Rant: I Hate My Parents - Academic Success & Childhood Neglect

[Redbelly98]

This talk about encyclopedia's reminded me of something. Did anyone else have a set of these as a kid?

Not that I recall. But I see they put Physics in its rightful place at #1 on the list of technologies

 

[runner]

when you start to feel sorry for the hand that was dealt to you, check out the story of Dr. Ben Carson. Dr. Carson is the Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital and performs some unbelievable brain surgeries.

childhood background:

born in the inner city in Detroit

mother could not read, but she made him and brother read books weekly and write a report which she then checked off.

at one time in his life he had a violent temper.

more recently:

he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor.

he recently performed a surgery on a young girl from Texas and removed the right half of her brain. http://wjz.com/local/surgery.jessie.hall.2.741266.html

he's an example that circumstances do not have to define the person. check out his books and listen to clips on youtube... good stuff.

 

[Evo]

I just didn't have much luck (or skill, to be honest) with model planes back then. Also had a brief try with the gas-powered variety, that attached to a line and circled around you. Never could get the thing to fly even 1 time around before it crashed to the pavement. After 2 tries (and the painstaking repair job in between), I gave up.

But, I did enjoy building the things.

My brother had one of those motorized ones, it was rather difficult.

I loved the balsa wood gliders, I'd whittle the parts until they flew right. Now I need to whittle some balsa wood. I can still feel my knife slicing through that soft wood. Damn you Redbelly!

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

 

[_Mayday_]

Hate is such a strong word.

 

[turbo]

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

I used to assemble plastic models of all types. My favorites were planes. I'd paint them with squadron colors, thin some black paint and add "soot" aft of the exhausts, and in the case of bombers that often took a lot of fire, like unescorted B-17's, I'd heat up a pin in an alcohol lamp flame (courtesy of the chemistry set) and use it to melt the plastic to add "bullet holes" to the fuselage. I had to put all my paper-route money and money earned from regular mowing and snow-removal jobs into my savings account, but my parents usually let me accumulate money from returnable beer, soda, and bleach bottles that I picked up alongside roads and in "unofficial" dumps in the woods, etc to buy models, glue, and paint.

 

[BobG]

When I was studying engineering, we had to use slide rules. Even when Bowmar came out with a 4-function calculator, we still had to use slide rules. The calculators were over $300, and the school thought that it would be an unfair advantage to wealthier students to allow their use. Since they cost more than half a semester's tuition, that was a fair assessment.

http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/bowmar.html

For a lot of the introductory courses, that probably would be a fair assessment. The funny thing is, slide rules were more functional than most of your scientific calculators until the introduction of graphing calculators that handled complex math problems. There was no way you could solve a quadratic equation on an HP-35 as quickly as you could on a slide rule. On the other hand, the first HP-35 had a light next to the on/off switch so you could tell whether or not the calculator was on. I guess that prevented poor students from scratching their head and puzzling over why the LED wasn't lit up with their answer in spite of entering so many numbers in the calculator (HP deleted the power light on their second edition).

Of course, the drawback is that it might be easy to learn how to multiply, divide, etc on a slide rule, but learning how to set up your order of calculations to get quick and accurate results is a lot harder. And all those extra scales on the more expensive slide rules eventually led to the same problem students had with calculators. If you rely on them too much, you hit a brick wall on the problems with magnitudes higher than your log log scales go. Those really simple slide rules (like Nestler AN-23R that Einstein and Von Braun liked so much) never ran into those types of problems since you never forgot the basics. Of course those wouldn't solve quadratic equations directly for you either and you had to pull the slide out and turn it over to solve complex math problems, vector problems, or trig problems.

 

[mormonator_rm]

I hate this "family" system where random people are allowed to have kids and do WHATEVER they want to them short of physical abuse or neglect. I think society should send all kids to a place where parents like mine can't inflict irreparable damage on them.

Sorry for this rant but its not fair! :(

Well, it surely must be sucky to have to choose to hate your parents...

If having the state raise all our children is the alternative, then I think I'd like to stick with the already sucky "family" system and take my chances, rather than turn it over to the even suckier "Big Brother/Nanny State" system and have no chance at all...

 

[Janus]

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

I didn't go in so much for cars and planes, but I did have some battleships ( I remember building the Bismark, and a one of those "cutaway view" models of a submarine ).

I also got into building tanks. I built a Panzer, Sherman, Tiger, Panther, etc.

