You either love him or hate him...

[Zeb_Carter]

Love him or hate him, he sure hits the nail on the head with this! Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

Rule 2 : The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

Rule 6 : If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

Rule 7 : Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Rule 8 : Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In so many schools, they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.

Rule 9 : Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.

Rule 10 : Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.

Rule 11 : Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.

If you agree, pass it on.
If you can read this - Thank a teacher!
If you're reading this in English- Thank a Veteran!

 

[DesertPirate]

I agree with Gates

MM2(SS) USS Silversides SSN 679 77 - 80

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

It's a great list, but it didn't come from Bill Gates.

Snopes:

This list is the work of Charles J, Sykes, author of the 1996 book Dumbing Down Our Kids: Why American Children Feel Good About Themselves But Can't Read, Write, Or Add. (The list has appeared in newspapers, although not necessarily in this book. It does, however, form the meat of his 2007 book 50 Rules Kids Won't Learn in School: Real-World Antidotes to Feel-Good Education.)

If you're ever driving through Wisconsin Charlies Sykes has a radio show on a big Milwaukee talk radio station in the morning that's pretty good.

 

[rgraham666]

Deleted because of Rumple's post.

 

[Rumple Foreskin]

Sorry, Zeb. That's an urban legend. Here's a link to the Snopes.com article about this particular bit of internet mis-information including the real author.

http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.asp

Rumple Foreskin

 

[TE999]

Regardless of authorship, this list is still good advice to the youth of America steeped in the juices of 'feel goodisim'.

Check out the last three rules (omitted) on the Snopes link above. They make sense as well.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Regardless of authorship, this list is still good advice to the youth of America steeped in the juices of 'feel goodisim'.

Check out the last three rules (omitted) on the Snopes link above. They make sense as well.

Yep. And give credit to Charlie Sykes, the real author of the list.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

That list has been hanging on my classroom wall for years.

 

[fieryjen]

Good list, no matter were it came from. A lot of things in it that many of the students I've encountered will have to learn the hard way.

I'm confused though what me being able to read it in English has to do with veterans.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Good list, no matter were it came from. A lot of things in it that many of the students I've encountered will have to learn the hard way.

I'm confused though what me being able to read it in English has to do with veterans.

You could be speaking German . . .

 

[TE999]

You could be speaking German . . .

Or Japanese...

Or Russian...

 

[rgraham666]

My rejoinder to this.

Rule 1 : Life is not fair - get used to it!

No, life isn't fair. And you should get used to it.

However, that doesn't mean you should be unfair. And my experience is that people who say 'life is unfair' aren't whining about it. They're using it as an excuse for being an asshole.

Rule 2 : The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.

Define 'accomplish something'. If the standard for success is being able to read words on a black board, and the person is blind, they'll never 'succeed'.

And yes the world doesn't care. Once again that doesn't mean you shouldn't care about esteem, your own or others.

Rule 3 : You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.

My experience with vice-presidents is their chief ability is the ability to play the courtly game. Being a master of manipulation isn't the same thing as earning a place.

Rule 4 : If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

The entomological base of the word 'boss' is the Afrikaner word, 'baas'. Which means 'master'. When South Africa was in the grip of apartheid non-whites speaking to whites in authority had to suffix their sentences with 'baas'.

Masters generally aren't kind to their slaves.

Rule 5 : Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping: they called it opportunity.

No it isn't. A loss of dignity or an opportunity. It's just a job.

A lot of people will treat you with a lot less dignity if you do flip burgers though. Who gives a fuck about the help?

I couldn't be bothered with the rest. These aren't rules, they're finger waving statements of moralizing.

And what I can gather from these statement is the original author, not Zeb, is a bitter old man grumbling 'Kids these days. Lazy, stupid bastards all of them. Get off my lawn!'

 

[3113]

And what I can gather from these statement is the original author, not Zeb, is a bitter old man grumbling 'Kids these days. Lazy, stupid bastards all of them. Get off my lawn!'

LOL! Thank you, Rob! That's just what I was thinking. And if anyone believes that kids these days think:

1) Life is Fair
2) My school makes me feel good about myself and the world will always care about my self-esteem
3) There are no winners or losers

You're out of your fucking mind! The guy who wrote this created this fantasy High School that doesn't exist--a "strawman" fantasy high school that lets them feel all superior to teens because *they* know these lessons and stupid teens don't! Here's some things for adults to remember before they send this list around in a desperate attempt to feel superior rather than "old" when they think about teenagers:

*You don't have to tell kids that life is unfair--that last rule about the nerds wouldn't exist if they were fair to each other! cliques still exist, as they always have, and everyone is unfair to everyone else. Oh, and some of those kids know that other kids *will* be given that a plum job, with cellphone, summers off, power lunches and $100,000 a year salaries, right out of college, because that kid has got the right parents/friends/relatives, not because that kid earned anything. Talk about "unfair."

