This weekend at Aquinas we held our annual scholarship competition for incoming prospective freshmen. High winners get full tuition, room, and board here at Aquinas for the fall. The competition is all about brains with a writing component, a math component, and a "how well you function in a group" component. Faculty here at AQ help out with judging the group work test. Basically, three faculty listen to 7-8 students at a time while they discuss a problem put before them. We then are rating them not on their solution to the problem, but on how well they worked together to arrive at that solution.
This year's topic was to rank order problems facing the United States in the order that they should be addressed by our new president. 18 problems. It was VERY interesting to see how different groups worked with each other or not...of which students are total extroverts or introverts...of who tries to get everyone involved and who always talks to here their own voice.
It was also interesting to learn what are important concerns to these students and what is NOT too problematic to them. I always cringe to here "The environment isn't really a problem" or "If people were smart, they just wouldn't get sick and need health care" or "alternative fuels will put too many people in the oil industry out of work." In the end, of the 24 students I watched, I saw a handful of bright, level-headed, well spoken students that I hope come to AQ and major in Biology. And then I saw at least one ass student who bowled people over with his opinions, showed little respect to anyone (include us), and was, well, an ass. I'll lay down $20 that says he thinks he'll be a doctor and he'll show up in our introductory course next fall. Yeah.
So what do you all think should be addressed first out of this mini-list?
5 comments:
Here's my triage, based on the simple metric of how many people a given problem is killing, and how quickly -- I actually went through a variation of this during the primaries.
1. The Iraq War -- it's killing and maiming Americans (and lots of other people) as we speak, plus it's an enormous drain on the economy. Fix that first, those resources are better used elsewhere. Also, don't forget about Afghanistan -- same thing applies there, too.
2. The Economy -- in order to fix any of the other problems on the list, we need resources, and that means money.
3. Health Care -- This is killing us too, but it happens to be slower than war.
4. Climate Change -- if we don't fix this one, it'll kill us all in the end.
In practice, however, the solutions to many of these problems overlap and dovetail quite a bit. For example, invest in a post-fossil fuel infrastructure, and you help the economy while working to mitigate environmental damage, plus you limit the need to control parts of the world where the oil happens to be, meaning people have less motivation to fly planes into buildings.
I'll have to agree mostly with your rant Nate. However, I think fixing the economy might be number one on my list. I not sure how we address the Iraq War and "fix" it very quickly.
And I would move the environment up hire and lump in alternative fuels. This would help with provididng more jobs for unemployment. Plus, we'll be able to leave at least some nice bits of the planet for our kiddies.
Then health care so that we can all have help staying well.
Hmm...then education
NO! We all know the MOST important issue is stopping teh gheys from marrying! THEY are the reason the divorce rate is so high!
Seriously, you want to fix the economy? Allow some form of gay marriage. The resulting ceremonies and receptions will pump millions into the economy.
Good call on the gay marriages and pumping the economy. But would "he" still be called bridezilla?
For educated people, you sure have problems with spelling!
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