*promote tutors for this gifted child

Uhh, complete sentences at four is a rarity in the United States, just to let you developmentally-disabled kids here in on a little secret....

bravo for this kid stating a very serious issue with teaching and one i agree with but i think his ire may be directed at the wrong person as @Yogi suggested and @JiggaJonson implied.

i substituted for a brief span a few years ago.
the reason my time was brief was not due to the kids,they were fantastic but rather it was the draconian and administrative bullshit i had to put up with.the school system was not looking for a substitute "teacher" but a babysitter.a warm body to sit in class and watch kids become catatonic. reading "packets" and qwell any form of disruption.

i was "officially reprimanded" three times due to actually engaging the classes i was substituting.my crime was not the fact i was covering material the absent teacher had already gone over recently but rather that i was talking and engaging the students.

seriously? it still boggles my mind.the teachers who i covered were appreciative of my efforts but the school only wanted me to keep the seat warm.

interestingly enough,those very same teachers convinced me to volunteer my time to tutor troubled teens who are constantly in ISS (in school suspension).thanks to a new principal who helped push through the massive paperwork and help from these teachers this may become an actual program.we have enlisted two more teachers who have come out of retirement and hope to have more tutors soon who are willing to donate their time.

the irony in all this is that the we (the tutors) have huge latitude in how we teach these troubled teens while vetted teachers have huge restrictions.

so generally speaking:its not the teachers.its the system.

This video really speaks to me. I'm just finishing up my computer science degree, and as part of it, I end up doing a lot of tutoring and actual teaching the classes for those who are just starting out (I want to teach it when I get out).

I always tell the freshmen, computer science is not about any particular language, or coding, its really about problem solving. Its the ability to take a large or complex problem, break it down into smaller tasks, then solve those small tasks. We just happen to do it using a computer. Those I notice that succeed and do well seem to really get this.

Of course I also always tell the freshman to indent when they see a curly brace...but that never happens.....

I'm a writing tutor at the community college. Also, I tend bar. And I'm a student.

>> ^Porksandwich:

Does Finland schooling system provide anything but education and the facilities and meals related to keeping a large group of people for hours on end?
Do they do tutoring?
How do they handle discipline?
Do they offer sports teams and fields, etc as part of the school budget?
Uniforms?
Field trips?
Music/band?
Im hoping to hear from @CreamK on this.
Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.


There's tutoring for students that are falling behind, it's personal one-on-one and there's a multiple programs to help students who have problems, like specail ed or for troubled teens. I actually went on one these troubled youth programs. I never had any learning problems in school, in fact i was always so much ahead in classes that i got bored and started to get in to problems and skipping A LOT.. But when they finally managed to get me in to this special class, i've never enjoyed school that much.. I did two years of math in half a year and got free choice of what to do instead of math.. I either got a free hour or i picked up another subject like literacy and the best part of it was that i choosed what to do..

Discipline is there, you got many levels of it. Mostly it's handled in conjunction with parents. Detention, personal tutoring or changing to a smaller group, workshops where you can fix bikes and learn sciences with more hands on approaches etc. Mostly it's not a punishment as such but personalized programs to tailored to fit for the needs. Expulsions are very rare, in my school years i heard of two incidences and both were changed to smaller group where they both stopped skipping school in two weeks time. Those smaller groups consists of one teacher per 5 students or even less..

No sport teams are provided by schools, they are handled by sport teams junior programs. There is of course 1-2 hour classes per week for sports but it's more to do with learning to enjoy excercise than competing.

No uniforms or mandatory dressing codes. There is the basic decency expected when it comes to dressing and one peculiar code is that you are not allowed to wear a hat in class... Those baseball caps can hide your eyes... I know, it's a bit strange..

Field trips: yes, there are both provided by the school and then longer ones where the students do bake sales etc to gather money and those are voluntary.

Music is a subject and schools can provide the means to do them more in your own free time. The bands are not a part of schools but usually every city has one or to schools that concentrate more for those programs. It means a few extra hours but provide a good base for secondary musical education institutes where you can enroll at young age. Those institutions are publicly funded too and work in conjuction with all levels schools and they continue seamlessly to provide education for music teachers and professionals up to master degrees. You can go to those schools when you're grown up too and they have a tuitions, in the range of 100-200€ per class. So once again, money is not a hurdle for education.