*Kids know that the world isn't going to support thair self-esteem. Teens have horrible self-esteem and it's worse now than ever with the internet where people will post, for everyone to see, thoughtless insults and remarks about each other, embarrassing videos, lies and rumors. A girl killed herself because of the brutal things kids were saying about her. Mockery and bullying goes on relentlessly. Would you please explain to me where the "feel good" in high school is? 'Cause all I ever hear about today is Teens posting brutal remarks about each other in the internet, in text messages, on each other lockers. I honestly don't know how anyone could possibly believe that the world cared about them or their self-esteem if they'd spent even a week in high school. Only parents and maybe teachers seem to give a shit about that.

*Kids know full well that there are and always have been winners and losers. See the two above. So the teachers are soft in handing out grades or having games with winners/losers? That doesn't stop the fact that teens see one group of "winners" and other groups of "losers" everyday at lunch. Once again, that remark about "be kind to nerds" would not exist if there were not winners and losers. And to add injury to insult, they not only see this in the school, they see it between schools--often between their school with underpaid teachers and broken equipment, and other schools, in other parts of town that have new buildings and new computers. Which also goes back to that first lesson: "Life isn't fair."

So let's put these myths to bed as well. Just because some schools rightly or wrong-headedly tried to do some of these things--away with grades, or trying to fluff-up kids self-esteem, doesn't mean that kids have been bamboozled into naively thinking that "Life is fair," and "The world cares about me," and "There are no winners or losers." High School and the Teen years are a bitch, and ones peers during these years always have and always will teach each other at least these three things, brutally and horribly, before graduation.

Oh, and one last thing. All adults should remember this one important rule: What teenagers say and do in class or to parents, pushing and rebelling, yelling that "it isn't fair" and such, doesn't tell you what's really going on in their heads. What they're really thinking or feeling--which often is: "I'm a loser. I'm never going to succeed. I'm ugly. No one cares about me."

Remember now how it really was?

 

[Shwenn]

I'll do a few more:

If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.

Bosses are waaaay easier to bamboozle and manipulate than teachers are. Teachers are always on thier guard. Your boss is more worried about manipulating her own boss than she is about whether you are manipulating her.

If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault , so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.

This is true but it is way more true than this guy would have you believe. When you do something good, that's not your parents either. They have no more right to be proud of you than they have to be disappointed. It is your life. Your mistakes and your accomplishments belong to you and you alone.

Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.

Your parents aren't even boring now. The more interesting you become, the more you will see how interesting your parents actually are. It's natural to not see it as a teen, but you will see it eventually, and it will be awesome when you do. Look forward to it.

MY FINAL ADDITION:

You are going to be fine. People are going to get angry with you for being exaclty what a teenager is supposed to be. They were just as young and stupid as you are. In fact, chances are they were worse.

There is a great deal of joy and freedom in not understanding the world very well, yet. You are going to miss it. You will miss not knowing how bad it really is. You will miss the times you thought there was more hope and possibility than actually exists. Keep that ignorance, hold it as long as you can. But be ready to get your heart broken.

 

[Guest]

LOL! Thank you, Rob! That's just what I was thinking. And if anyone believes that kids these days think:

1) Life is Fair
2) My school makes me feel good about myself and the world will always care about my self-esteem
3) There are no winners or losers

You're out of your fucking mind! The guy who wrote this created this fantasy High School that doesn't exist--a "strawman" fantasy high school that lets them feel all superior to teens because *they* know these lessons and stupid teens don't! Here's some things for adults to remember before they send this list around in a desperate attempt to feel superior rather than "old" when they think about teenagers:

*You don't have to tell kids that life is unfair--that last rule about the nerds wouldn't exist if they were fair to each other! cliques still exist, as they always have, and everyone is unfair to everyone else. Oh, and some of those kids know that other kids *will* be given that a plum job, with cellphone, summers off, power lunches and $100,000 a year salaries, right out of college, because that kid has got the right parents/friends/relatives, not because that kid earned anything. Talk about "unfair."

