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I don’t know. He got what he wanted out of it, and was able to support his GF’s decision to keep working without actually saying anything even resembling classwork.
I was at the mall twelve years ago, I was 18 then, when this guy at a booth offers to show me and my girlfriend that thing. We don’t know what it is so we’re like okay sure. Well I am SUPER sensitive and ticklish. Dude puts it on my head and I literally fell to my knees and started gasping at how amazing it felt. It was a bit too intense for me. I will never forget that day.
Not mine. Os sure, she makes it seem like I can get back to work if I scratch her head, but it’s never enough. She’ll hop up and somehow spread out so that her tiny six pound mass takes up 80% of the surface area of my desk.
Belly rubbings WILL happen, and they will not cease until she is bored.
I have found my people. Cat people. Which is a separate thing from cat-people. If you ever go to a florists, ask for a flower box. Your cat will love it. They are 4ft/9in/9in. you will need scissors.
Walky: if he were real he’d be real-life comic relief.
That’s the only proper way to phrase that. Saying a character in a comic is comic relief for the characters of said comic is sort of redundant.
Y’know, that’s pretty much the gist of it. Thanks for simplifying my own words for me i guess? And congratulations on deciphering something i typed trying to be perceptive while in Sleep Deprived Rambling Mode.
The irony is that Dorothy has some great ideas but however she does in college is NOT going to determine whether she’s President. That’ll be how she does with people and oratory as well as backroom dealing with the parties.
If anything, Mike is probably the most likely of the cast to become president. The most essential part of being in any position of authority is convincing people that you should do what they tell you to, by intimidation if nothing else, and Mike has that down.
Of course, he would probably be president the same way Porfirio Diaz was.
If you need to postpone life while studying, how could you hope to pick it up when working? Oh sure, you’ll pick it up once your job is steady. And then once you got that promotion. And then once you get the next. And then there is no more promotion, so you have to change jobs and work doubly in order to catch up and make yourself worth the pay increase.
With that kind of attitude, you’ll have your coffin picked out and paid off before you even had a chance to start living.
Your best hope for happiness is to find another person with the same twistedly obsessed work ethic as you, so that you can keep telling each other that the stolen minutes and the effort itself qualify as real happiness. Walky is perhaps not the best person for that.
I’ve seen enough lazily written romantic comedies to know that he either didn’t mean it, or he’ll change his mind. There will be a slow-motion run through an airport involved.
It’s possible she was always big fish/small pond in her hometown without any true intellectuals with whom to compare herself. We’ll see, there ARE alternative explanations for her difficulties… just none that seem as likely to me.
I’d wager that she took AP classes in high school, and is in higher level classes to start with, other than the Gender Studies class. This is something I’ve wondered as well.
… um i assure you this is entirely NORMAL and expected – no, demanded – behavior, *especially* at the freshman level.
At a hypertypical/state-associated institution such as IU, all the large lectures (which are, of course, intended for underclassmen) are 20-80, meaning the professor teaches only 20% of the content they will be testing on in class, and you are expected to teach yourself the remaining 80% from the textbook on your own time.
This is something that’s institutionalized – it’s considered perfectly acceptable or even standard for professors to teach this way. Never mind the wide range of learning styles and learning disabilities, it can also set up a lot of freshmen up for failure because they don’t know this going into their first year of college, and by the time they realize it it’s too late because they’ve already taken over the credit limit of courses and signed up for 5 clubs and got a job on campus and partied their pants off because they didn’t realize what all that “free time” they thought they had was actually for.
It’d be one thing if all students were warned about this during orientation at every school, but it almost never happens, for a load of bullshit reasons. It’s finally a great big surprise when you start failing and you have no idea why. Dorothy is quite ahead of the curve here, either she was brilliant enough to realize this from the get-go, a guardian angel told her while she applied for college, or she just has study habits bordering on the inhuman that actually are serving her now. And you wonder why so many students complain about being zombies…
And now you know where the phenomenon of “teachers not teaching the material” comes from. The argument is that it prepares you for real life; true, but even jobs have job training…
For the record, SOP in high school is 80-20 – 80% of the test material taught by the teacher in class, 20% learned at home via readings/homework.
… Whew, I wrote a small thesis here. Sorry guys!
I have attended Community College and State University in America, and I spent a year at a Universiteit in the Netherlands. I am now a graduate student at a State University. This does not mean my experience is fully comprehensive, but I HAVE seen and heard a lot in my time. In general, the people I would earmark as smart don’t have much trouble in their first semester, especially not before the finals crunch. Typically the people who spend a lot of time in rigorous study before their third or fourth semester are those of more modest intelligence but possessing considerable motivation.
Personally, I did study in my freshman year. Not NEARLY this much, though.