It's been a years when i was in basic school, i graduated in 1989 and went to secondary school in 1991. That was about the time when the education reform was moving to that state too so i had to mixed field of teachers. Some were not up to job and some were just wonderful personalities. Now adays it's up to standards too and in fact, i'm enrolling in one next fall to finish up my graduation..

The downside of Finnish system is that you can not even get a job as a cleaner without finishing some sort of courses for it.. So even for basic shitty jobs you need a basic education in that field... But since those are basically free of charge (some require a 100-200€ fee, not a problem...) everyone has a chance. Also when you get a better job the companies often provide the follow-up studies that fit to that job description. The cost of those are divided by the goverment and the companies.

Does Finland schooling system provide anything but education and the facilities and meals related to keeping a large group of people for hours on end?

Do they do tutoring?

How do they handle discipline?

Do they offer sports teams and fields, etc as part of the school budget?

Uniforms?

Field trips?

Music/band?

Im hoping to hear from @CreamK on this.

Like I've always felt in the US that the sports programs and all the cost associated with them plus the competition they spawn within the student body and against other schools is not beneficial. Basically you end up with a small group of players who get the school to bend over backwards to make things possible for them and everyone else loses out on it, in fact they often have to pay for tickets to even see the events their parents tax dollars make possible.

>> ^chilaxe:

@Porksandwich
I'm talking about north-east Asians (Chinese/Hongkongese/Chinese-Singaporeans, Koreans, Japanese, Taiwanese). Other Asians don't have the same significantly consistent high performance.
Increases in school spending don't significantly correlate with increases in student performance. You can't change someone's nature to make them like to read, and bad teachers & old textbooks can't turn a driven person with a good attitude into someone who doesn't like to read.


Praising athletics while scorning academics is a common trend in the US. It is most definitely disheartening to see the programs that only a small fraction of the student body participate in getting the lion's share of the budget. And increases in school spending also tend to get funneled away from the absolute educational needs and maintenance of the buildings to large projects such as a new school being built or new sports complex. It happens time and time again that the money ends up being spent on things that fall under the umbrella of "school budget" but are not directly related to education.

And I would agree that you can't change someone's nature, but you could spend time trying to identify their interests and fostering those. Math and Science are great, we need more but as you said you can't change their natural inclinations. Bad teachers are notorious for forcing material by the standard means rather than try to find out what would best suite them. Perhaps you need to see things written to retain knowledge, but you write slowly....and the teacher continues to throw a lot of information at you faster than you can write. That is not serving the purpose of education, and it is no big inconvenience or time sink to the class for the teacher to hand out a basic packet to follow along and add additional information to allow people to keep up. Hell I had college professors do this, so you could make your own notes on the subject but still have an organized list of topics pertinent to the lesson.

So short version: School spending does not mean spending toward education. Bad teachers can stunt progress of students through a number of means. Hell a person with a heavy foreign accent can make it hell on earth trying to follow along or do the required homework if they never write it down. A person who can learn in spite of all of this, probably has parents who've given them the time and means to do so or may even know much on the subjects themselves. An immigrant with uneducated parents who may only speak but not read or write English is going to find this much more difficult.

If my parents had taken me out of the US and into Mexico where very little was taught in English, and my parents spoke rough Spanish and couldn't read or write in Spanish....I'd find myself struggling as well. Especially if there was no time to tutor after school because I had to be home for chores or an after school job to make ends meet. Only an extremely exceptional person could prevail through that, and I refuse to believe that all Asians of the categories you mention have no additional help outside of school. And that may be where the focus should lie immigrants not of those categories, helping establish this foundation for their cultural groups and filling it with people who are familiar with their common backgrounds and beliefs to help them adapt. If they are naturalized, you are stuck with them now.....and just throwing them under the bus because they aren't the Asians types you hoped for as immigrants is not going to solve it. If they are willing to work and not undermining society through malice...they can be worked with to find a place for them. This goes for both natural born citizens and former immigrants.....ignoring huge swathes of your population is not a good idea.

