Sims 3 logic vs real life

@polrbear I didn't mean to make it sound like my teachers were terrible because most of them were good if not great. My AP teachers were generally wonderful, and I loved them; they had a section or two of AP whatever because they were the best. (Except for calculus—the best math teacher by a wide margin flat-out refused to keep teaching BC Calc because he couldn't stand it anymore.) It's just that the pressure to make sure their students aced the AP limited how much creativity they could have in class. And that pressure ultimately came from the parents, who made it clear to the school that they weren't paying an arm and a leg in tuition just to see their children have a good time. If they wanted that, they'd send their kids to a public school (some of which were actually very good, but didn't let parents buy special treatment for their children). One of those advantages was taking some APs junior year, even if the kids would have benefited from waiting.

I never took AP Bio, but from what I heard, it was almost as stressful as US History. I think that it had as much to do with who took each class—Bio was an AP that was considered accessible to students who didn't have the technical skills for the most hardcore science. So then those kids needed to work harder to compensate, and specifically memorize more in lieu of understanding the underlying concepts. But even Chemistry and Physics just didn't have time to mess around; most of the fun stuff happened in the regular versions of the classes. On the other hand, my AP Chem teacher gave me a couple of personal assignments for extra credit when I was bored, and those were a lot of fun. I got to learn all about the creation of synthetic isotopes (heavier than plutonium) in particle accelerators just because I found it interesting.

I'd have loved to experiment on freshmen, but there's no way the teacher who let that happen would've made it through the week without being fired. I was in high school during a transition phase, where all of the "traditional" ways to have "fun" were identified as bullying behavior (which they mostly were), but nobody had figured out what to do instead. The PCness often went way too far, though. In eighth grade, students had long been taking cheek swabs and sticking them on a slide to examine under a microscope. But the year before mine, some student had seen a bunch of white blood cells on the slide and then been sick (just the flu) a couple of days later. Therefore, we couldn't take our own swabs because someone might be embarrassed for the rest of the class to see an anomaly. Which, fine, if you don't want to, but we weren't even given the choice. I'm sure the school has a much better approach now, but it didn't develop while I was there.

Oh, right, we're talking about TS3. This got me thinking how it would be fun for teen sims to have projects and skill-building as assignments. As in real life, younger kids just have to show up on time and do their homework, but older ones should actually be learning something useful. Of course teens get opportunities like improving writing or charisma, working for an evening at the business office, or delivering a fish to the science lab, but completing them is useless if the kid already has an A. I know that some skills help if you send them to University, but it would give the teen years a bit more character as well. Experience meters could drop or reset each time a teen stays at the max for a bit, simulating the different grade levels; an extra-credit project could then make a big difference. And what if there were actual graduation requirements—say, a minimum of two points in a list of skills, and four or five in a specialty or two? Or maybe have a "senior project," like building an invention or performing a recital. How much fun would it be to unleash the Time Machine on an unsuspecting vice-principal? It's a lot harder to assign detentions when you're stuck in the stone age.