U.S. state university student here… American universities are known for the system I spoke of in large lectures, which are of course all freshmen and maybe a few sophomores. This was admitted openly to my face by a dean at my school. Problem is, if you don’t pass the first big-lecture courses you can’t progress through your university career… and you can’t pass those big lectures if you don’t know how you need to do it.
In my case, I was really intelligent, passed through high school with honors, barely needed to study in order to achieve top grades. I hit university and… Bam, hit a brick wall. Failed everything because I simply didn’t know what I was working with. Once that dean saved me by telling me this, I started succeeding again.
And there is a measured phenomenon of this across the top state schools that still use this system. The smarter schools, including many privates and lately a few of the smarter public/state schools, have figured out why all the supposedly smart students they accepted onto their campuses are failing their first semesters and years and becoming massively discouraged; these schools have begun to drift away from the 20-80 system and teach the intro-level classes in smaller groups rather than several-hundred-student lectures. Europe had already figured it out a long time ago. I would guess that the U.S. university you went to was small enough to not consider this system, or smart enough to have stopped using it, or that you went to university here more than 15-20 years ago.
I would also add that this isn’t a real problem in community colleges because they would also be too small to use giant lectures in the first place, with a few exceptions.
Also, I read over your personal experience more closely, and while you surely have been in university here less than 20 years ago (mea culpa), this is a phenomenon that specifically began when college enrollment swelled due to the whole “everybody can go to college!” movement around 15-20 years ago.
Yeah it was 6 years ago when I started. I was at community college for my first two years, so I polled some people I knew who went to the State or U of. These were people whom I consider rather intelligent.
One said: I never studied
Another: It was really easy, I was bored.
Last: I had to do a lot of busywork, but I got to sleep on time every night.
So it’s really not within the realm of my experience or those I know. But this was, including myself, a group whose majors were Math/Econ, Math/CS, Philosophy(physics minor), and Physics(math minor). So maybe that plays a role as well.
Side note: this sort of system is marginally OK but only with advance warning (which is so often not given), but giant 250+student lectures are a terrible form of teaching in the first place, and the 20-80 method just exacerbates things.
I’m interested in knowing what courses Dorothy is taking at the moment; we already know about the Gender Studies of course.
I thought Dorothy was also supposed to be taking advance calculus as well. Which is pretty darn intensive course for a freshman. also Dorothy’s major may come into play when it comes to her workload. If she is in the hard sciences, which would account for a major course load especially if she took AP or IB, which means she would most likely skip some 100 & 200 level courses. She may be in the honors college, which if that’s the case it may explain her work load.
Huh. I aced maths in gymnasium (which at the time you left after 13 years of school, aged 19). We had a new math teacher in my 5h/wk “power course” in math who did not believe in mollycoddling pupils. The curriculum included all the basics in analysis (sequences, series, limits, differentiation, indefinite and definite integrals and their theoretic underpinnings, proof theory, computational geometry and so on) anyway.
Then I went to study (electrical) engineering at the university. The last two years of gymnasium were more or less rattled off in three weeks of higher math, and then without changing pace, two years of material were stacked on.
Now the engineering courses in that university had some reputation. 800 started along with me. It was expected that half dropped out in the first two years of “prediploma” while half of the rest dropped out in the 3 years of diploma courses following. Note that the numbers are the official durations: you were free to do stuff differently, and the median was about seven years all in all.
Now obviously, stuff depends on what you study and where. One problem with the liberal arts is that there is usually a tremendous discrepancy between the amount of work and studies you need to put in before you are capable of doing serious scientific work, and the amount of work and studies you need for getting a degree.
My girlfriend at the time was studying Romance literature and languages. She took her profession seriously, and her work was so far off the chart that professors apologized for not being able to give her more than the best grades. She handed a philosophy (minor course) term paper in in her first year, and got it back with “Excellent. What for?” on it.
Sort of deflating, so she went to his next speaking hours to check what that was supposed to mean. Turned out that he indeed could not for his life figure out what this was for: he thought that maybe he had negotiated some PhD thesis with somebody and this was the draft, but he could not remember doing so, and her name also did not strike a chord.
Shit like that. When she finally did get her PhD, she decided to take an apprenticeship as scientific librarian since her opinion of what was happening at universities was basically lots of smoke and mirrors competing for funds in fake science, and she was not interested in spending her life on that sort of fight.
At any rate: if you are giving your studies the kind of attention that its topics ultimately deserves, having aced school means nothing much. Now Dorothy’s ultimate goal was merely to become president, so she probably does not need to angle for “good enough to actually make the field move forward” but merely for “good enough not to be laughed at”.
