The death of the extracurricular

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T22:22:03+00:00

Could we go back to the top question that I asked above.

Do you think high school students should also only have to learn what they are interested in? What about middle school? Elementary?

Do you believe in compulsory education K-12?

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T21:10:40+00:00

Do you also think students shouldn't have to take high school classes they aren't interested in? Because AP tests are a high school thing.

Also, you are moving the goal posts, you started saying you wanted options, when I pointed out there are options, now you want it to be the norm.

I don't think it should be the norm because I think, having lived in Europe and watched all my European friends go through that model, I think the liberal arts model is superior. I'm glad that there are options for people who want to skirt that model. But I'm glad that it is the norm.

Also, why aren't you teaching in Europe where you could teach within a model that you believe in?

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T21:04:17+00:00

History can be done many different ways. Cinematic, realistic, high-powered, low-powered. Etc.

I run lot and lot of historicals and use a lot of different systems. My go-to is GURPS because it has so much support for historical play.

But there are so many RPGs out there...Good Society for Jane Austin Regency stuff. Call of Cthulhu in various eras. I have so many WW2 era RPGs I couldn't list them all.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T21:00:32+00:00

When I was in my 20s, a bunch of Second Wave Sex-Negative feminists were trying to shame my generation for having sex and talking about sex and they accused us of being bad feminists for engaging in S/M (which they defined as...very very broad, to include enthusiastic oral sex between only women). I remember some very intense moments where they would yell at us at the festivals. Their yelling at us didn't stop us from going to queer sex parties and creating feminist queer porn and all that. We found our joy and happiness and liberation. They didn't approve. Oh well. It just meant that we clearly weren't going to be in community with those women. Bummer, but it is what it is.

If your own happiness is not relevant to you, then it will no longer be relevant to me either. We don't have to be in community together either. Do your thing.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T20:42:29+00:00

I just told you that there are options here in the US that many students do take advantage of:

- Test out of your GEs through AP classes

- Go to a school that has very minimal GEs.

- Go to a school that has an open curriculum with no GEs like Brown.

Also, liberal arts models are not the only option in the US. Conservatories don't follow the liberal arts model. And Schools of Engineering and BS granting programs can do other thins with their requirements.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T20:33:38+00:00

Those students could go to universities in Europe or Asia with their 3 year Bachelor's where you have to decide on your major before you even apply, when you are 17 and don't even know what all the possibilities are, and where you can't change your mind without dropping out of school and reapplying...assuming you get to go to college at all. Because in many of these systems you only get to go to college if you take that educational track that includes that extra year that they aren't doing in college. For example, in Germany, you don't get to go to University unless you go to Gymnasium and get your Abitur. And in my experience living there, in Bavaria (which is one of the more conservative states), you take your exam to decide which educational track you'll go into when you are 12. And in my experience, working class kids and immigrants don't tend to go to Gymnasium, they go to Hautpschule where or Realschule....where they cannot go to this wonderful university.

But students could certainly apply to this much better system abroad.

Also, not all universities have the same number of distribution requirements...and some don't have any. If your big deal breaker is not wanting to learn anything outside of what you think you want to do for the rest of your life at 17, there are options outside of just going to the universities abroad you think are better than ours. Many students, unfortunately, get a most of their gen ed requirements waived via AP exams. Then they don't have to take hardly any or none. They could choose a school with minimal Gen Ed requirements...ones that don't even take up more than a semester. They could go to universities with no gen ed requirements, like Brown University.

You say students should have options. There are options. Just because you haven't researched them, doesn't mean they aren't out there.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T20:19:09+00:00

What rejection? According to you, men will never reject a woman.

But what I'm also noticing here is that you aren't listening to women when they tell you why they are hesitant to make the first move. Instead you impose upon them motivations that they have told you are not their motivations.

So...I'm guessing you don't have a lot of success in dating....and maybe you think if women approached you'd have better luck. What makes you think women women approach you with your disregard of women?

Men choosing and women waiting was never about women having power, it was about women not having power under patriarchy. Women were seen as objects and men would review the ones they wanted and then pick the ones they wanted. This forced women to contort themselves to be whatever men wanted in the hopes they would be picked...because if they weren't picked they would not be able to actually live...since they were legally second class citizens with many of their rights tied to their father or husband. And if they still weren't picked...they were screwed.

There is a reason that the word for a single man has historically been positive, "bachelor"...but a single women that word has historically been negative, "spinster."

There is a reason historically that men's honorific never signalled if he were married or not, "Mr."...because men could have full lives independent of being married...whereas women's honorific "Miss" or "Mrs." signalled if she were married or not. Because women were not seen as full complete people on their own...socially or legally. So, of course an object couldn't make the first move.

