Monday Slacker Manager wrote that people quit managers, not companies; I took that further in my Tuesday post saying that

• Adequate managers manage employees.
• Good managers manage people.
• Great managers manage persons.

Marvin commented that this also applied to families, saying, “It was a great reminder that people don’t leave families, they leave the leaders of that family. … Adequate husbands/fathers have a wife and kids, Good husbands/fathers provide for their wife and kids, Great husbands/fathers learn the individual needs of their wife and kids and serve them accordingly.”

I know from Marvin’s site that he is coming from a Christian perspective and I respect that.

However, I’m not willing to assume that the male is the ‘leader’ in a marriage—nor do I think the woman is (no offense to any same-sex couples reading this) and I certainly hope that the kids aren’t.

I think marriages should be partnerships, with both contributing to the vision and each leading within his/her strengths and supporting the other as appropriate—and I don’t mean this in the traditional sense.

Next, I’m not completely comfortable with the paraphrasing.

Having a wife and kids is possible for any male with $20 bucks for the license (it’s probably gone up) and active sperm and those two things certainly don’t make them adequate in my mind.

The ‘good’ ones provide what? Food, shelter and safety or more intangible things, such as love, respect and acceptance.

There’s nothing wrong with the definition of ‘great’ as long as it includes unconditional love, unconditional respect and unconditional acceptance for life choices—barring those that are illegal—that may not agree with others in the family.

I also think that ‘great’ is more than serving individual needs in kids; sometimes their needs shouldn’t be served or they will come to expect that. Serving is also about standing back and letting the kid make mistakes starting at a very young age. No parent serves their child by smoothing every kink, filling every pothole and easing every difficulty on the road to adulthood.

Serving is about being sure that kids are exposed to and learn to deal with the real world, one that doesn’t always live up to expectations or work the way one wants.

My own opinion is that this can’t happen if the child is raised in a homogenous environment spending their time with like-minded people. I also think it’s unfair to the kid, because eventually they’ll have to function in the real world, which is messy, diverse and often uncooperative.

This is as true whether it’s the Latino kids living in the Mission District of San Francisco being able to do everything in Spanish except school or the home-schooled kid whose entire world and contact revolves around their family and church.

Homogeny is crippling when it comes to producing adults who can move in a diverse, multicultural, multi-thought, multi-everything global economy.

OK, rant over.

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Are kids learning anything from the economic meltdown?

Parents seem to be doing everything possible to avoid exposing their little darlings to a dose of reality.

Quotes in a December post highlighted parental efforts to fill Christmas wish lists and shelter their kids from the tanking economy.

A letter to Malcolm Berko asking for financial advice is another example of the lengths to which parents are willing to go, here is the key part.

“…Our son will graduate high school this May and we don’t have the savings to send him to the University of Florida, his chosen school where his two best buddies attend. Our combined 401(k) savings plans are worth $67,000 and they too took a big hit in the market. So we are thinking either of taking a mortgage on our home (we built it without borrowing money), cosigning a note at the credit union or cashing in our 401(k) plans for his college money. Or I could take a part-time consulting job…”

Berko doesn’t suffer fools gladly and has no compunction about saying what he thinks (I highly recommend his column). I’ve shortened his response, but it’s worth reading the whole thing.

“I’d be more concerned about adding money to your retirement savings plan than helping your son pay for frat parties, beer, sex and drugs at the University of Florida…I suspect he really wants to party with his buddies, and UF is a great party school.

Here’s my advice: Tell your son to join the armed services where he’ll mature in a hurry…Or your kid can live at home, attend a community college…and take a part-time job at McDonald’s. If he does well in community college, he can easily find the financial support to earn a bachelor’s or a master’s degree.”

One reason the Great Depression made a great impression was that kids weren’t sheltered from its effects. And although this isn’t a depression the principle is the same.

Saddest of all, preventing kids from experiencing and dealing with reality now cripples them in the future. They have a

• harder time in college;
• more difficulties when they start working and
• more problems in relationships and marriage.

Succeeding in life requires knowing what to do and how to deal with things when they don’t go your way and are outside of your control.

But as long as parents keep shielding kids from the ups and downs of reality and are available to intervene and make [whatever] better then there’s no reason for kids to learn how to do it themselves, which will be a big disadvantage for them in the future.

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CandidProf is a Professor of Physics and Astronomy at a state university. He’ll be sharing his thoughts and experience teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday— anonymously because that’s the only way he can write really candid posts.

An uncaring and ineffective professor does not even take into account the possibility that students are not properly prepared for their class. The students who are ill prepared will not have a chance.

So, you have to learn where your students are. What do they know? What do they not know? If a large number of them don’t know the shape of the Earth, then be sure to cover that. If they don’t understand a certain type of differential equation, cover that in class. But, a good leader also recognizes when success is not possible.

Occasionally I have a student who has no chance of succeeding in the class. That is tough for me, because I want everyone to succeed. But, I have students who sign up for calculus based physics even though they do not even have a good grasp of algebra and have never had calculus.

I have students who take the second semester class after taking the first semester class somewhere “easier” where they did not cover as much material as we do in our first semester class. Unfortunately, the second semester class builds on the concepts covered (or supposed to be covered) in the first semester.

There is only so much that I can do. Physics is intense enough. I cannot teach algebra, trigonometry, and calculus AND physics. If students are missing some things, then I can help them and explain those few things. But, I cannot teach them an entire course’s worth of material in a few minutes when they come by my office.

Eventually, you have to realize that some of them need to stop, drop the course, and go back and take the other classes that they need in order to succeed in your course.

It is very difficult having to tell a student that he or she is completely unprepared for the level of your class and needs to go back and learn the basic things needed before signing up for the class again. You know that many of them will just quit rather than doing that. But, you also know that they won’t succeed if they stick with it. That is something that a good professor will occasionally have to do, though.

How prepared were you for college?

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