Isn’t Dorothy hoping to transfer to an Ivy League school? Now, granted, I have no idea what transferring between colleges, particularly to an Ivy League entails, but I’m guessing she’s doing an insane overload to be impressive. Possibly she’s planning on retaking SATs as well?
My freshman year was more intense in terms of sheer work hours than any other at the school I went to. Every credit hour was at least 2 homework hours or more. IDK if you could class me as “intelligent” but my 3.9 gpa in highschool did not consume nearly so much of my time.
I think Aizat’s point is not about college elections; it is about how as a society we act like grades and GPA is the end-all-be-all in academia. Admitting that networking and socializing is more important would be an admittance to the fact that a lot of it equates to nepotism.
Maybe Dorothy could get elected the same way Robin kept her position as a senator in shortpacked. That’s right, twin mountains on national tv will get anyone elected.
Robin was (and, in DoA, is) a Congresswoman, not a Senator. Robin’s pert jugs’ll get you a seat in the House, but, as we’ve seen recently in the real world, being a drooling moron will get you a seat in the House, too. If you’re aiming for the Presidency on the merits of your rack, it’s gotta be Billie-class.
Well, as I recently told my daughter; in real life, nobody really cares about the marks, just get the degree. After the first job, nobody will ask for the marks, and the degree itself will also be less important.
I thought her entire plan was to only be here for a year or two, after which she’ll have gotten good enough grades to get into a REAL college. Grades may not get you elected, but law school admissions still seem to care about them.
She is what we used to call a ‘grind’. (don’t know what the latest call is). She’s just a person who has to be grinding the books all the time to realize her goals.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
“What we do every Friday night, Pinky, take over the world”.
“Stay on target.”
“You’re too close!”
“Stay on target.”
“LOOSEN UP!” *BOOM!*
“Gold Five to Red Leader. Lost Tyree, lost Hutch.”
“I copy, Gold Leader.”
“Came from behind.” *BOOM!*
The moral of that? Watch your six and loosen up a bit, or you’ll go boom the moment you’re in charge.
That was in Red Leader’s run, in the second assault run. Gold Squadron was the first assault run, Gold Leader (Hutch) with Golds Two (Tyree) and Five (Pops).
Luke’s run with Biggs and Wedge was the third assault run.
Maybe in panel 3, she is remembering that her goal is to leave Wally and Joyce in the rear view mirror. Really, she would be better off graduating from the Big Ten and planning an Ivy grad school.
That said, my governor is a college dropout and my rep is best known for being on a reality TV show. Not sure if a Ivy degree that represents hard work rather than legacy is that helpful in politics.
Writer has the most comments (obviously), followed by Moral foundation. Ironically, Neighbor has approximately 30% less comments.
Average number of comments per character:
1. Ethan (482)
2. Joyce (450)
3. Amber and Dina (356)
4. Dorothy (330)
5. Danny (307)
6. Sal (280)
7. Ruth (278)
8. Mike (269)
9. Walky (256)
10. Billie (255)
11. Sarah (211)
12. Joe (210)
13. Roz (163)
So… just going by comment count, Danny is more popular than Ruth and Billie.
guys we fucked up
Nah, but seriously, Ethan, Joyce, Amber, and Danny have been at the epicenter of this storyline’s drama. Of course, that could change in the coming weeks. I’m expecting more Sal stuff tomorrow (DoA time).
Where did Hollywood go so wrong? I thought movies were supposed to be an escape from reality, a chance to put your worries aside and not have to think about any underlying ideas or concepts. Well, not anymore.
theonion.com/you-can...
It's not a new argument, of course, but Chesterton dismissed it effectively in 1908.
"You will hear everlastingly... this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man."
Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com ⋅ 19h
Hawley dismisses Trump lining his pockets with his memecoin: "Listen, I think nobody believes that Donald Trump can be bought. I mean, what does Donald Trump need more money for?"
wilbur, savvy enough to know he's in a comic strip but still not a great actor, awkwardly lifts a muffin up into frame so that we, the audience, understand that he has a muffin right now, which is very important narratively, but he's not really selling it well as an organic, human action
confirming that the reason there's been no Galaxy Version female characters in Blokees until now is that they felt they needed to make Round Lady Thighs For Ladies
It's #webcomicday? We have a special day???
Well, my name is Pat McHoarney and I draw 69 Mouse-Ear Blvd, a multigenerational story about women who all have sexy legs and probably other features. There was a grandmother, but she wasn't hot and so she died off-panel.
