Maintaining a healthy work-life balance…
13 minute read
May 30, 2025, 1:05 PM
Recently, I was thinking about how some people do a remarkably poor job maintaining a healthy separation between home and work, and making sure to have a life outside of work. I also can’t help but think that it’s the logical result of conditioning that we all received as children. As children, after all, we start out being pretty good at setting boundaries, as any child that says “no” about something could probably attest to. But then the ability to maintain boundaries and to maintain a healthy separation between the different parts of our lives is trained out of us as we grow up, and as adults, we have to relearn how to set those boundaries and relearn how to set and maintain that separation between work and having a life.
I would argue that this lack of respect for boundaries between various parts of one’s life starts very early, in school. I remember that school liked to make a lot of demands of my time outside of school. Homework, school projects, and the like taught us all that school was your entire life, and that this took priority over all of your other activities. It actually got to the point where I was made to felt guilty about engaging in activities that I enjoyed because I “should” be doing things for school instead.
I know that I’ve said a lot of negative things about my elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas, but homework was one thing that Grimes did right: they didn’t assign any. Later in my school career, after leaving Grimes, they told us that the goal was to have an hour or so of homework every night. Grimes didn’t assign any, and we did all of our work at school. I appreciated that, because it meant that once school was over, I could leave school at school and focus on my various other interests. In other words, it was a healthy separation between school and personal. My parents, on the other hand, were always critical of that, suggesting that it was wrong that Grimes didn’t assign daily homework. However, I suspect that some of their criticisms of the school were rooted in the idea that everything in Arkansas was bad or wrong because it was Arkansas. They didn’t really want to move out there in the first place, but it was a good career move for Dad at the time. But as far as the homework went, I was fine with not having any, because I understood that school happened at school, and my personal life happened at home.
Continue reading…Sometimes, you wonder if they’ve ever listened to themselves…
14 minute read
May 20, 2025, 2:22 PM
Recently, I was on Threads and found a post about the fallout from an Advanced Placement (AP) exam that was interrupted by a fire alarm at Davis High School in Kaysville, Utah. According to the linked article, a fire alarm sounded at Davis High School on Monday, May 12, about three and a half hours into a four-hour AP calculus exam, which required that the school be evacuated, which lasted about thirty minutes. The alarm was determined to be accidental, caused by a stray balloon that interfered with the operation of a beam detector designed to detect smoke using infrared light. When students returned to the testing room after the emergency was over, they were informed that their exam was invalidated. Students were then told that they could either submit their exams as they stood when the fire alarm went off, or they could retake the exam on either May 22, which is the same day as the school’s graduation ceremony, or they could retake the test on May 28, after they had all graduated.
First of all, for those who are not familiar, Advanced Placement, commonly known as AP, is a program run by the College Board, which is the same organization that administers the SAT. High school students take specially-designated AP courses in high school, and the instruction culminates with an AP exam, which is given in May on a date that the College Board determines. The exam consists of several sections, and then it’s all sent off to the College Board for scoring. You get your score some time during the summer, typically in July. You get a score between one and five for the AP exam, with five’s being the highest. This score is then used by colleges to determine whether to award credits for the equivalent courses in their programs. Because of the third-party scoring, as well as the timing of when the scores come out, there is no way for an AP exam score to be used as part of the grading for the high school’s purposes. Thus this exam only determines credit for the next level of education, i.e. college. Then you only find out what your AP scores were really worth once you enroll in a college and they determine how to apply your scores. In my case, I got a 3 on my AP history exam during my junior year, a 2 on my English literature and composition exam and a 4 on my US government exam during my senior year. JMU, where I attended college, at the time would award course credit for a score of 4 or above. So the AP English literature score wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, and we knew that as soon as we saw it, but at the same time, we weren’t surprised, because I had struggled in that course, for reasons that I have discussed previously. We knew that my AP government score would get me course credit, and as it turned out, my 3 for AP history was a moot point, because that course satisfied the same general education requirement that the government class did, and I had gotten credit for that.
Categories: Companies, High school, Ride On, Social media
Singing along to only the music…
7 minute read
May 9, 2025, 11:14 AM
Back in March, I made a Journal entry about the then-impending liquidation of the Hudson’s Bay Company, including the company’s flagship location at Yonge and Queen Streets in Toronto, which many people know as the store from Today’s Special. As part of that entry, I ran the following slideshow, set to a song from the Today’s Special episode “Sleep”, where I covered the lyrics:
Categories: Artificial intelligence, Today's Special