How College Works

We talk with a coordinator for the AVID program about what AVID is, how it works, and why it is such a successful program for getting students ready for college. You can find their webpage at https://www.avid.org/

We use a the themes of Rich Dad, Poor Dad (a book Drew read some years ago) as a starting point to discuss why you may or may not want to go to college, what our motivations were when we started, and how some of those didn't really pan out the way we expected.

We have a little fun using Google's autocomplete to answer common questions in the form of "How does college. . ."

We're back and spend our time checking in on how our academic years have been going with Covid and other struggles.

We discuss why students might take a gap year or gap semester and speculate about effects that could have on colleges with the worst case possibility of many student taking gap because of Covid. We are particularly speculative on these issues and not predictive.

We talk with a college junior who has words of wisdom and advice (new to us) on how to make the transition to college smoother and to thrive at college.

We talk about what office hours are, how we hope students will think of them, what we do, and what we'd like students to do.

We talk with a High School senior who will be on her way to college in the age of Covid and her mother about their concerns and questions, and we, of course, give advice.

We check in with each other about how the online classes are going. We talk about how our daily/class routines have changed (or not), what we hope and expect going forward, Zoom etiquette, and how working remotely has helped expose inefficiencies and forced some better practices for us.

We talk about what it's like working to get classes converted to distance learning on the instruction and technology sides.

We talk about the differences and similarities for Spring Break in High School and College, expectations going into break and coming back from break, and also what we do over Spring Break.

We go through the 10 things Brittany Lucas TV (https://youtu.be/KcJQoHCzLFM) wishes she knew before going to college. We give our perspective on her answers, most of which we agree with, some for different reasons.

We talk with an International Education Coordinator and find that there are many options for where to study that don't require speaking a foreign language, don't set you back in your degree, and that there are options for funds to help pay for it. We also find that Melody and Peter did college wrong in this respect.

We talk with Jacob Kashiwagi about his experience with students and what it means to "go slow" in school and life, how you know you are going slow, what to watch out for, and what going slow looks like from the outside.

We take up the question from Reddit about how to be productive in college on days you don't have class. We talk about how our ideas on this have changed from when we were in college to now, give advice from out experience, and talk about setting a theme. reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/college/comments/evasbo/what_do_you_do_on_days_you_dont_have_class_that/ CGP Grey on New Year Resolutions: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVGuFdX5guE&t=13s

We talk about the mature of learning and how it means that we should have some level of discomfort. We also talk about how we have experienced this in our lives and some ways to determine if our discomfort is from ourselves, the instructor, or the material. The article mentioned is this one: https://edu.rsc.org/opinion/in-pursuit-of-discomfort/4010955.article#.XiZV6zCYLiM.twitter

We talk about what we do/did on our first day of class and some of the work that goes into preparing for that. We also try to set students' expectations for what is reasonable on the first day of a class.

We discuss the differences between a liberal arts education and other forms or philosophies of education, its history, what it means, what we think the point of it is, and why we think it is important.

We talk about the end of semester feedback that students give college professors, similar feedback that high school teachers might get, who reads the feedback, what purpose it has, and some tips for making sure that your professor will take what you have to say seriously.

We talk about the myth that motivation as important to get things done, the difference between motivation and will power, some ways we think about getting things done, and some pitfalls we try to avoid.