Elizabeth Holmes is in prison for defrauding investors through her blood-testing company, Theranos. Her partner, Billy Evans, is now trying to raise money for a company that describes itself as “the future of diagnostics.” nyti.ms/3FbtZm9
www.ebay.com/itm/23609767...
selling my netflix war for cybertron megatron -- the walmart exclusive one that came with pinpointer and lionizer (but being sold here without pinpointer and lionizer)
Gran... IS ALIVE?
okay, juliette still has brown hair, so this is probably definitely a flashback
i'm just surprised that the comic has remembered her, at all
Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com ⋅ 19h
Pavel
@spavel.bsky.social ⋅ 10d
The New York Times @nytimes.com ⋅ 5d
preternia @preternia.com ⋅ 3d
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Walky’s not the best negotiator…
This actually seems like a perfect deal, to me.
I would give up a lot of things for head scratchies.
It is the Klondike bar of massages…
(huff)…(grunt)…(pant)… “They will never find the body.”
What would you do-oo!-oo for a Klondike bar!
This is were EVERYONE’S mind goes when the commercials air during a crime show. They need to make a face intro to a law and order of this.
And I need an edit button.
What would you do for an edit button!
Terrible, unspeakable things. Unpronounceable things.
I would also cross frogs and spider monkeys like in that beer movie, just for fun. Go monkey go!
Mojo Jo Jo!
Have you had the back of your head scratched before? If anything, Walky’s taking advantage of Dorothy’s anxiety ridden situation.
I don’t know. He got what he wanted out of it, and was able to support his GF’s decision to keep working without actually saying anything even resembling classwork.
Clearly you have not gotten the back of your head scratched.
Does doing it yourself counts?
If you’re able to tickle yourself as well, I would say yes.
~good point~
Clearly you have not used this and have felt the “back of your head”-gasm it creates.
That thing’s almost enough to make me believe in sin. Imagin a cockroach caroling up your spine… from the INSIDE. Buy one! Torture your friends.
And now I’m imagining a cockroach singing Christmas carols. Like, with a top hat and everything.
Oh my, yes. That’s actually pretty accurate accurate.
That looks like something that would be more at home in an exhibit of medieval torture devices.
This.
I was at the mall twelve years ago, I was 18 then, when this guy at a booth offers to show me and my girlfriend that thing. We don’t know what it is so we’re like okay sure. Well I am SUPER sensitive and ticklish. Dude puts it on my head and I literally fell to my knees and started gasping at how amazing it felt. It was a bit too intense for me. I will never forget that day.
That looks amazing. Must try!
Well, he’s no Roger Smith.
Head scratches… mergleblergmlafherkjglkjgshknkg
The perfect couple. A Working female and her “dog”
“Walkies!”
Walky should be glad he’s with Dorothy instead of the girl in your avatar…
But Osaka is such a nice girl.
Just a tad slow.
Hey now, it’s thanks to Osaka’s insight that I stopped wearing shoes while inside my own house.
Hey! She’s not slow. She just has a case of Attention Deficit something awful.
She’s not too bright either.
But she’s great with puzzles and word-play.
I have fond memories of that dog.
Plasma, I love that Osaka avatar.
Walky needs to change his name to Toto.
And now he’s learning to be responsible for his Dorothy.
Wow, Dorothy…You’re just a TON of FUN.
And by fun, you mean…snuggling?
Hey! She demands he touches her boobies. She’s damned fun!
Man, no girl takes me up on that deal when I offer
Stay on target… almost there…
We’re too close!…Loosen up!
They came from behind!
Y’know the scratching the back of the head thing here really works as an apology for having to study instead of watching cartoons….
I maaaaaaay or may not have a somewhat similar relationship to Dotty/Walky. ONLY SOMEWHAT.
My cat was pretty much the same way.
Not mine. Os sure, she makes it seem like I can get back to work if I scratch her head, but it’s never enough. She’ll hop up and somehow spread out so that her tiny six pound mass takes up 80% of the surface area of my desk.
Belly rubbings WILL happen, and they will not cease until she is bored.
Times like that call for distraction, so I keep a box and a bag of cat treats nearby. Cats just love boxes.
I have found my people. Cat people. Which is a separate thing from cat-people. If you ever go to a florists, ask for a flower box. Your cat will love it. They are 4ft/9in/9in. you will need scissors.
Walky: if he were real he’d be real-life comic relief.
That’s the only proper way to phrase that. Saying a character in a comic is comic relief for the characters of said comic is sort of redundant.
Did i just get redundant in a statement about redundancy? That’s, like, redundanception.
This comment brought to you by the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ah yes, the good old D.R.D. Department
I haven’t been visiting my DRD Department much since I forgot the PIN number for their ATM machine.
Rumor has it, they made the DRD department redundant!
So, in the comic setting, Walky is just relief?
Y’know, that’s pretty much the gist of it. Thanks for simplifying my own words for me i guess? And congratulations on deciphering something i typed trying to be perceptive while in Sleep Deprived Rambling Mode.
It’s the little things….