 

[NoTime]

I just didn't have much luck (or skill, to be honest) with model planes back then. Also had a brief try with the gas-powered variety, that attached to a line and circled around you. Never could get the thing to fly even 1 time around before it crashed to the pavement. After 2 tries (and the painstaking repair job in between), I gave up.

But, I did enjoy building the things.

I must have rebuilt mine about 10 times before I learned to fly it.
When I did finally get it to go around a few times it fell apart due to the hack quick reassembly i did.
Later I learned that you can only loop one so many times before friction in the control wires prevents you form being able to control it.

 

[Andre]

My brother had one of those motorized ones, it was rather difficult.

I loved the balsa wood gliders, I'd whittle the parts until they flew right. Now I need to whittle some balsa wood. I can still feel my knife slicing through that soft wood. Damn you Redbelly!

Well that certainly triggered very old memories. I built dozens of those, all self designed, which turned out to be a bad idea. But that didn't matter.

 

[binzing]

Cool Janus. Maybe I'll have to get one. But hey, I'd rather just buy the materials for just a few "creations" (smoke mix, BP, etc.) in bulk.

 

[Astronuc]

I didn't go in so much for cars and planes, but I did have some battleships ( I remember building the Bismark, and a one of those "cutaway view" models of a submarine ).

I also got into building tanks. I built a Panzer, Sherman, Tiger, Panther, etc.

I did 1/72, 1/48 models of aircarft - bombers like B29, B24, . . . , Avro Lancaster, and fighters P38, P40, P47, P51, F4F Wildcat, F4U Corsair, . . . .

I built a few modern ones of which my favorite was the North American's F107 and Convair's B-58 Hustler.

I also built a naval battle group built around CV's Hornet and Yorktown, BB's New Jersey, Iowa, and Missouri, and some crusiers and destroyers.

I built models mostly from Revell and Monogram.

http://www.revell.com/catalog/catalog/Aircraft-7-1.html

http://www.revell.com/catalog/catalog/Ships-2-1.html - sure don't have the selection they used to.

 

[turbo]

Some of my favorites included B-24 Liberator, B-17 Flying fortress, P-38 Lighting, and a pretty accurate-looking version of the Lancaster dam-buster with skipping depth-charge under the belly. I also really liked the PBY Catalina with the machine-gun blisters and retractable landing gear. Growing up in Maine, I saw a lot of sea-planes - they are really popular for getting to remote lakes.

 

[BobG]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reid_W._Barton
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gabriel_Carroll
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Kane

These are examples of people who had parents who were nice enough to nurture their thinking abilities from a young age so that academic success was natural and that is allowing them to have amazing careers. They have an amazing basket of skills that they carry around with them and have all these versatile mental abilities that make doing math and basically anything else supereasy for them.

Compared to their parents, my parents are a complete joke. Between the ages of 0 and 18, my parents had almost complete control over my identity and what activities I participated in and where I went to school. And the choices they made have been detrimental for me. They had tons of resources yet I spent MASSIVE amounts of my childhood just doing nothing (i.e. watching TV, playing video games, trying to be accepted socially, traveling in cars or airplanes, having the most trivial conversations imaginable, eating deadly desert food filled to the brim with saturated fat and trans fat, listening to music in my room (while doing nothing else) for prolonged periods of time, trying to be rebellious, shopping for clothes that were "better" than the ones I currently had, playing with random "for-the-masses" electronic toys like Bop-It or little robots or race cars or whatever,... the list goes on and on)!

Did you have older brothers and sisters? If so, maybe you're not so unjustified in hating your parents. You only need two kids to replace the parents. The rest are just spares. The only way they get any attention is if something bad happens to one of the older ones.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1672715-1,00.html

I like the bird that spaces out its eggs so they hatch a day apart. That fourth one born is practically guaranteed to die and it had better be a pretty abundant year for that third one to live (unless something bad happens to one of its older siblings).

I was the oldest in my family. I found my spares to be particularly eerie. It was kind of like being followed by vultures. They always grinned when something bad happened to me. They even told my parents when the police drove me home. The second oldest was particularly eager to snitch on me. They were just aching for something bad to happen to me.

 

[Evo]

I was the "Middle Child". My brother was older and he was a "boy" so he could do whatever he wanted. I also suffered from anything he didn't want to do. I wanted so badly to learn how to play the piano, but since my parents paid for piano lessons for him and he gave it up, I wasn't allowed to have lessons. I never could figure out the logic in that. He did poorly in school (elementary through high school) because he didn't care, so he got paid for making anything better than an F, I made straight A's and got nothing because "it just came naturally" for me. No, I actually read my school books and did my homework. Then my younger sister was seven years younger, so she was the baby that could do no wrong.