Anyway, I don't view immigration as a national problem. Sure it has some influence on the overall problems the country faces, especially illegals. But the core of our problems are related to greed as has been stated, but policies that ignore the people and favor the profit machines whether they be individuals or corporations in spite of the people. And that's where the favor towards Socialism is springing up in the young, Capitalism may have worked but it is no longer allowing the young to establish a life that would even come close to that of their parents. They are reducing the opportunity chance as time goes on for each new generation by these choices. So I don't blame anyone for wanting to throw out what these decision makers cling to as sacred in favor of trying something else that may restore a little sanity into the system. After all, your citizenry needs a way to support itself without being a member of the armed forces, born wealthy, or just plain lucky.

With every word I think a little less of you. Keep talking. Kisses.

In reply to this comment by JiggaJonson:
Well I don't want to come off like a "cynical chicken little" but it sounds as though you're implying I'm not a productive member of society.

In spite of being laid off and not receiving a salary this year; I'm substitute teaching in three different school corporations, I volunteer at a local animal shelter (ARF, Animal Rescue Fund), and I tutor non-traditional students to help them get their GEDs. I don't get compensated the same way that my friend who sells "Accidental Death and Dismemberment" insurance does but meh.

Then again, you could be just continuing your thinly veiled narcissistic nazi troll tantrum.

Either way, I'll be enjoying watching the depths of your hypocrisy continue to blossom as you tout personal freedom and live a life of complacency regarding the powers that be.

Now go pay for your marriage license whore.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
I don't know you're the educated one, you figure it out.

In reply to this comment by JiggaJonson

Well I don't want to come off like a "cynical chicken little" but it sounds as though you're implying I'm not a productive member of society.

In spite of being laid off and not receiving a salary this year; I'm substitute teaching in three different school corporations, I volunteer at a local animal shelter (ARF, Animal Rescue Fund), and I tutor non-traditional students to help them get their GEDs. I don't get compensated the same way that my friend who sells "Accidental Death and Dismemberment" insurance does but meh.

Then again, you could be just continuing your thinly veiled narcissistic nazi troll tantrum.

Either way, I'll be enjoying watching the depths of your hypocrisy continue to blossom as you tout personal freedom and live a life of complacency regarding the powers that be.

Now go pay for your marriage license whore.

In reply to this comment by blankfist:
I don't know you're the educated one, you figure it out.

In reply to this comment by JiggaJonson

1. Do not equate jobs. I was a public education teacher for four years, and I've been an IT pro for seven years, now as a senior consultant for AD, Exchange, VMware, and storage, with too many certifications to list them all off the top of my head. I just want to make this clear. Even with all the learning I've done to get all those certifications, it wouldn't take me the five years it took me to get a master's degree in education. Even with "summers off", without a doubt, I worked more hours in a year as a teacher than I have as an IT pro with 2-3 weeks paid vacation. Even in the most demanding IT jobs I've had (one was Premier Support for Microsoft Support Services), I have never been more stressed out than I was as a teacher, and I got paid half as much to teach.

2. You get better with experience as a teacher, but the ability to teach is also a gift. You must have some innate ability for it to actually be a good teacher. Not only do you have to know your subject matter, but you must also be able to relate it to an audience with completely different backgrounds, styles of learning, while managing a classroom of immature people by their very nature. Dismissing it as an "acquired skill just like anything else" shows an dizzying amount of ignorance about what the job entails.

3. You're half right about this. Teachers in my experience fell into 3 categories - great teachers, slackers, and those who tried really hard but failed because of a lack of talent. Of the slackers, the overwhelming majority were people who got the idealistic burning desire to teach beaten out of them by the system. They didn't move on or weren't fired because they simply didn't want to start over, and the system was short of teachers anyway. I moved on because my wife had medical issues, so I needed to earn enough for both of us, and there was no way I could do that by teaching. It took me 2-3 years to fully transition into IT. By the second year, I realized I didn't want to be a teacher anyway because of how screwed up public education was. I still believe in public education, but it's the external factors that prevent you from doing your job, whether it be woeful funding, bad salary, unsupportive parents, ludicrous insistence that standardized multiple choice tests accurately measured knowledge and understanding of a subject, etc.

Here's the problem with "getting rid of those bad teachers" - we don't have enough teachers as is, so you want less teachers? Can't wait to see those classes of 37 go to 45 or 50. Until you address the problem of attracting and keeping teachers, all that stuff is moot.

As for merit pay, I'm fine with that as long as something can be devised that accurately measures the teacher's performance. Standardized test scores won't do that because, nor absolute values on grades, etc.

