This past couple of weeks is my second TV viewing of Green Acres, the first being when it was aired originally in 1965. Tween-age me would only watch an occasional episode, if that. As a geezer I find I like it better. In 1965 it was just too silly; I found it barely watchable. Now it is still silly, but in an amusing over-the-top way. As I recall the plots and action get more and more ridiculous as the episodes progress, but so far, the first 10 episodes of season one, I’m enjoying. One thing is certain, for a 1965 tv show, if nobody watched it now, it wouldn’t be on TV now.
I like looking at the old cars in those shows. Not Green Acres but Perry Mason, etc. When you see a shiny 57 Merc, it’s because it is new, not restored.
… and then there is a friend of mine who still gets lost, even with GPS.
I can’t figure out his problem, other than to theorize that he is so nervous behind the wheel that he frequently turns in the wrong place. After owning a car and driving in his teens and early 20s, he didn’t own a car–or drive–for close to 50 years, and just recently returned to driving. I think that he is extremely uncomfortable behind the wheel, and that he does dumb things because he is in frequent panic mode.
And that’s why I (and many others) made some good money as HS and college math tutors. I averaged 5-8 clients per semester. And where are the Home Economic Tutors? You are clearly the exception if you think you can get the basics by reading a book. IQ must be north of 140. Because MOST can’t. Even people I know who majored in Mathematics at Princeton.
Wait, are you saying you can’t get the basics of a discrete discipline by reading a book designed to teach the discipline?
I don’t think it has anything to do with IQ. It has to do with how people learn. Some people have trouble learning out of books, I get that. But other people sometimes wish the teacher would just shut up and let them read the book so they could absorb the information faster. My calculus teacher in high school was also the basketball coach, and most of the lessons devolved into talking about basketball. I definitely wished he’d stop talking, because I wanted to learn the calculus (admittedly, pretty much all of which I have since forgotten) and I really don’t care about basketball.
I learned at an early age to learn math out of books. Probably because my dad, who was stellar at all things math, tried to teach me but was… Let’s say less than stellar at imparting that knowledge on kids.
And there are cooking tutors - just not in academia, mainly because schools don’t generally teach high-level cooking unless you’re specifically at a cooking school. Home-ec involves making muffins and scrambled eggs - not exactly rocket science.
Regardless, most of the DIY car guys here have done countless things to their cars that they learned how to do by reading a manual, or watching a how-to on Youtube, or via some other method than having to have an ASE-certified mechanic come over and walk them through it.
The idea that everyone must have an actual human teacher in order to learn discrete subjects (i.e, subjects regarding things that have specific answers/outcomes, like math, or physics, or car repair) just isn’t supported by experience.
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Certain subjects for many people -YES. It’s been proven. Math is one of them. Some can…some can’t. When I tutored in College (or when I was a TA)…some students had a hard time understanding it. Especially since math is very abstract. Even kids who did well in Algebra and trig had a hard time understanding Calc. Concepts like Limits and approaching infinity…
There’s a cottage industry on teaching Math.
And my argument isn’t that you CAN’T learn math on your own. The argument is that learning how to cook is 100,000,000 times easier to learn on your own then Math is. Again…show me the Home Economics tutors.
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Ha! Give most people a formula, they can follow it and get the right answer. If I give everyone here a set of ingredients (with a recipe even!) and ask them to bake a cake not everyone will get the right answer. In fact I can guarantee not only variable results but many will be inedible… 
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Hm, if that’s a requirement then I’m allready behind in the competition.
Oh-wel, not the first time I’ve been behind - and lost.
I’ll better get out now and fix my car. It has to go through inspection friday.
That wasn’t the original premise. I don’t need to bake a cake to cook for myself so I can live. That was the original tenant that Bing was saying.
Well, you can learn enough math to squeak by in life too without being a super genius on the subject. It’s all a matter of degrees (see what I did there!). My interpretation for learning to cook is not surviving, it’s learning the nuances of the trade.
BTW- not everyone can cook to survive. Take my Dad. When my Mom was lost to a drunk driver early in life, he had to take over the cooking duties. It was tenuous at first. We had to go out to eat as most of the concoctions resulting were literally inedible…I guess you could have eaten some of it and survived but death was running a close second choice… 
Always remember, there are 2 kinds of people in the world
- those who can extrapolate from incomplete data.
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Exactly. Heck, most people have trouble making scrambled eggs “correctly.”
Cooking is an art form. It’s not enough to know what ingredients to use, it’s when to use them, and when to stir (and when to leave it alone), and what exactly “medium” heat is given that different stoves have outputs ranging from “100 watt light bulb” to “fighter jet afterburner,” etc.