…that kills you.
*Kill. That kill you, like pedants.
That statement sounded very grumpy with the Mike gravatar. But /everything/ sound grumpy with the Mike gravatar.
Oooh, darn it… *sounds.
Now we just need tomorrows strip to be Danny seeing them happy together …
Does Danny even care anymore?
It’s only been a couple weeks, and he just went through another breakup (maybe two, in his mind), so yeah, he’ll care
I think he’s gotten to the level of mere resigned annoyance/disgust – and even that’s when he’s not distracted. At the moment he’s distracted.
God yes. I’m hoping for a moderately happy Danny one day, where he’s got his shit relatively together and settled things with Amber.
Curse my non-sleep. Totally missed what was actually being said. xD
Who knows though, that push may drive him in the right direction.
Awwwwwwwwww…. all the feels for both of them.
All fun and no work makes Dorothy an anxious girl.
Alright I want to know what deep-seated trauma made Dorothy so obsessed with becoming President.
She wants to take over the world and make Satanism the only religion. At least that’s what Joyce”s parents think.
Know how Bruce Wayne chose to become Batman because he finds bats frightening? Dorothy is terrified of presidents.
She’s going to fight crime dressed as George Washington?
Well, she could be wanted to be the very best, like no President ever was.
The irony is that Dorothy has some great ideas but however she does in college is NOT going to determine whether she’s President. That’ll be how she does with people and oratory as well as backroom dealing with the parties.
And this is why I never understand politics in the first place. It’s way too much self serving than what leaders supposed to do.
If anything, Mike is probably the most likely of the cast to become president. The most essential part of being in any position of authority is convincing people that you should do what they tell you to, by intimidation if nothing else, and Mike has that down.
Of course, he would probably be president the same way Porfirio Diaz was.
To be elected is her real test; to lead them is her cauuuuse
She will campaign across the land, stumping far and wide
This candidate, she understands
the power that’s inside
Gold Five, standing by.
It’s cute, really. There’s hope for these two after Dorothy’s studies.
If you need to postpone life while studying, how could you hope to pick it up when working? Oh sure, you’ll pick it up once your job is steady. And then once you got that promotion. And then once you get the next. And then there is no more promotion, so you have to change jobs and work doubly in order to catch up and make yourself worth the pay increase.
With that kind of attitude, you’ll have your coffin picked out and paid off before you even had a chance to start living.
Your best hope for happiness is to find another person with the same twistedly obsessed work ethic as you, so that you can keep telling each other that the stolen minutes and the effort itself qualify as real happiness. Walky is perhaps not the best person for that.
To be fair, most jobs don’t include a whole lot of essay writing in your off time.
Not to mention the usual lack of advanced calculus.
Indeed. I wonder if Walky picked up on the fact that he is not one of her goals.
She has expressly told him so, and he said “that’s fine by me!”, so I’d friggin’ hope he picked up on that!
I’ve seen enough lazily written romantic comedies to know that he either didn’t mean it, or he’ll change his mind. There will be a slow-motion run through an airport involved.
And this is why I like these two together, again.
Wasn’t Gold Five the dude who got capped by Darth Vader?
He’s the pilot of the 3rd Y-Wing killed by Vader.
“They came from behiiiinnnndd”
A brilliant girl having to study this hard as a freshman just seems unrealistic. How smart is Dorothy supposed to be, anyway? Do we know?
Could be doing something silly like taking 21 credits.
Actually I’m beginning to think Dorothy’s ambitions are greater than her abilities.
It’s possible she was always big fish/small pond in her hometown without any true intellectuals with whom to compare herself. We’ll see, there ARE alternative explanations for her difficulties… just none that seem as likely to me.
Even so, at the introductory level… I guess it could just be a lot of work, while none of it is particularly hard.
I’d wager that she took AP classes in high school, and is in higher level classes to start with, other than the Gender Studies class. This is something I’ve wondered as well.
I’m still finding this unrealistic, and I skipped Intro Bio and Intro Chem straight to Genetics and Organic Chem as a college freshman.
… um i assure you this is entirely NORMAL and expected – no, demanded – behavior, *especially* at the freshman level.
At a hypertypical/state-associated institution such as IU, all the large lectures (which are, of course, intended for underclassmen) are 20-80, meaning the professor teaches only 20% of the content they will be testing on in class, and you are expected to teach yourself the remaining 80% from the textbook on your own time.
This is something that’s institutionalized – it’s considered perfectly acceptable or even standard for professors to teach this way. Never mind the wide range of learning styles and learning disabilities, it can also set up a lot of freshmen up for failure because they don’t know this going into their first year of college, and by the time they realize it it’s too late because they’ve already taken over the credit limit of courses and signed up for 5 clubs and got a job on campus and partied their pants off because they didn’t realize what all that “free time” they thought they had was actually for.