I was the weird dorky kid in the middle that every year at the beginning of school when we were asked to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I would write that I wanted to be a mad scientist working in my laboratory. That always got a stare from my teachers.

 

[Redbelly98]

I loved the balsa wood gliders, I'd whittle the parts until they flew right. Now I need to whittle some balsa wood. I can still feel my knife slicing through that soft wood. Damn you Redbelly!

Better some wood than your thumb ...
Speaking of which, hope it's doing better.

Who else here made the plastic model planes, boats and cars? Between my brother and I, I don't think there was ever a time when the house didn't reek of model glue.

Yup, those too. There were these models of characters from horror films, where some parts (faces, hands) were made of glow-in-the-dark plastic. I built maybe 3 of those. Man, was it creepy in my room at bedtime

I was the oldest in my family. I found my spares to be particularly eerie... They were just aching for something bad to happen to me.

LOL

 

[rewebster]

I was the "Middle Child". My brother was older and he was a "boy" so he could do whatever he wanted. I also suffered from anything he didn't want to do. I wanted so badly to learn how to play the piano, but since my parents paid for piano lessons for him and he gave it up, I wasn't allowed to have lessons. I never could figure out the logic in that. He did poorly in school (elementary through high school) because he didn't care, so he got paid for making anything better than an F, I made straight A's and got nothing because "it just came naturally" for me. No, I actually read my school books and did my homework. Then my younger sister was seven years younger, so she was the baby that could do no wrong.

I was the weird dorky kid in the middle that every year at the beginning of school when we were asked to write about what we wanted to be when we grew up, I would write that I wanted to be a mad scientist working in my laboratory. That always got a stare from my teachers.

From what you keep saying about your job, are you saying you didn't fulfull that childhood dream?

 

[Cyrus]

Any child who did not make plastic models missed out!

This is probably the last one I've made. I used to make these things constantly as a kid. We had a place called the 'squadron shop'. It was a dedicated plastic model hobby shop for aircraft. They had display cases that I would look at growing up full of models made by world class builders. These things were of the quality to be in a hollywood movie. Every little detail was there and then some. But sadly they went out of business a few years ago. Now you can buy their squandron brand tools, like files, knives, hemostats, etc.

Its a boeing 777 that came in all white plastic mold. I then glued it up and painted the body white and the wings gray. The silver along the leading edges and belly of the fuselauge is made from thin cigarette foil pressed onto it. The wing is weather with oil stains near the control surface hinges. The pencil just gives you a sense of scale. Its about a foot and a half long and in span, so pretty big as far as plastic models go.

http://img57.imageshack.us/img57/2017/pict0234dx5.jpg

Sadly, this is one of the only models I have left. That damn squadron shop was a bad influence on me. I wanted my models to look PERFECT like the ones built by those world class modelers. If there were imprefections when I was done, Id throw it in a box or just stop building it.

You can kind of make out the painted squares on the engine intakes. If you look at the real engine, they have slightly different colored panels inside the engine that make that pattern. It was b*** to paint inside them... Another hard part is to get rid of the seam that shows when you glue the two halves of the fuse together. It makes a line that runs down the entire length of the top of the plastic. You got to put putty in there and wet sand, wet sand, wet sand, wet sand, finer finer, finer...

 

[Evo]

Cyrus, that's a thing of beauty. Anyone that really got into making models understands what goes into making them works of art as opposed to just "gluing" them together.

My brother loved the WWII German planes for some reason. My mother and her family were almost constantly on the run from the Germans during the war, first in Europe, then in North Africa (her father was also a Captain in the French Navy, yeah I guess they had a Navy). Anyway, she said they could tell if the planes above them were American or German from the sounds of the engines, I still remember the sounds she would make immitating them. She said that at night the air raid sirens would sound and you would hear the whistle of the bombs dropping. One villa where they had taken up residency had a vacant villa across from it and the Americans had turned it into an ammuntions depot. During one raid, a bomb was dropped directly on the depot. Luckily the bomb was a dud and didn't go off, thanks to that I am here today.

 

[Redbelly98]

I must have rebuilt mine about 10 times before I learned to fly it.
When I did finally get it to go around a few times it fell apart due to the hack quick reassembly i did.
Later I learned that you can only loop one so many times before friction in the control wires prevents you form being able to control it.

