside the bounds of the material and into an inappropriate realm of psychology.

Attendance policies in situations where accumulated is absolutely necessary for safety reasons, such as lab work, are perfectly fine. An attendance policy that exists solely to "make people come to class because they wouldn't otherwise," is probably a good indicator that the class is going to be near worthless.

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