5. See above. Most teachers' unions are against merit pay because no one has come up with a fair evaluation of a teacher's performance.

As for the arts, exposure to arts help students beyond the specifics of the art, assisting with learning and comprehension of every other subject. Ridding art from schools is a big mistake. Major advancements in science for example is derived by creative thinking, which art helps to develop. And this isn't just some psychological BS.

>> ^RedSky:

1. So is every other job.
2. It's an acquired skill like anything else. Also, let's not equate private tutoring with teaching a class, they are different things entirely and while some teachers certainly fill that role it is entirely unreasonable to suggest that most students will either demand this kind of attention or that most teachers will provide it (outside of what their job entails). I should probably disclose that my mother is a teacher too.
3. I'm not sure what you mean here. What I'm saying is people who don't want stress in their job and potentially don't want to put in a great deal of effort work in more secure positions, typically government related. I am not saying that all government employees are lazy and unmotivated, I'm simply saying that the obvious and apparent perks they provide attract certain kinds of people disproportionately.
4. This is why I would argue there needs to be a way to evaluate performance and reward teachers that do well. Rewarding them will allow the wages of teachers who are good at what they do rise and encourage more talented individuals who want to teach into a field they would otherwise not consider. As I said in my previous comment as far as I'm concerned the primary skills that schools should be teaching are reading, comprehension and rudimentary maths. These are also easily able to be evaluated with standardised tests. The same standardised tests that determine university enrollment. As far as I'm concerned I see no reason a test like this cannot evaluate a teacher's capability in improving year upon year results of students. Yes, it cannot be a primary measurement and it is certainly not perfect, but if your intention to increase the standards of teaching and you accept the impractically/implausibility of vastly increasing the teaching budget, you have to accept that improvements have to come from improved efficiency and effectiveness. You can't begin to address that unless you have some way of measuring it.
5. No skilled or academically minded industry is a factory. Yet everything from engineering to consulting to scientific research companies thrive in a competitive economy. Am I suggesting privatising and cutting funding? Not at all. I think poor neighborhoods need to be subsidised to encourage good teachers to teach there. I have no particular issue with public schools although I see no reason charter schools should not receive eligible to such government assistance and what currently exists where the funding is there to serve the common good of creating an educated and knowledgeable society. My problem is entrenched union interest groups who by virtue of the campaign contributions they endow to their elected representatives, block any capacity to reward good teachers and who in effect keep teacher wages depressed and a whole bunch of talented individuals who would have otherwise genuinely considered teaching out of schools.
My point is not that I don't think art/music/drama are valuable aspects of schooling. Rather that schools in poor neighbourhoods are failing to endow students with the basic skills they need to enter a skilled job or for that matter to enter university. I think when people make arguments like this (which if I recall one of the people in this video did), they fly in stark contrast to reality that many simply do not even grasp the basics of education.
Schooling at it's base is not rooted in wishy washy concepts of creativity, expressing individuality or character, they are part of growing up but not the function of school at its core. Math and reading skills are ultimately rooted in effective teacher instruction followed by repetition. No amount of related activities will dress up the fact that if you want to function in modern society you need to go through these trials and tribulations. Until all schools can do that, the last thing I want to listen to is some guy at a rally preaching about abstract skills.

1. So is every other job.

2. It's an acquired skill like anything else. Also, let's not equate private tutoring with teaching a class, they are different things entirely and while some teachers certainly fill that role it is entirely unreasonable to suggest that most students will either demand this kind of attention or that most teachers will provide it (outside of what their job entails). I should probably disclose that my mother is a teacher too.

3. I'm not sure what you mean here. What I'm saying is people who don't want stress in their job and potentially don't want to put in a great deal of effort work in more secure positions, typically government related. I am not saying that all government employees are lazy and unmotivated, I'm simply saying that the obvious and apparent perks they provide attract certain kinds of people disproportionately.

4. This is why I would argue there needs to be a way to evaluate performance and reward teachers that do well. Rewarding them will allow the wages of teachers who are good at what they do rise and encourage more talented individuals who want to teach into a field they would otherwise not consider. As I said in my previous comment as far as I'm concerned the primary skills that schools should be teaching are reading, comprehension and rudimentary maths. These are also easily able to be evaluated with standardised tests. The same standardised tests that determine university enrollment. As far as I'm concerned I see no reason a test like this cannot evaluate a teacher's capability in improving year upon year results of students. Yes, it cannot be a primary measurement and it is certainly not perfect, but if your intention to increase the standards of teaching and you accept the impractically/implausibility of vastly increasing the teaching budget, you have to accept that improvements have to come from improved efficiency and effectiveness. You can't begin to address that unless you have some way of measuring it.