It’d be one thing if all students were warned about this during orientation at every school, but it almost never happens, for a load of bullshit reasons. It’s finally a great big surprise when you start failing and you have no idea why. Dorothy is quite ahead of the curve here, either she was brilliant enough to realize this from the get-go, a guardian angel told her while she applied for college, or she just has study habits bordering on the inhuman that actually are serving her now. And you wonder why so many students complain about being zombies…
And now you know where the phenomenon of “teachers not teaching the material” comes from. The argument is that it prepares you for real life; true, but even jobs have job training…
For the record, SOP in high school is 80-20 – 80% of the test material taught by the teacher in class, 20% learned at home via readings/homework.
… Whew, I wrote a small thesis here. Sorry guys!
I have attended Community College and State University in America, and I spent a year at a Universiteit in the Netherlands. I am now a graduate student at a State University. This does not mean my experience is fully comprehensive, but I HAVE seen and heard a lot in my time. In general, the people I would earmark as smart don’t have much trouble in their first semester, especially not before the finals crunch. Typically the people who spend a lot of time in rigorous study before their third or fourth semester are those of more modest intelligence but possessing considerable motivation.
Personally, I did study in my freshman year. Not NEARLY this much, though.
U.S. state university student here… American universities are known for the system I spoke of in large lectures, which are of course all freshmen and maybe a few sophomores. This was admitted openly to my face by a dean at my school. Problem is, if you don’t pass the first big-lecture courses you can’t progress through your university career… and you can’t pass those big lectures if you don’t know how you need to do it.
In my case, I was really intelligent, passed through high school with honors, barely needed to study in order to achieve top grades. I hit university and… Bam, hit a brick wall. Failed everything because I simply didn’t know what I was working with. Once that dean saved me by telling me this, I started succeeding again.
And there is a measured phenomenon of this across the top state schools that still use this system. The smarter schools, including many privates and lately a few of the smarter public/state schools, have figured out why all the supposedly smart students they accepted onto their campuses are failing their first semesters and years and becoming massively discouraged; these schools have begun to drift away from the 20-80 system and teach the intro-level classes in smaller groups rather than several-hundred-student lectures. Europe had already figured it out a long time ago. I would guess that the U.S. university you went to was small enough to not consider this system, or smart enough to have stopped using it, or that you went to university here more than 15-20 years ago.
I would also add that this isn’t a real problem in community colleges because they would also be too small to use giant lectures in the first place, with a few exceptions.
Also, I read over your personal experience more closely, and while you surely have been in university here less than 20 years ago (mea culpa), this is a phenomenon that specifically began when college enrollment swelled due to the whole “everybody can go to college!” movement around 15-20 years ago.
Yeah it was 6 years ago when I started. I was at community college for my first two years, so I polled some people I knew who went to the State or U of. These were people whom I consider rather intelligent.
One said: I never studied
Another: It was really easy, I was bored.
Last: I had to do a lot of busywork, but I got to sleep on time every night.
So it’s really not within the realm of my experience or those I know. But this was, including myself, a group whose majors were Math/Econ, Math/CS, Philosophy(physics minor), and Physics(math minor). So maybe that plays a role as well.
Side note: this sort of system is marginally OK but only with advance warning (which is so often not given), but giant 250+student lectures are a terrible form of teaching in the first place, and the 20-80 method just exacerbates things.
I’m interested in knowing what courses Dorothy is taking at the moment; we already know about the Gender Studies of course.
I thought Dorothy was also supposed to be taking advance calculus as well. Which is pretty darn intensive course for a freshman. also Dorothy’s major may come into play when it comes to her workload. If she is in the hard sciences, which would account for a major course load especially if she took AP or IB, which means she would most likely skip some 100 & 200 level courses. She may be in the honors college, which if that’s the case it may explain her work load.
That’s actually extremely useful info. Thanks for sharing, pyro
I don’t know where you study, but this is pretty common in my experience. Besides, she’s probably aiming for HD’s in every subject, knowing Dorothy.
Huh. I aced maths in gymnasium (which at the time you left after 13 years of school, aged 19). We had a new math teacher in my 5h/wk “power course” in math who did not believe in mollycoddling pupils. The curriculum included all the basics in analysis (sequences, series, limits, differentiation, indefinite and definite integrals and their theoretic underpinnings, proof theory, computational geometry and so on) anyway.
Then I went to study (electrical) engineering at the university. The last two years of gymnasium were more or less rattled off in three weeks of higher math, and then without changing pace, two years of material were stacked on.