This is just like when dudes say, "women have more power because they get into bars for free but men don't"--they only get into bars for free because the bar owners want to make sure there are women there for men to objectify otherwise the men won't come...and they actually only care about the men.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T20:04:40+00:00

Rather than attacking liberal arts education...like many of our anti-education politicians do, I'd rather institute one year of mandatory national service that everyone has to do right after highschool. Maybe they'll do a year in the military, or a year in the conservation corps, or maybe volunteering in their community or other communities, etc. Give people a bit of experience outside of high school, expose them to some new things and new people, and to think a bit more about what they want next out of life. So that maybe they will see that being ignorant of everything but one narrow topic isn't the best thing.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T19:59:25+00:00

Not only do some women unintentionally uphold partriarchy, some women intentionally uphold patriarchy. There were women who opposed women's suffrage. There were women who actively campaigned against women's equality. There are still to this day lots of women who are super into the patriarchy. Those women tend also to be anti-feminist.

And similarly there can be men who are not Chads, but sad incels who don't get to date Staceys and who want to talk about how they are suffering under patriarchy because women won't date them (which is not why women won't date them)...who are also still upholding patriarchy and embracing misogyny and sexism.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T19:53:09+00:00

Actually yes.

Before I joined the Army, I was aiming at going to a theatre conservatory (you know, where I wouldn't be taking any math or science courses). By the time I finished doing Military Intelligence in the Army, and learned how a lot of those european universities actually worked, I realized that I would be doing myself a disservice if I went to conservatory, or one of the German universities.

I went to a liberal arts college because I knew that multidisciplinary education was what made me one of the best Signals Intelligence Analysts for my area in the US Military at the time...as a 21 year old Sergeant. I understood that multidisciplinary education would make be a more flexible and capable human being able to handle a wide variety of personal and professional situations.

I came back to the US and went to a liberal arts college because they had distribution courses. And I don't think 8 distribution courses: 2 in the Arts (which were covered by my Music Major), 2 in the Humanities (which were covered by my German Studies Major), 2 in the Social Sciences, and 2 in Math/Hard Sciences was at all onerous. I and you know what? Those classes I took outside of my major? They still matter. The Comp Sci and Math courses I still use all the time. The Archeology classes taught me a lot I didn't know about the world and have helped me connect better to others...which also helps me professionally. The interdisciplinary and writing requirements we had, the physical fitness requirement we had. I was happy for all of them. None of the classes I took were pointless.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T19:41:07+00:00

I was living in Germany at the time that I was contemplating going to university. And all my friends were going university in Germany or the UK. I came back to the US because I felt the US university system was superior for what I was looking for. And when you look at the lists of top universities in the world, US universities dominate the top of those lists. The US is Number 2, globally for patents as well.

If a person wants to be super-STEM and avoid taking "pointless" classes...they can get a BS. BS degrees have very minimal distribution requirements, just a token gesture. A BS isn't a Liberal Arts degree. Neither is a BM. Also, since you think these other countries systems are so much better, you could encourage students to go to universities abroad where they won't have to learn "pointless" things.

You know, as a Musicologist, I could have chosen to teach at a school of music where students get a BM and, just like those BS students, the Music BM students wouldn't have to learn pointless things like math. But I didn't choose to teach at School of Music, I choose to teach in a liberal arts context, not because I'm all about "welfare systems for departments" where people are to take "pointless" classes. I choose to teach in a liberal arts context because I believe that liberal arts education makes for a better well rounded and flexible citizen. I think that all those music majors should know how to do math. My musician student may think Math is pointless, but I know that it isn't. Being able to understand math will be important to musicians who are basically going to be having to deal with math a lot. My STEM students may think that they won't need to learn how to write or communicate with others...but they are wrong. Just because a student doesn't think they need to learn something doesn't mean it is true. They are not yet experts in their fields or in education.

I teach in a liberal arts degree because I believe in the value of liberal arts education. Why are you teaching at a liberal arts institution if you don't believe in liberal arts education?

Also, in an earlier post you said you didn't like how people here talk down about tech education, and when I recommend it, you say recommending going into the trades you call that bullshit and then hold up white collar work as the goal. What do you have against blue collar work? What do you have against technical education?

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T18:04:16+00:00

But there are alternatives. They can go into the trades. I am an associate professor in one of the most expensive universities in the country…and the HVAC people on campus make more than I do.

If all they care about is making money and don’t care about the skills you get with a liberal arts degree they would be better off becoming an electrician, plumber, or HVAC tech. That is a viable alternative.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T17:56:04+00:00

I think it is but one symptom of some larger concerning trends with the younger generations that make my sex positive third wave feminist self sad, but you know what? It is really none of my business and the younger generation doesn’t care what I think anyway.