5. No skilled or academically minded industry is a factory. Yet everything from engineering to consulting to scientific research companies thrive in a competitive economy. Am I suggesting privatising and cutting funding? Not at all. I think poor neighborhoods need to be subsidised to encourage good teachers to teach there. I have no particular issue with public schools although I see no reason charter schools should not receive eligible to such government assistance and what currently exists where the funding is there to serve the common good of creating an educated and knowledgeable society. My problem is entrenched union interest groups who by virtue of the campaign contributions they endow to their elected representatives, block any capacity to reward good teachers and who in effect keep teacher wages depressed and a whole bunch of talented individuals who would have otherwise genuinely considered teaching out of schools.

My point is not that I don't think art/music/drama are valuable aspects of schooling. Rather that schools in poor neighbourhoods are failing to endow students with the basic skills they need to enter a skilled job or for that matter to enter university. I think when people make arguments like this (which if I recall one of the people in this video did), they fly in stark contrast to reality that many simply do not even grasp the basics of education.

Schooling at it's base is not rooted in wishy washy concepts of creativity, expressing individuality or character, they are part of growing up but not the function of school at its core. Math and reading skills are ultimately rooted in effective teacher instruction followed by repetition. No amount of related activities will dress up the fact that if you want to function in modern society you need to go through these trials and tribulations. Until all schools can do that, the last thing I want to listen to is some guy at a rally preaching about abstract skills.

>> ^DerHasisttot:

>> ^RedSky:
Pretty much all their answers are half truths or platitudes. They're impassioned rather than particularly fact backed.
1 - It is hard to get a teacher fired in a private school in the US, the job security is markedly better than in other private jobs.
2 - Not all teachers go into teaching because they are necessarily passionate about it. The work hours are only long if you put in the hours to prepare for classes. The mandated aren't very long, yes you have to cover supervise sports, participate in events which all adds up but they're still undoubtedly shorter than the 8-6 + every other weekends I'm doing now.
3 - A portion of all professions are bad at what they do, and yes it is more likely that with increased job security that there are more lingering in teaching than other professions.
4 - Teaching is not free and the amount of taxpayer money it is apportioned at least partially depends on the reputation it has for delivering results. Particularly given the mood in most rich economies right now of debt reduction that's a terrible attitude if you want to improve the results of students with limited money.
As far as I'm concerned, schools should be focused primarily on teaching the skills that will enable them to achieve in a workplace. Yes arts/music are great, but only if the school is already achieving good standards on the core learning that is required in most jobs like reading, comprehension and rudimentary maths. Having these core skills will ultimately allow them, coming from either a rich or poor background to make a living comfortably and ultimately spend money on developing any number of those skills later in life.

1. I'm not Usasian, I don't know. What I do know is that teaching is immensely stressful. Having to worry about your position would only add to that.
2. Imagine having the responssibility of teaching 30 different, growing individuals per class times the amount of classes you have, correct and test 30 times x people on sth different every week/month. This is no job in which you have to do routine. Routine is easy.
3. Why would they want to work an insecure underpaid job? Isn't it more likely that the benefits outweigh the lingerers?
4. True. American education needs an overhaul. Which will cost money, which is why it doesn't happen.
5. Schools are not factories which educate to produce workforce robots. They impart the whole cultural knowledge of a society. Art helps your brain to think abstractly and understand what you are reading. Music gives you a sense of aesthetics. Would you play computergames which are badly written, have horrible graphics and have no music? No? Well, then you need a culture which teaches these things.
Why do I even have to tell this to someone? Have you painted your profile picture yourself?

