Sims 3 logic vs real life

"igazor;c-16300112" wrote:

As a weak way to protest against forced senseless conformity, a bunch of us in high school used to get annoyed with the student number bar code stickers we were issued to identify ourselves on computer graded mandatory standardized tests (and with the tests themselves). So during testing week, we all went around wearing the bar code stickers on our foreheads.

To be fair, I don't think any of us really amounted to very much after that... :p

Good one! I always thought they should outlaw those tests. College tests are the reason why I developed test anxiety.
I always thought it was wrong that one test (the SAT) decides if you get into college or not. Many people are just bad test takers. I don't think our sim friends are plagued by ruthless testing. >:)

@puzzlezaddict I'm sorry that you had terrible teachers like that, but not all of the system is like that.

I understand standardized tests. But I am sorry for the plummy teachers who apparently sucked all the fun out of learning...

No one was ever freaking out at my school like it sounds they were at yours.

Btw, I took AP US History too, happy to have something in common. And no, I probably did not do as well as igazor :disappointed:

My school had fun learning. For instance, in AP Biology we got to draw things, make models, experiment on freshmen, and we went to the zoo together in New York, we took a train out. It was bomb. Editing in here: We learned so much better because of this, we wanted to know because we could see it all.

I'm really lucky to live where I live I guess. They gave all the seniors iPad minis for the year. I hear they've now bought more and distribute to the juniors as well.

I sure know why my parents chose to move to this town for its education system. None of us really felt the need to rebel against the testing, just the dresscode ;)

I'm sorry your teachers weren't any fun :confused:

"puzzlezaddict;c-16300776" wrote:
Besides, after taking an entire yearlong class whose express goal was to get you as high an AP score as possible (as opposed to, you know, actually teaching you anything interesting), and then basically being forced by the school to take a standardized test to prove your worth, whether you cared about the college credit or not, a little rebellion was definitely in order. And if you think I'm exaggerating about the single-mindedness of the classes, after the AP, the teachers mostly wouldn't bother even trying to teach us anything for the rest of the school year.

Ours was a public school and more of a hybrid system. Most AP students did take the exams (in May), we didn't have to, and our performance or lack of it had nothing to do with our grades for the classes. The History one I was recalling wasn't that stressful to me, even if I were to have fallen asleep in the middle of it and turned in a mess of an exam it would have been nothing more than a waste of time and the testing fee unless I really had plans to be a history major in college. I actually did fall asleep in the middle of the English one, but only for about a minute or two thankfully.

In between the exam and the end of the school year (end of June), I do recall that there were no classes in English, History, or Chem and there were no final exams. Instead, we were all on our own to complete our year end projects for each class, and those were used in place of final exam grades -- not turning them in would have resulted in an F for the "final exam" grade and negatively impact our GPAs, but we all for the most part knew where we were going next year by then anyway. I suppose if we failed the English one we might have failed the class and then not been able to graduate high school without making it up over the summer as four years of English of some kind was a state requirement. Math (Calc) was the only one that continued on from where we left off and had its own final exam as if the AP never happened. We were all seniors though, juniors didn't take AP classes although I wish we could have.

"polrbear;c-16300933" wrote:
My school had fun learning. For instance, in AP Biology we got to draw things, make models, experiment on freshmen, and we went to the zoo together in New York, we took a train out. It was bomb. Editing in here: We learned so much better because of this, we wanted to know because we could see it all.

ROFL! I took Chem, not Bio, but now I feel like an important part of my education has been missing and I never knew it all this time! Not to mention having missed out on the experience a freshman must get by having been experimented on. :p

Anyway, this is the way it should be done. We were, after all, being spoon-fed college level classes that typically lasted one semester (maybe two) with "lectures" only 3x/week stretched out over a full school year and 5x/week. There was plenty of time for creativity on how to be taught and still get through the core material.

Being provided with iPad minis would have been an interesting twist on it all though as it would have been almost 40 years before they actually existed. I wonder what we would have done with/made of them at the time. :p


Anyway, to make this post somewhat relevant to the game, this kind of thing is why I love sending select teens to Uni with their older siblings or cousins (Traveler mod) so they can get a head start on their higher education while really still in high school. They don't need that head start of course since time stands still while in Uni anyway, but it just seems like more fun to me this way.

@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.

@puzzlezaddict I hated AP Physics. Love physics, hated the class.

But we still did have fun and the teacher was the funniest guy ever!

Yeah, I'm not so sure private schools are approaching this correctly. These days, a lot of people from small town public schools end up ivy league. Like my class's valedictorian and the 20 students behind her. She's at Harvard right now, and the rest are at various other ivy leagues. (I always wonder where I'd be if I hadn't gotten depressed junior year...also I got distracted by a girlfriend, but it was mostly the depression)

This reminds me that in the Sims 2 they had that ridiculous thing where you had to impress a man from the private school in order to get your child in! LOL You had to feed him, small talk him, and give him a tour of your house. From then on, your children would change into uniforms to go to school...

Would have been funny if they had a Sims 3 version.

> @king_of_simcity7 said:
> The Sims 3 logic: If Your car cannot fit in your driveway just put it in your inventory with your musical instruments and what ever seeds you found and just use it when you need it :blush:

And let's not forget that parot you found and tamed in under five minutes; that can just fit right on in there too. Along with ninety apples and six heavy wizard books. Huzzah!

"igazor;c-16272948" wrote:
I think that might have been where I began using large collections of food and recipe related mods myself. :)

I wonder if there are mods to aviod certain recipes (when using the butler from LN for example what he serves is not controllable)

"Avatarit;c-16302313" wrote:
I wonder if there are mods to aviod certain recipes (when using the butler from LN for example what he serves is not controllable)

There are mods that will prevent actively controlled sims from autonomously preparing recipes for which the ingredients are not already in stock or not available to them (e.g., no fridge shopping). I don't know if those work on butlers. I don't play with household servants whom I can't control, it never works out well for me. Maybe maids once in a while, but they shouldn't be cooking anyway.

"igazor;c-16302941" wrote:

"Avatarit;c-16302313" wrote:
I wonder if there are mods to aviod certain recipes (when using the butler from LN for example what he serves is not controllable)

There are mods that will prevent actively controlled sims from autonomously preparing recipes for which the ingredients are not already in stock or not available to them (e.g., no fridge shopping). I don't know if those work on butlers. I don't play with households servants whom I can't control, it never works out well for me. Maybe maids once in a while, but they shouldn't be cooking anyway.

That reminds me I hired a maid once in an old save, she came in and immediately started making herself a hotdog. She got mad when fired.

"polrbear;c-16302946" wrote:

"igazor;c-16302941" wrote:

"Avatarit;c-16302313" wrote:
I wonder if there are mods to aviod certain recipes (when using the butler from LN for example what he serves is not controllable)

There are mods that will prevent actively controlled sims from autonomously preparing recipes for which the ingredients are not already in stock or not available to them (e.g., no fridge shopping). I don't know if those work on butlers. I don't play with households servants whom I can't control, it never works out well for me. Maybe maids once in a while, but they shouldn't be cooking anyway.

That reminds me I hired a maid once in an old save, she came in and immediately started making herself a hotdog. She got mad when fired.

What I meant was maids shouldn't be cooking platters of food to serve to their employers as it's not part of their job responsibilities. Some of them will goof off, although when they get hungry I usually see them eating soup, ice cream or other quick snacks. Can't really be annoyed at them for that. Maybe this one just liked to cook?