Now the engineering courses in that university had some reputation. 800 started along with me. It was expected that half dropped out in the first two years of “prediploma” while half of the rest dropped out in the 3 years of diploma courses following. Note that the numbers are the official durations: you were free to do stuff differently, and the median was about seven years all in all.
Now obviously, stuff depends on what you study and where. One problem with the liberal arts is that there is usually a tremendous discrepancy between the amount of work and studies you need to put in before you are capable of doing serious scientific work, and the amount of work and studies you need for getting a degree.
My girlfriend at the time was studying Romance literature and languages. She took her profession seriously, and her work was so far off the chart that professors apologized for not being able to give her more than the best grades. She handed a philosophy (minor course) term paper in in her first year, and got it back with “Excellent. What for?” on it.
Sort of deflating, so she went to his next speaking hours to check what that was supposed to mean. Turned out that he indeed could not for his life figure out what this was for: he thought that maybe he had negotiated some PhD thesis with somebody and this was the draft, but he could not remember doing so, and her name also did not strike a chord.
Shit like that. When she finally did get her PhD, she decided to take an apprenticeship as scientific librarian since her opinion of what was happening at universities was basically lots of smoke and mirrors competing for funds in fake science, and she was not interested in spending her life on that sort of fight.
At any rate: if you are giving your studies the kind of attention that its topics ultimately deserves, having aced school means nothing much. Now Dorothy’s ultimate goal was merely to become president, so she probably does not need to angle for “good enough to actually make the field move forward” but merely for “good enough not to be laughed at”.
Isn’t Dorothy hoping to transfer to an Ivy League school? Now, granted, I have no idea what transferring between colleges, particularly to an Ivy League entails, but I’m guessing she’s doing an insane overload to be impressive. Possibly she’s planning on retaking SATs as well?
My freshman year was more intense in terms of sheer work hours than any other at the school I went to. Every credit hour was at least 2 homework hours or more. IDK if you could class me as “intelligent” but my 3.9 gpa in highschool did not consume nearly so much of my time.
Walky, Walky. Stop lookin’ left in that first panel.
Dorothy, you’ve turned off your targeting computer. What’s wrong?
You’re all clear, Dorothy! Now let’s blow this thing and go home!
Yeah, there’s a kid in here.
I think Dorothy should run for something on campus and realize people skills are more important than grades.
And she is boned.
She needs to try for something you can get on merit like Supreme Court Justice.
But guess which gets constantly focused on by parents and society? That’s right, grades. Well, at least where I’m from.
I doubt any local college election would be decided by grades. At least not the ones where I was from.
I think Aizat’s point is not about college elections; it is about how as a society we act like grades and GPA is the end-all-be-all in academia. Admitting that networking and socializing is more important would be an admittance to the fact that a lot of it equates to nepotism.
Exactly my point.
Socialising is more important than grades? No more future for me, then, I guess.
Maybe Dorothy could get elected the same way Robin kept her position as a senator in shortpacked. That’s right, twin mountains on national tv will get anyone elected.
Robin was (and, in DoA, is) a Congresswoman, not a Senator. Robin’s pert jugs’ll get you a seat in the House, but, as we’ve seen recently in the real world, being a drooling moron will get you a seat in the House, too. If you’re aiming for the Presidency on the merits of your rack, it’s gotta be Billie-class.
Well, as I recently told my daughter; in real life, nobody really cares about the marks, just get the degree. After the first job, nobody will ask for the marks, and the degree itself will also be less important.
I thought her entire plan was to only be here for a year or two, after which she’ll have gotten good enough grades to get into a REAL college. Grades may not get you elected, but law school admissions still seem to care about them.
Then the REAL issue for Dorothy is money. Especially since student loans have gone from being a way for the government to help to racketeering.
Oh Dorothy, dat homework life is some serious stuff…
She is what we used to call a ‘grind’. (don’t know what the latest call is). She’s just a person who has to be grinding the books all the time to realize her goals.
“What are we going to do tonight, Brain?”
“What we do every Friday night, Pinky, take over the world”.
I know that feel, Dorothy. I know that feel.
But unlike you I’m a shameless procrastinator who is inherently doomed.
We’re all inherently doomed. At least the slackers get to enjoy the meanwhile.
That is so deep. I’m never studying again!
Chocolate Cat.
Porcelain Bunny.
Velveteen Moose
China Cat.
Gingham dog.
Vanilla Giraffe.
I love that nobody is questioning any of what’s going on above here.
Minty Bunny.
Rocky Road Rooster?
Mango mongoose?
Skin Horse?
Truffle Triceratops
I’m with Walky; that feels *awesome.*
Panel 3 Dorothy is a Dorothy that is considering strangulation as a stress relief.
Or Dorothy slowly losing her sanity.
IS that an inuendo
It IS.
Actually, I don’t think it was.