*Kids know that the world isn't going to support thair self-esteem. Teens have horrible self-esteem and it's worse now than ever with the internet where people will post, for everyone to see, thoughtless insults and remarks about each other, embarrassing videos, lies and rumors. A girl killed herself because of the brutal things kids were saying about her. Mockery and bullying goes on relentlessly. Would you please explain to me where the "feel good" in high school is? 'Cause all I ever hear about today is Teens posting brutal remarks about each other in the internet, in text messages, on each other lockers. I honestly don't know how anyone could possibly believe that the world cared about them or their self-esteem if they'd spent even a week in high school. Only parents and maybe teachers seem to give a shit about that.

*Kids know full well that there are and always have been winners and losers. See the two above. So the teachers are soft in handing out grades or having games with winners/losers? That doesn't stop the fact that teens see one group of "winners" and other groups of "losers" everyday at lunch. Once again, that remark about "be kind to nerds" would not exist if there were not winners and losers. And to add injury to insult, they not only see this in the school, they see it between schools--often between their school with underpaid teachers and broken equipment, and other schools, in other parts of town that have new buildings and new computers. Which also goes back to that first lesson: "Life isn't fair."

So let's put these myths to bed as well. Just because some schools rightly or wrong-headedly tried to do some of these things--away with grades, or trying to fluff-up kids self-esteem, doesn't mean that kids have been bamboozled into naively thinking that "Life is fair," and "The world cares about me," and "There are no winners or losers." High School and the Teen years are a bitch, and ones peers during these years always have and always will teach each other at least these three things, brutally and horribly, before graduation.

Oh, and one last thing. All adults should remember this one important rule: What teenagers say and do in class or to parents, pushing and rebelling, yelling that "it isn't fair" and such, doesn't tell you what's really going on in their heads. What they're really thinking or feeling--which often is: "I'm a loser. I'm never going to succeed. I'm ugly. No one cares about me."

Remember now how it really was?

Excellent post, especially the last paragraph (my bold).

Not many people talk about this aspect of teaching, but the solid teachers understand.

It's a fine line for discipline/self-esteem/saving face for kids these days.

Even if a teacher has a kid completely against the wall and in the wrong it's really their option to either crush them completely (the student may back down but they'll resent you for it but they'll probably act up even more) or allow them a tiny bit of wriggle room in order for them to save face and recover.

It doesn't change the teacher's authority to allow this. It doesn't stop the wheels of education to allow this.

But it does give kids an anchor, a bit of breathing room, a chance to dig out of the hole they've made for themselves. Its a hand up after you've bested them in battle, so to speak. It's respect for them as a person, which everyone deserves, no matter what their age.

You give them this, and often you've won them over for life.

You keep slapping them down and you'll never get them back.

 

[rgraham666]

You keep slapping them down and you'll never get them back.

That's what happened to me in school. They gave up on me when I was nine.

My quitting at seventeen just fulfilled their expectations of me.

 

[fieryjen]

I've been thinking on this list a little more. I still believe that it makes some good points (though, reading Rob's post, I think they can be interpreted quite differently by different people - mine would be very different from his). I don't think the points should be driven home by telling the kids about this in a speech, anyway, because telling does not equal understanding. And there are plenty of kids who don't need to be told these rules, they already know them, but there are some that will be shocked by what's out there once they leave high school, and it was those kids I was thinking of when I first read the list.

Those were the kids I was talking to when I calculated mortgages on the board, and told them how to make a budget. I was going for shock value, and showed them how much they would eventually end up paying back to the bank. An interest rate of seven percent doesn't sound like a huge deal to them, until they figure out that this probably translates to paying back twice of what they borrowed in the first place. That was when some of them first started thinking that it might not be so easy to get a mortgage and just buy a house as they thought it would be. "That's not fair!" was a frequently used sentence in that class, and it didn't come from me. But, in the end, a goal of mine during this lesson was to drive home the point that banks aren't necessarily "fair", and that one has to be careful and informed when getting loans.

These kids lack life skills, and far too many of them decide during high school that they can somehow have success without their diploma. This has always been a problem, but at the school where I taught it was a major one with rising trend. Once they leave, it's usually too late once they realize that living is not as easy as it seemed to them just a few years ago.

I'm not saying put this list in front of the kids and let them read it, but it does have some good points about life skills that might actually be beneficial for certain kids to know. To me, it doesn't mean giving up on those kids, but quite the opposite. It doesn't mean slapping them down, but trying to nudge their mindset in the right direction so they don't have to learn it the hard way.

 

[CWatson]

I worry about how easy it seems to be for people to lose touch with what it was like to be younger--over the course of just one generation.