I'm having trouble understanding why that would happen. Aren't you turning your body to keep facing the plane? But then it seems you could get rather dizzy after a while. Did you just keep facing the same direction, so the lines would twist around each other as the plane went around?

 

[turbo]

My brother loved the WWII German planes for some reason. My mother and her family were almost constantly on the run from the Germans during the war, first in Europe, then in North Africa (her father was also a Captain in the French Navy, yeah I guess they had a Navy).

A former boss (and a very good friend of mine) grew up in Latvia and experienced WWII from the viewpoint of a young person whose country was invaded and counter-invaded. His mother and aunt came to take him from school one day when the Russians had slaughtered all the livestock on their farm and had killed all the men who tried to defend the farm. They spent the next 2 years crossing Europe, living on whatever food they could glean from fields or get from villagers. Kredo told me that his mother and his aunt fed him from potatoes, turnips, etc, that they carried wrapped in their belongings, while telling him that he should eat because they "were not hungry". Believe me, he loved his mother and aunt, and nothing that he could ever have done for them could ever have repaid them for what they did for him.

 

[NoTime]

I'm having trouble understanding why that would happen. Aren't you turning your body to keep facing the plane? But then it seems you could get rather dizzy after a while. Did you just keep facing the same direction, so the lines would twist around each other as the plane went around?

Loops (loop de loop) you just stand facing one direction while the plane goes up, then backward upside down (inverted), then down and then forward again (or reverse sequence).

 

[rootX]

To op,

You should see this video.

It is so hilarious!

It's little stereotypical but I don't have any friend whose parents
go crazy if the he/she get B+

 

[Cyrus]

To op,

You should see this video.

It is so hilarious!

It's little stereotypical but I don't have any friend whose parents
go crazy if the he/she get B+

...?

 

[rootX]

...?

I found it funny .. (actually, when I watched it second time)
b+ is a pretty grade

 

[cristo]

I found it funny .. (actually, when I watched it second time)
b+ is a pretty grade

Hmm... that video could be about 10 seconds long and have the same effect.

 

[ehrenfest]

It sounds like you are being a little hard on your parents...I'm sure that they didn't force you to eat "deadly" desserts

Well no but they bought the high trans/saturated fat cookies and brownies and sweets and put them in a cabinet in our kitchen and told me that they were there and failed to educate me to any significant extent on the dangers of eating such foods (they also failed to educate themselves on those dangers).

As far as I am concerned, that is called poisoning a child.

 

[robertm]

As far as I am concerned, that is called poisoning a child.

...with indirect stupidity.

Could or should someone ever face consequences for merely being an idiot? Or if their stupidity allowed them to commit a wrong without any knowledge or understanding of it?

I don't know, it is hard to come to terms with feeling anger towards someone who could never fully grasp their own fallacies...

 

[BobG]

Well no but they bought the high trans/saturated fat cookies and brownies and sweets and put them in a cabinet in our kitchen and told me that they were there and failed to educate me to any significant extent on the dangers of eating such foods (they also failed to educate themselves on those dangers).

As far as I am concerned, that is called poisoning a child.

...with indirect stupidity.

Could or should someone ever face consequences for merely being an idiot? Or if their stupidity allowed them to commit a wrong without any knowledge or understanding of it?

I don't know, it is hard to come to terms with feeling anger towards someone who could never fully grasp their own fallacies...

Wow, that's really opening up the box. When I was young, I was allowed to stand up in the back seat, hang my head out the window, and stick my hand out as far as I could to see if the signposts were close enough to the road to lop off my hand. If I got tired, I could go to sleep in the back window so I'd be a human projectile in the event my parent drove into a brick wall. I don't think our cars even had seat belts! In fact, the definition of a good car seat was one that had a toy steering wheel with a horn! Safety was not driving into the same intersection as a drunk driver (who was probably uninsured and sure to receive a small fine if he killed someone).

Nowadays, a parent could be convicted of manslaughter if one of his kids wasn't wearing their seatbelt and was killed in an accident.

I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before a parent could be found guilty of child abuse for allowing their kids to eat too many unhealthy desserts. Tobacco use in the home is already on the verge of being labeled as child abuse by many communities.

 

[Ki Man]

To op,

You should see this video.

It is so hilarious!

It's little stereotypical but I don't have any friend whose parents
go crazy if the he/she get B+

I am Asian but am lucky enough to have relatively understanding and supportive parents. I have plenty of other Asian friends though whose parents raise them to be doctors and are extremely disapproving and reactionary when they hear about plans of anything else (Even if its a career that isn't too far removed and would leave them just as well off, like psychologist or veterinarian.)