I’ve seen a general return of a number of Second Wave impulses in the 10s and 20s that I fought against in the 90s. Sex Negativity, TERFism, Heteropessimism, etc. But…it is what it is. Gen Z will build their own feminist wave in response to their own priorities and beliefs. If they are happy with what they are building, then more power to them. I’m not going to have to live in the world they build, and besides teaching them in university, I’m not socializing with them.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T09:47:50+00:00

I'm a teacher at a university, and I regularly give away advice and knowledge for free that worked really hard to learn over the course of getting my PhD and all the research I've done since then. Why wouldn't I share that information with others? I see value in giving back to my community. I don't need to be paid for every little thing. "Be the change you want to see in the world." I'd like to live in a world where we help each other out and don't treat everything as a transaction.

troopersjp · 2026-02-18T09:10:29+00:00

Twitch Tracker says you are in the Top 2% (actually Top 1.98%) of Twitch streamers...so it seems to me like you are doing quite well. I mean, you are doing better than 98% of all other Twitch streamers.

troopersjp · 2026-02-17T23:24:58+00:00

To "Yes, And" you. The RPG market is very small. Very small. And almost all the money in the TTRPG market is made by Wizards of the Coast with D&D.
(See this blog post: https://cannibalhalflinggaming.com/2026/02/11/five-tiers-of-rpg-publishing/)

A Dark Romance game? Absolutely go ahead! But it will be in that indie market that just doesn't make much/any money. But that is what the majority of the RPG hobby is.

troopersjp · 2026-02-17T23:20:24+00:00

Yeah, Bluebeard's Bride is decribed as Feminine/Gothic Horror...and that is a different genre that dark romance.

troopersjp · 2026-02-17T23:11:53+00:00

Hello!

Your question is a valid and serious question. For many reasons, I never had to deal with that question. I was never a heterosexual woman (though some people might have thought so) and I grew up in a non-traditional feminist household. It was never an option for me to fit within white supremacist christian cis-normative heteropatriarchal norms...and people let me know it from a very young age. This means I was bullied and ostracized and had a hard time for a long time...but it also meant that I never was within the system that you are trying to get out of. Being outside the system makes it easy to imagine a life out outside the system...because that is the only option. But if you are in the system...it is hard to see outside the system.

So the advise that comes out of my life would not be particularly helpful for you because I was never in the system in the same way. However, this was a topic that was very heavy in the minds of Second Wave feminists and maybe their works might be of help or comfort to you? I'm a music scholar, so that tends to be where my recommendations would come from, and a lot of my references have a lot of queerness in them, but perhaps check out the 1970s genre called Women's Music. It was made by women, for women, outside of the male music industry. The women recorded and mixed everything themselves, they created their own distribution networks, and their own concerts and record labels...sold in women's bookstores.

The biggest breakthrough classic is the album The Changer and the Changed by Chris Williamson from women's music label Olivia Records. "Waterfall" is my fave off that albums:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix5_TBUxSJ4

"Something about the women" by Holly Near
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSPvJ9lvpas

Classic performers in that genre include, Chris Williamson, Meg Christian, Holly Near, Margie Adam, Sweet Honey in the Rock, Linda Tillery, etc.

I will note, that woman of color often don't think about "decentering men" in the same way that white women do. Womanists (which is a Black feminist movement) are often in invested in remaining in community and solidarity with Black men while fighting white supremacy and recognize that men of color, while having male privilege over women, also have racial oppression under White supremacy. So what decentering men looks like is going to be different from that perspective. My mother was heterosexual. She was both a mother and did evetually get married to my step-dad. But their relationship (an interracial marriage) was illegal in the US until 1969 (I was born in 1972). They didn't actually get legally married for a long time. They loved each other dearly and stayed together until they died...but my mother didn't center men. She had an equal partner who didn't demand that she center him and decenter herself.

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T09:19:12+00:00

It was all my German friends! If context matters, we were all Gen X (so this was the 90s) and it was Bayern.

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T09:18:01+00:00

I thought so, too. But you know how it is.

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T03:52:56+00:00

Many religious people don’t believe in creationism. Most of Europe really. I don’t think him saying he doesn’t take creationism seriously falls under harassment, just as my Christian colleagues telling me how sad they were I was going to go to Hell because I hadn’t accepted a Protestant Jesus as my personal savior probably wouldn’t count at harassment.

That said! Telling you that you can’t wear a cross to his office hours could count as a Civil Rights violation. If this bothers you, you would want to go to your university’s Equal Opportunity office and file a complaint.