YYYYEEEEEAAAAAAHHHHHH GOLLLLDDDD FFIVVVVVVEEEE!
+1000 internets for Willis
Walky’s eye is on the bridge of his nose first panel.
Looks a bit odd :I
“Stay on target.”
“You’re too close!”
“Stay on target.”
“LOOSEN UP!” *BOOM!*
“Gold Five to Red Leader. Lost Tyree, lost Hutch.”
“I copy, Gold Leader.”
“Came from behind.” *BOOM!*
The moral of that? Watch your six and loosen up a bit, or you’ll go boom the moment you’re in charge.
Dorothy should take note.
… and I did that entire sequence from memory. *GAH!*
(Well, it *was* the first movie I saw in the theatre, at age 6, when it was first released….)
So? I still remember the entire fight in the 1st Tenkaichi Budokai tournament arc…even though I watched it when I was 6.
and… … … jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, dodge left, jab, dodge right, jab, dodge left, dodge left, dodge right, jab…
how to beat Mike Tyson in round 1 in Mike Tyson’s Punch Out.
Where were you when Game Grumps attempted this?
My friend and I used to do the entire “English motherfucker, do you speak it?!” routine from Pulp Fiction in middle school.
“What ain’t no country I ever heard of! They speak English in What?!”
“What?”
DOES MARSELLUS WALLACE LOOK LIKE A bongo?!
“…What?” *gets shot*
“Say what again! I dare ya! I double dare ya motherfucker! Say what one more goddamn time!”
Que?
is there an “Almost there” in there somewhere?
That was in Red Leader’s run, in the second assault run. Gold Squadron was the first assault run, Gold Leader (Hutch) with Golds Two (Tyree) and Five (Pops).
Luke’s run with Biggs and Wedge was the third assault run.
Dorothy, never play Pikmin.
They came from behind indeed.
Maybe in panel 3, she is remembering that her goal is to leave Wally and Joyce in the rear view mirror. Really, she would be better off graduating from the Big Ten and planning an Ivy grad school.
That said, my governor is a college dropout and my rep is best known for being on a reality TV show. Not sure if a Ivy degree that represents hard work rather than legacy is that helpful in politics.
And my grab is gone again. I swear they come and go.
Damn autocorrect, my grav is gone. Though my grab may be gone too.
My gran is gone, but it was her time.
I really wanna see a graph of total comments for each strip over the course of DoA’s run.
In fact… *runs off to make it*
Here’s Freshman Family Weekend’s graph so far (excluding this strip): http://imageshack.com/a/img189/9784/uj8c.png
Writer has the most comments (obviously), followed by Moral foundation. Ironically, Neighbor has approximately 30% less comments.
Average number of comments per character:
1. Ethan (482)
2. Joyce (450)
3. Amber and Dina (356)
4. Dorothy (330)
5. Danny (307)
6. Sal (280)
7. Ruth (278)
8. Mike (269)
9. Walky (256)
10. Billie (255)
11. Sarah (211)
12. Joe (210)
13. Roz (163)
So… just going by comment count, Danny is more popular than Ruth and Billie.
guys we fucked up
Nah, but seriously, Ethan, Joyce, Amber, and Danny have been at the epicenter of this storyline’s drama. Of course, that could change in the coming weeks. I’m expecting more Sal stuff tomorrow (DoA time).
Thus concludes an incredibly nerdy report. /bows
That is amazing. Also, that doesn’t mean Danny is more popular, it means he’s more contentious. ;p
wow, well done!
Ruth and Billie are more popular than Danny, we just like to bongo about him more, is all.
Why thank you guys! :B
And yeah, a good third of those comments tend to be Danny-hate.
Only a third are Danny hate? huh seems like more than that *cough** yotomoe**cough
How come Yotomoe always gets all the credit for the Danny-hate? What about Thor? What about me? Is it because I don’t post cute fanart?
Now’s the perfect moment!
Tell her you love her dude! She’ll make you breakfast and shit!
That’s movie reference… not a… not a sincere declaration of misogyny… Wanted to make that clear…
Is it just me, or is “I’ll not ask…” a bit British for Walky? Wouldn’t he say “I won’t ask…”?
Maybe he just came from a class with Jason, heh…
There’s a subtle distinction, where “not asking” is a specific thing someone is saying they will do.
“That’s good. Now… do behind my ears?”
“Stop panting, Walky.”
And stop kicking that leg.
Walky’s probably thinking to himself: Ya know Dorothy, maybe Joyce can help you relax a bit…
Is it just me or did Walky get kinda watered down since the whole run-in with Joyce’s parents?
Yeah, keep touching me until we get to a room. That’s the ticket.
Head scratchies are awesome.
“purrr”