One Chinese girl who I am friends with was practically bred into being an Ivy League student. She became extremely anxious after receiving one B in freshman year and felt as though she now had to redeem herself in order to get into UCLA. I am certain that she would literally cry if she had anything less in her GPA. The video is a satire, but in some cases it doesn't exaggerate much

 

[Moonbear]

Wow, that's really opening up the box. When I was young, I was allowed to stand up in the back seat, hang my head out the window, and stick my hand out as far as I could to see if the signposts were close enough to the road to lop off my hand. If I got tired, I could go to sleep in the back window so I'd be a human projectile in the event my parent drove into a brick wall. I don't think our cars even had seat belts! In fact, the definition of a good car seat was one that had a toy steering wheel with a horn! Safety was not driving into the same intersection as a drunk driver (who was probably uninsured and sure to receive a small fine if he killed someone).

Nowadays, a parent could be convicted of manslaughter if one of his kids wasn't wearing their seatbelt and was killed in an accident.

I'm pretty sure it's just a matter of time before a parent could be found guilty of child abuse for allowing their kids to eat too many unhealthy desserts. Tobacco use in the home is already on the verge of being labeled as child abuse by many communities.

I was even allowed to sit in my father's lap and "help" drive!

It's a little ridiculous to blame one's parents for things society as a whole didn't even know were bad for us at the time, and generally condoned.

I don't think anyone other than biochemists knew what a trans-fat was up until a few years ago when suddenly it was decided they're bad for us and should be avoided. The only thing people used to worry about was all the sugar making kids fat, and if you weren't fat, then there wasn't a problem.

You can waste your time blaming your parents for doing the best they could to raise you, or you can take responsibility for yourself now and move forward rather than dwelling in the past. You're an adult now, and your future is in your own hands, not your parents. You can throw temper tantrums about the stupid things your parents did, or you can grow up.

 

[WarPhalange]

Well no but they bought the high trans/saturated fat cookies and brownies and sweets and put them in a cabinet in our kitchen and told me that they were there and failed to educate me to any significant extent on the dangers of eating such foods (they also failed to educate themselves on those dangers).

As far as I am concerned, that is called poisoning a child.

Are you a fatty now? Do you have diabetes because of it? Or what? If they gave you diabetes through a poor diet, then sure, get pissed at them.

But even if you're overweight now you can do something about it. You didn't have a perfect start, so what? Suck it up.

Besides, trans fats are a recent fad. I doubt most people knew of them a few years ago.

 

[rewebster]

I am Asian but am lucky enough to have relatively understanding and supportive parents. I have plenty of other Asian friends though whose parents raise them to be doctors and are extremely disapproving and reactionary when they hear about plans of anything else (Even if its a career that isn't too far removed and would leave them just as well off, like psychologist or veterinarian.)

One Chinese girl who I am friends with was practically bred into being an Ivy League student. She became extremely anxious after receiving one B in freshman year and felt as though she now had to redeem herself in order to get into UCLA. I am certain that she would literally cry if she had anything less in her GPA. The video is a satire, but in some cases it doesn't exaggerate much

I've known this one woman for a while. She went part time to get her masters, and the problem (part of it) is that it took her a long time. The other part of the problem is that she wanted an 'A' in all of her courses. I don't know the routine she got into as far as how (or why) if she didn't get an 'A', she re-took the course, and how she got the 'A' to replace the other grade (usually a 'B'). I know she re-took one course three times. I think she said that she ended up getting a 4.0 at the end.

So far so good, you would think.


She took so long (going part time) to get her straight 'A's (from re-taking so many courses) that her degree (some facet of Psychology) that that specific area of speciality was no longer accepted as being the 'correct' one to get a good job in the field.

I didn't get into trying to understand as it was usually hard to understand her train of thought as it had so many twists and turns that you had to follow that she HAD to tell to 'make' sure that you knew ALL of the problems that lead to whatever she was trying to say.

She convinced me that (this was just a speculation that you hear) 75% of all the people that go into Psychology/Psychiatry go into it to figure out their own problems.

 

[Math Is Hard]

She convinced me that (this was just a speculation that you hear) 75% of all the people that go into Psychology/Psychiatry go into it to figure out their own problems.

Not me. Perfectly sane here! :)

 

[Moonbear]

She convinced me that (this was just a speculation that you hear) 75% of all the people that go into Psychology/Psychiatry go into it to figure out their own problems.

Do you really think the percentage is that low?