>> ^shinyblurry:

Since you asked, I'll tell you why I believe in God. Up until 8 years ago I was agnostic. I was raised agnostic, without any religion. We celebrated Christmas and Easter, but that was about it. I wasn't raised to like or dislike religion, I was simply left free to decide what I believed.
At the time I became a theist, I didn't believe in a spiritual reality, or any God I had ever heard of, because like most of the people here I saw no evidence for it at all. I actually used to go into christian chat rooms and debate christians on what I saw to be inconsistances in the bible. A lot of what people have said in this thread are thoughts that I once had and arguments I used to use myself.
Then one day it all changed. I guess you could say my third eye was opened. I had something akin to a kundalini awakening, spontaneously out of nowhere. When it was over, I could suddenly perceive the spiritual reality. I didn't quite know what I was looking at, at the time..didn't truly understand what had happened to me (though through intuition i understood the great potential of it). It was only after researching it online and finding out about the chakras did I start to understand.
It's an amazing, truly truly amazing thing to find out everything you know is wrong. It is really utterly mind blowing. This however, was the conclusion I was forced to immediately reach however, because the evidence for it was right in front of my face. Everything that I had known up until the point I could perceive the spiritual was missing so many essential elements that I may as well have been just born.
I started to receive signs..little miracles, I would call them..like stepping in front of a vast panarama of nature and suddenly seeing it at an angle impossible to human sight, where everything is in focus at the same time, that produced such startling beauty it filled me to overflowing with estatic joy. I started to perceive there was a higher beauty, a higher love that had always been there but I had somehow missed it. I started to get the point, that there was something more. That there was a God.
When I conceded it was possible, to myself, it was then that I started to hear from Him directly. He let me know a couple of things, and proved to me that I wasn't just imagining Him. He showed me that He had been there my entire life, teaching me and guiding me as a child on, only I had been totally unaware of it. He showed me how we "shared space", and that not only could He read my mind, but in some essential way that He was what my mind is. That He is mind itself. He showed me how my thought process was more of a cooperative than a solitary thing.
Now before you say I just jumped at all of this because everyone wants to imagine a loving God, etc etc..untrue in my case. When I first found out He was definitely real, i was scared shitless. Up until that point, my thoughts about God were all negative. I figured if He did exist He probably hated me. You see, that is what I had gleaned growing up in a Christian society without actually knowing anything about it.
At this point I became a theist. I thought of God as a He because He seemed masculine rather than feminine, and also I thought of Him as the Creator. I didn't know anything about the bible, or the Holy Trinity, or what a messiah was, or any of that. I thought the God I knew must not be generally known because I had never seen anything out there that pointed to a loving God.
For the next 6 yeears I was on a spiritual journey. I studied all the various belief systems, spiritual or otherwise, all the religious history..east and west, north and south. I studied philosophy and esoteric wisdom, gurus and prophets. The one I really hadn't studied though, was Christianity. The reason being I didn't believe Jesus actually ever existed so I dismissed it out of hand.
Before I knew anything about Christianity, God taught me three important things about who He is. One, He taught me His nature is triune, that God is three. I didn't understand what that meant precisely, I just knew that was His nature. He also taught me that there was a Messiah. He taught me that there was someone whose job it was to save the world. The third thing and most important thing He taught me was about His love. That He loved everyone, and that He secretly took care of them whether they believed in Him or not. He showed me His perfect heart.
What led me to the bible was this: I asked Him who the Messiah was and He told me to look in a mirror. At the time I had been away from civilization for a few months and my beard had grown out for the first time in my life. I hadn't seen a mirror since I was clean shaven. I sought one out and when I saw my reflection I couldn't believe my eyes. I looked exactly like Jesus Christ. I mean to a T.
It was then I was forced to accept the possibility that Jesus was real. To be honest, I really didn't want to. I felt like I had a really special relationship with the Father and that Jesus could only get in the way of that. I didn't even feel like I could pay Him any real respect, because I knew the Father was greater than He was. But, I couldn't ignore what He was showing me, so I started to read the bible. To my surprise, I found out it was about the God I already knew.
Everything I read in the bible matched what I already knew about God . The Holy Trinity matched His triune nature. That there was a Messiah and Jesus was it. And most of all His love, His great and majestic love, for all people, was perfectly laid out in ways I had never before comprehended. The bible was the only information on Earth that accurately described what I already knew about God. That is how I knew it was true from the outset.
So that's when I became a Christian. I couldn't ignore the evidence. My journey to Christianity was based on rationality and logic, believe it or not, albiet with miracles and spirituality mixed in. Even the miracles themselves were logical, as God showed me how He worked from a meta-perspective, and that time and space didn't restrict Him at all. So there you have it..an interesting testimony to be sure.
I am unusual in that I didn't come to God on my own. God chose me, I didn't choose Him. I might never have come to God if He hadn't. I found out later that this means I was elected..in that, before God made the world He had already planned to create me to do His will. After He woke me up it never really took much faith to believe in God because He demonstrated to me His amazing power and ASTONISHING intellect in ways that were impossible to refute. Whatever brick wall I would put up, He would smash it down into oblivion. He favored me because I stayed hungry. I knew the truth was knowable, and I gunned for it 200 percent. I would have died for it.
So I empathize with the people here. Some of you might actually be elected too, it just is not your time to know. Some are probably angry/scared/rebelliious, while still others are intellectually incurious and swayed by hyperbole. I'm pretty sure not many people here have actually read the bible. I hadn't either..I was simply arrogant at the time.
So what I would say to people here is..there is far more going on than seems apparent..if you don't believe at least that there is a spiritual reality, you're practically rubbing two sticks together. God definitely exists and will prove it to you if you humble yourself, come to Him in sincerity, with your total heart and pray. Admit you're a sinner, and ask Him to be your Lord and Savior. Anyone can know God is real. I wish I had read it earlier..would have saved me a hardship. Save yourself the trouble and find out the truth for yourself, that God is real He loves you. God bless..


