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You don't have to do a lot of repetitive, boring exercises to learn piano. Once you learn how to hold your hands a little, read music, and learn where the notes are, you can simply try songs you like, and switch songs when you please. On other instruments, you might not need to read music (I've met many guitarists and drummers that cannot read music, nor do they use printed music to play - and blind folks can play instruments too)

Art is similar. You can look up skills as necessary to try to make the piece you want. Adult art learners often just start with the type of art they want to make.

In both cases, the finished piece might not be the quality you want, but in neither case are you necessarily doing repetitive stuff to learn (playing scales over and over or sketching the same bits over and over). You can retry a piece or move on - the skills will still carry over.

None of these reflect homework in school. Now, I know I graduated school decades ago, but math homework was repetitive with seemingly no real-world application and absolutely no help if I needed it. I took a math course online some years later and it was much better: Instant feedback if I got the problem wrong and instant help to walk through the problem if I needed it - then a different but similar problem was given for the homework. This was actual practice in ways traditional homework wasn't. Homework in the traditional sense isn't practice - they are all miniature tests that affect your grade.

I didn't have to practice writing - I just did the papers assigned and rushed through them. You can grade papers for other subjects on prose and grammar instead of just doing it for language courses. You don't have to read classics to read better if you just read a variety of things you are interested in. You'll read plenty of boring things for other subjects and get that sort of practice.

With most of this stuff, having actual homework isn't necessary as long as students are given time for practice. Practice is what makes you good at something, not homework, and practice can take many forms.


Are there a lot of concert pianists who got to the level that they did by just playing random songs they liked, without deliberately practicing the mechanics? And then, one day, woke up with the ability to quickly learn and perform unfamiliar pieces of music at the level expected of one?

You can absolutely learn to play some piano by just noodling. Your learning will be much slower, and you'll miss important fundamentals that are present in any piano method.

That's perfectly fine for learning things that you do for enjoyment, or things that don't really matter. It's a lot less fine for learning things that... do.


How, exactly, are they working more? How many low-paying jobs offer overtime, if they are full time at all? Any clue how many jobs won't let you work a part-time job or won't work around another job? Can't exactly work for Uber if you can't afford a decent enough car. And this is assuming you have older children that don't need childcare.

The fact is that they aren't working extra, not for a job anyway. The extra work comes in the time making dried beans instead of buying canned, in repairing stuff poorly, in shopping around for a doctor that takes the state health insurance or an affordable option if you have none at all, in taking busses (if they are available), and other unpaid things. Your child will be lucky to afford the activities that gets them a 'good' education, especially if they have to work.


> not for a job anyway

That is exactly OP's point: for OP, if a child's "working hours" includes university prep and resume-padding sports activities, then an adult's "working hours" includes housework, grocery shopping, dealing with insurance and taxes, and commute/family chauffeur time.


To be fair, "Bac'n Bits" have been made of soy for decades - IIRC, they have always been. That's not them being cheap - they were designed that way. You just didn't realize. A lot of brands are similar - not all are vegetarian or vegan, but many are.


Some of the organizations mentioned have never welcomed me - the first hurdle to some of these is simply being female. Freemasons only accept men IIRC. Knights of Columbus? Catholic. Oddfellows acceptance really depends on the individual lodge, despite what the literature says. These organizations aren't always in smaller areas either, so you aren't joining if you are in a small town an hour's drive from the nearest meeting place.


It might not be a written metric, but do you actually believe that someone isn't being evaluated partially based on how many times they've had to talk to them about issues?

I highly doubt it. If this is the reason your manager knows who you are, you are absolutely going to be judged on it. It doesn't really matter what the policy says.

And the nurses absolutely feel like they are being punished for it. Just like having to consistently remind HR that your "absence problem" is due to covered FMLA leave - they know who you are because they've had to talk to you about absenteeism. In a call center of 500 people, it isn't likely they remember that you had issues because of their faulty systems.


> but do you actually believe that someone isn't being evaluated partially based on how many times they've had to talk to them about issues?

This is true for any job. I was unfairly fired from a job because somehow the manager got a perception of me being incompetent, because he often talked to me about problems in my work - most of those conversations ended with him saying "Oh, now I see why you did it that way."


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