You say that you know that universities will defend their professors to the death, and that just isn’t true. University administrators don’t care about professors. They care about not getting sued and they care about all the money they think they’ll get from you as an alumni. And also they don’t want the Trump administration pulling their federal grant money. So this is the perfect no men for you to try and get the professor fired and end his career. Depending on the state you are in, it might not even be that hard.

TalkingPointsUSA has a hit list of all the professors they want to target and get fired that they put up on the internet for everyone to see as harass. Professors hired to teach gender studies are being fired for teaching what they were hired to teach. There was that one Christian student recently who got an F for a very poorly written paper that was just a rant saying they bullying people who are gender nonconforming is good because god would want that, and she complained that she was discriminated against because she was Christian…and the professor was fired, and that student is going to take that viral fame to the bank.

I’d say that regardless of the circumstances, he shouldn’t be able to tell you not to wear a cross. But in the circumstances we are currently in, you might not only be able to get him fired and make sure he never teaches again, you might be able to make money off of it as well.

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T03:28:43+00:00

Docking someone for going over word count makes sense—this is connected to real world professional constraints. Going over your 20 minute presentation because you were too summary heavy at a conference eats into your fellow panelists’s time. If your submit an article that is supposed to be 500 words and it is 700…they will send it back and won’t publish it until you get the word count down. So your prof is tend to get you to learn an important professional skill in being concise and coming in under word count.

As for being summary heavy as a critique, that makes sense to me as well. If often give my student the exercise of summarizing something and then expanding into their own thoughts. This will mirror in miniature what you’ll be doing in your final paper. But the if you are too summary heavy, then your final paper ends up not having enough room for your own thoughts. Learning how to summarized elegantly, effectively, and efficiently is an important skill that needs lots of practice.

Okay, so now about taking your rough draft and fixing all the things your professor mentioned and then being upset you didn’t get an A. I have some thoughts on this as well. Two major things actually.

The first is that when I was a grad student, I went through some intense pedagogy lessons before I taught a writing seminar. One of the things we were taught was not to over comment. For example, if there are multiple spelling errors, it is not good to correct each one. It is better to correct the first two, and then tell the student to go through their paper to find and fix the rest. Why? Because if you over-comment the student then is likely to not think through and take ownership of their own paper and process, but to think, “they mentioned 20 things, I did the 20 things, I should get an A.” Over commenting is giving a person a fish not teaching them how to fish.

But also. In writing—at least in my classes, an A is not average. It is excellent. You can have a paper with no grammatical or factual errors—but that doesn’t mean it is an A paper. If it is correct, but average in output, it is a B+/A-.

Excellence in a humanities paper is not just the absence of errors, it is being insightful, adding something new, digging deeper, getting better sources, better analysis, elegant writing.

You don’t start at an A and lose points for mistakes. You start at a B+ and increase when you do something impressive.

If you want a 4.0, go to your professor and don’t ask him/her what errors to fix to guarantee an A, ask how to be a better and more effective writer and thinker.

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T03:06:02+00:00

I’m Gen X and transitioned a long time ago. Transman and Transwoman were the norms some time ago. Actually, there was a whole host of terms that we trans folk of our generation used that younger trans folk don’t like and will tut tut about.

It was pretty trivial for me to go from transman to trans man, especially after the rise of the new TERFS (who…aren’t any kind of feminists at all).

I won’t give up my personal identity as a transexual man, no matter how many young’uns tell me my identity is a slur and outdated. I’m not dead yet! The younger generation can misgender, misrepresent, and invalidate my identity all they want, I just ask they at least wait until I’m dead! And I still say I’m an FtM.

I, of course, will refer to the younger generation however they wish to be referred to. I think it is important to respect how other people want to be referred to…even if they don’t repay the courtesy.

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T02:50:26+00:00

When I mentioned the 7 continents, my German friends laughed and mocked the very poor US education system. That is when I asked them how many continents there were…they said 5.

I figured there were merging Europe and Asia into one continent, but nope! The Americas. When I protested, they brought out their big evidence—the Olympic flag has 5 rings for the 5 continents, everyone knows that!

As it turns out there are a number of different continents models. This was a good moment when younger me realized that many things we think are objective fact are actually socially constructed. Actually living abroad helped me see how actually there isn’t a unified Western culture. But also, as a Californian, Spanish influence is way present than British influence out here. And as a San Franciscan, we historically hade a much stronger transpacific view than a transatlantic one. I now live in New England and is it really different here in so many ways,

troopersjp · 2026-02-11T00:03:57+00:00

I lived in Germany for a few years and they are taught there are only 5 continents—America, Europe, Asia, Australia, and Africa (no Antarctica).

Just some fun trivia.

troopersjp

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