One of the things that upset me a lot when I was an adolescent in high school was the fact that the girls were not allowed to take shop, they were required to take home economics. And boys were not allowed to take home economics, they were required to take shop. I have always wanted to learn more about tools and what they are used for, and how to use them. I’ve always wanted to know how to build and fix things. I like to think that I’m a reasonably intelligent person, yet when my hubby told me that he needed to buy some special threaded inserts to repair something in his shop I felt really stupid that I had no idea what threaded inserts are, or how they are used. I looked them up online and still don’t quite understand. I think I’m going to have to tell my hubby that I want to see what it is he is working on and how threaded inserts are used.
Category: Educational
When I was a young mother, I was always worried about how in the world was I going to be able to save for college for my kids. After all I was a single parent, barely scraping by. I started to read a lot of articles in parenting magazines about the subject even before my kids were born! There were a lot of columns giving advice about buying savings bonds, buying life insurance policies, and even pre-paying college expenses at the college that you want your child to attend!
The catch with the pre-payment plans were that if your kid didn’t want to go to that college you would not be able to get a refund. Well, that sounded like a really bad idea to me – especially since the college my parents wanted me to go to was really a secretarial school and not a college at all. If I refused to go to the school of my parent’s choice, why in the world would I think that my own kid would go to the college I wanted my kid to go to?
One of the more painless ways parents can save for college is by joining programs that give you rewards for signing up at a website and shopping with their affiliated partners. When you do that, a small portion of the money you spend go into a special savings account that you can spend later on college tuition. I did that for my kids; it didn’t save them a whole lot of money, but every penny helps!
One of the choices that I had to make when I was in college was whether to pursue a course in study that would give me training in management in nonprofit careers. At the time I really did think that I was going to continue to live in that particular area and did not think that there were very many nonprofit jobs in the area.
So I did not pursue the college courses designed with non profit jobs in mind. Since then I’ve moved to a completely different state, about eight hundred miles away and find myself wishing that I had taken that career path because when I look through the help wanted advertisements I see a lot of careers nonprofit openings advertised. Hindsight is twenty-twenty! With the economy the way it is going, I would guess that more non-profit organizations are going to need to step in and take some of the load off of the government, so that is probably a good career choice around here.
Thank goodness my kids have finished their college education and we no longer have to search for financial aid information to get them to have enough money to sig up for their college courses. It was becoming extremely difficult to get the help we needed for one of my sons that struggled with his grades. But now we are in the stage of repaying his student loans, which is another challenge on it’s own right.
When I was talking with Madeline about how we had to search far and wide for the financial aid, she was telling me that she had heard that her son might qualify for a scholarship for left handed students. I had never heard of any scholarships based on something like that! What will they think of next!
Andrew dropped into the store today to say hello. He brought a couple of pizzas from Domino’s with him, and we had the chance to visit for a bit in between customers. We haven’t seen him since he left for school a year and a half ago. I can still remember the last time we saw him, right before he left; he was so excited! He is well on his way now to his final semester and is getting ready to take his gp exam. He was talking about how his univeristy had sponsored a job fair and there was a booth of information about gp recruitment and filling out the gp application.
Andrew has been working long and hard to pursue his dream, and he is a wonderful young man. I hope he does well. I have to admit that I miss seeing his smiling face here at work, and as nice as his replacement is here at work, it’s just not the same since he left to finish his schooling.