Talking to my son today about one of his CS classes, not sure which.

He says: "I missed the lecture yesterday, but I'm not going to bother re-watching it."

Me: "Why? You really should. You're paying for these classes AND you really need to actually learn this stuff."

Son: "Well, because I got 100% on my last assignment without going to class. I just Google'd everything and figured it out on my own from what I found."

My wife out of the blue: "DAMN IT, BUT THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS IN THE REAL WORK WORLD!"

Oh, you poor, uninformed summer child. I love her, but she just doesn't know that my son has already learned the key lesson he needed to learn from his schooling in order to get a job and make good money in this field! #ProudTechieDadMoments

Pre-Covid I never went to my basic web app class. I made 90+ on all the assignments. After like 4 weeks of not seeing me, I finally showed up to class and the lecturer was like "it's great to see you again blah blah blah with the grades you keep making, if you don't wanna show up, you don't have to. Attendance isn't mandatory, but I stress attendance for some bc of their poor grades."

I went to that class all of 4 times in the semester, and it was a MWF class.

While I genuinely agree with the "you're paying for them, might as well go," this particular class moved slow asf and half the time he'd call on people to answer questions and these dip shits would literally be staring at the answer in the power point and go "uhhhhhhh I'm not sure." After a few hours of that I wanted to scream lmao

If you're comfortable you know / can find what you need / where the class is going, then there you go.

But some classes can go off the rails too...can be risky.

Lawl. Truth. I learned nothing from any of my university courses.

The only real risk is it the professor is going to expect you to regurgitate their lecture. Happened once or twice, but I was able to defend my answers they didn't agree with. Probably easier to not have to bother appealing to a Dean and alienating a professor in the long run.

I love the hashtag at the end :)

Can’t totally relate because I learned a lot in uni but our best professors couldn’t be bothered to follow the official uni course and invented their own and it was fantastic

I have to admit, I can relate a ***lot*** to your son.

One has to read the stuff themselves to really learn it. Lectures are just an addition, like mustard on a hot dog.

So finally did you tell him to attend class or nah?

I had a class where the teacher even said "google it" we were confused and angry he wouldn't explain it himself. But we learnt haha

@epictern Oh yeah, I bitch at him about it every chance I get. I tell him look, if for no other reason go because you're paying for that shit!

But yes, I do tell him how important it is to get as much exposure as possible, especially because unlike me, it's a means to an end for him, not a passion, so he's probably got a harder road ahead of him and there's no sense in handicapping himself early.

Of course, with COVID now, things are obviously very different, so there's much less I can say along these lines now. I think he's down to only one in-person class anyway, and I don't think it's a CS class actually.

In our uni you could just apply to be a assistant teacher/lab teacher. I wasn't actually top of the class but I realized that I learned a lot more by teaching it to others. I struggled with recursion until I was asked to explain it to other students. You could suggest something like that if your kid is bored. In addition to helping me learn, it made me a lot better at communicating with peers and understanding alternative approaches to problem solving.

@essi That's a really good suggestion, I'll definitely tell my son that. Thanks for the idea!