My mother was surprised to find out that my sister and I already know that we are not retiring on Social Security. We just looked at her funny. How could we not know this?--we're over 20 and we're reasonably well-informed. But beyond that, my mom has that whiner's mentality, something my dad and sister and I keep trying to break her of. My dad describes himself as a fatalist: what happens, happens; and the objective isn't to wonder why or bemoan it, but rather to deal with it, and maybe even turn it to your advantage. Every cloud has a silver lining, after all. (Of course, likewise every silver lining has its cloud, but let's worry about that later.) And seeing the miracles our dad has pulled simply because he has bothered to read the Tax Code, my sister and I believe him.

As to the original list, Rule 2 is complete bullshit. The world doesn't care about your self-esteem per se, but--as someone who has had it for only about four years now, I can tell you--you need it to accomplish anything. You need it to feel like you can accomplish anything. (Sure, maybe you cured AIDS--but if you don't remember it and don't use it to bolster your self-confidence, you're just as much a loser to your own mind as you were before you did it. And that's kind of a stumbling block.) Unfortunately, self-esteem is not something they teach in schools. They teach destroying it--oh, how they destroy it--but it's not something you can build up again by back-engineering it in reverse.

America seems to swing to extremes in this department. Either you're a cocksure know-it-all and there's no way to puncture the balloon of your ego, or you're a wilting geek and you think you're a loser. Where, I ask you, where are the parents that teach kids to be grounded?? "Okay, Child Of Mine. You're good at [thisandthis]; you're not good at [thatandthat]. A man's gotta know his limitations, though a man should also know what he's talented at. ...And you too, daughter. Both of you. Know thyself, and then go out and be the person you know." Is this really that hard?

(Well, clearly it is, because almost no one ever accomplishes it...)

</threadjack>

 

[dr_mabeuse]

For every complex issue, the right has an answer; simple, common-sensical, and wrong.

 

[DesertPirate]

For every complex issue, the right has an answer; simple, common-sensical, and wrong.

We have to turn every thread into political bullshit huh?

Of course the left would never admit to being wrong, it's that upturned nose and superiority complex that turns most folks off.

 

[DeeZire]

No, life isn't fair. And you should get used to it.

However, that doesn't mean you should be unfair. And my experience is that people who say 'life is unfair' aren't whining about it. They're using it as an excuse for being an asshole.

I got a chuckle out of the fact that Bill Gate's career is based on making sure life isn't fair for his competitors. No wonder 'life isn't fair' would top his list.

I laughed yet again when I saw that this list wasn't originated by Bill Gates, but by someone else - just like almost every piece of software Microsoft sells.

If Bill Gates is supposed to be a role model for children, our country is doomed. (He spent years being the stingiest billionaire in history before the press finally hounded him into launching his much-trumpeted philanthropic endeavors.)

When you consider the billions in lost productivity caused by the unstable Windows OS, (back when Macs were running a windows OS, and PC's were running DOS, painfully trying to get Win 3.1 off the ground,) Bill Gates' brainchild could be considered one of the biggest disasters to hit the American economy since the Great Depression.

 

[trysail]

For every complex issue, the right has an answer; simple, common-sensical, and wrong.

Not only did he fail to acknowledge the author (Mencken) with the original thought, he (apparently?) intentionally doctored, twisted and butchered the quote to serve his own purpose. There's not even a slight suggestion that the thought originated elsewhere— that smacks of the worst possible form of plagiarism. It's dishonest, offensive and obnoxious.

 

[DesertPirate]

Not only did he fail to acknowledge the author (Mencken) with the original thought, he (apparently?) intentionally doctored, twisted and butchered the quote to serve his own purpose. There's not even a slight suggestion that the thought originated elsewhere— that smacks of the worst possible form of plagiarism. It's dishonest, offensive and obnoxious.

Just like the way Gates company deals with producing software?

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

For every complex issue, the right has an answer; simple, common-sensical, and wrong.

Who says these are complex issues? They're pretty fundamental and straightforward.

Not only did he fail to acknowledge the author (Mencken) with the original thought, he (apparently?) intentionally doctored, twisted and butchered the quote to serve his own purpose. There's not even a slight suggestion that the thought originated elsewhere— that smacks of the worst possible form of plagiarism. It's dishonest, offensive and obnoxious.

Too harsh. The quote is so well known that in a smart group like this one no attribution is required.

 

[Guest]

We have to turn every thread into political bullshit huh?

Of course the left would never admit to being wrong, it's that upturned nose and superiority complex that turns most folks off.

Jesus.