Wow, thanks for that detailed reply. Forgive me, but I've broken it down to basics here. Can you confirm that I've understood you correctly?:

OK, so in short:

- You were an atheist from birth.

- You had a dramatic and sudden spiritual awakening and began to perceive an extra spiritual dimension in the material world around you.

- You began to have visions that were akin to out of body experiences or remote viewing, but with an extra dimension of spiritual perception. You interpreted these experiences as little miracles, and that they were provided by a higher being: a god.

- At this point god spoke you directly and explicitly, and proved to you that you were not imagining him. He explained that he permeated *everything*, including your being, and that in many respects he *was* you.

- Over the next 6 years you studied, and were guided and tutored directly by god who explained to you more specifically about his nature, and what the bible was all about.

Or to break this down even further!:

You believe there is a god because, after a sudden spiritual awakening he spoke to you directly and proved to you that he exists.

Have I got the basics correct here? Just the very basics?

>> ^dannym3141:

>> ^Opus_Moderandi:
Rosario Dawson can pander to my nerd base anytime... repeatedly... with whipped cream... and strawberries... her fazer is set to stunning... yeah, that last one was pretty bad.

You'd need to be careful. Her horse-like mouth and jaw would be likely to chew any extruding features off. Especially if cartman had tutored it first.


Well, she's gonna need that horse-like mouth and jaw to accommodate my horse-like penis (it's multi-colored and smells like hay).

>> ^Opus_Moderandi:

Rosario Dawson can pander to my nerd base anytime... repeatedly... with whipped cream... and strawberries... her fazer is set to stunning... yeah, that last one was pretty bad.


You'd need to be careful. Her horse-like mouth and jaw would be likely to chew any extruding features off. Especially if cartman had tutored it first.

It's a complicated issue that can't be summed up in one statement "bad to discriminate".

The linked article doesn't build a convincing case at any rate. California's asian population is huge relative to other states. I lived in a town that was 50% chinese. So, you would expect asian-americans to make up a sizable percentage of admission candidates to california's colleges and universities. Elite people from all walks of life apply to Harvard and the other Ivies. What percentage of asian americans are applying to those schools relative to the other groups?

Re: The kid that had the GPA, test scores, and 7 or so AP credits, and didn't get in, I would say that there is not enough information to understand if he deserved to go or not. Community service? Extra-curricular activities? What about his essay and story? Is this guy some egghead loner? Who wants to go to college with someone who is not well rounded? In addition, did his high school inflate grades? Did he hail from a rich family who could afford tutors to raise his test scores? Lot's of unanswered questions.

As someone who has sat on an admission committee for an Ivy League graduate business school, a perfect GPA and GMAT would not cut it. Not the same as undergrad, but I imagine that there is less fixation on scores as well.

GPA and standardized test scores should obviously be huge factors in admissions, but certainly not the only factors. Also, any smart student would apply to several colleges. Noone should feel entitled to get into any college; admission is not a right.

To echo a sentiment above, I have often felt that colleges should matriculate anyone who wants to go who can do the work. Graduation should be the gate, not admission.