Want to replace the brake calipers on a 2009 Jetta? You go to the shop manual. First you do A, then you do B, then you do C. Everything’s laid out for you, much as in a math formula. Want to make a bearnaise? There’s 1,000 different ways to do it, many of them are “correct,” and just throwing a list of ingredients at the pot without knowing how to properly combine them will result in crappy failure.
And, again, there are cooking tutors. Lots of them. They’re called at-home cooking instructors. It’s actually a very healthy industry that people make a lot of money in.
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That could be…but that wasn’t the original discussion. It’s kinda morphed into it.
Anyone can be taught where middle C is on a piano and how to read music but few can successfully make music sitting at the keyboard. And likewise most any able minded adult with reasonable patience and determination can follow instructions to successfully do a brake job on a car but some talent is required to successfully do 8 brake jobs on various makes and models of cars in a day. And as for the cooking I have had to survive on my own cooking for a few years more than once and while I can honestly say I can cook it’s because heating a can of Hormel chili and pouring it over a plate of rice was considered a gourmet meal to me and I had a better than even chance of success cooking real cornbread.
As for Green Acres I am familiar with that program but I don’t believe I ever sat through from beginning to end on one of the episodes. Fact is, it’s likely that I never saw the program until it was in reruns in the mid 70s or later. When looking at the 3 re-run stations that my cable service has I have come to realize that Green Acres, the Beverly Hillbillies, etc., were popular because that’s all that was offered at the time. The Rockford Files seemed to keep my interest whenever it was on but I never see it listed on a rerun station, likewise Amos & Andy, Route 66, and Barney Miller which I recall enjoying.Oh well, I’m sitting here because it got too hot to do anymore yard work and there’s nothing on 170+ stations that interests me so I’m a keyboard commando.
This is sort of car related and learning mathematics. Some years back, I bought a Ford Windstar from a small dealer in a little community about 12 miles away. I was coming back to the campus where I worked after lunch and the Windstar would die when I let up on the accelerator. I called the dealer and the service manager said to bring it in. If they couldn’t fix it right away, they would give me a loaner. My next class was a late afternoon class, so I nursed the Windstar to the dealer. While I was waiting for the diagnosis on my Windstar, a high school girl went up to the service counter and asked if anyone knew any geometry. When nobody could help her, I volunteered. She showed me the problems and the textbook was practically incomprehensible. It took me 20 minutes to figure out the terminology and I have an undergraduate degree in mathematics, a graduate degree in mathematics and a graduate degree in statistics. I
After I deciphered the code, I worked through a couple of problems with the girl and then had her work a couple of problems and explain her solution to me and how she worked the problem. She walked away happy and I drove back to campus in a loaner. The next day when I went back to pick up my Windstar, I asked about the girl I had helped with geometry the previous day. I was told that the girl was the daughter of the owner. I asked to talk to him. The father told me that his daughter and the rest of the students in the class were completely frustrated. The students found the textbook unreadable and the teacher didn’t understand enough to explain it to the students.
I have seen many poorly written textbooks in all levels of mathematics courses. These textbooks are short on examples.
There are also students who have difficulty grasping a concept. I was teaching an upper division probability course one summer and had a student who just didn’t seem to understand the theory and couldn’t do the assigned problems. When I gave the first test which he failed, I looked at him while I was going through the test. I saw his face light up and he came up after class and said “I see it now. I know where I missed the boat”. I thought I wouldn’t have to see him outside of class, but I was wrong. He would do the assigned problems without difficulty, but then he would go ahead and work on the challenge problems in the book.that I hadn’t assigned. I then had to sit and work through these problems to see if his solution was correct. The real joy in teaching for me was to see the students struggle and then master a concept.
I loved watching Green Acres growing up. Eva Gabor played the wife who never wanted to leave NYC and never got rural. Her husband was a NYC lawyer who wanted to live the rural live. The rural folks were nice but odd. I can’t remember if it was a spinoff of Petticoat Junction or it was the other way around. I believe both were a spinoff of The Beverly Hillbillies. They was definitely a connection and the Clametts did spend time in Petticoat Junction. So one show was a caricature of hill billies in a posh urban setting, Green Acres was the opposite. I haven’t seen it in over 40 years.
My wife couldn’t stand GA. She grew up rural and felt it made fun of people she knew (keep in mind she and her sisters were all college educated and their father was a dentist, he grew up there and his family was there since the first Virginia colonies). Her father loves the Beverly Hillbillies. They all enjoyed The Andy Griffith Show.
One to cars and education. I don’t know. I went to a public high school where almost everyone went to college. We had metal and wood shop, auto mechanics, print shop and the like. My impression was that they were for those not going to college. I thought of taking auto shop but a friend of mine who knew kids who took it thought I might be in danger. I’m no mechanic but managed to rebuild the carburetor in a 73 Chevy Suburban.
Moving forward, my son’s high school also sends most student to college. The the high school auto classes have been replaced with engineering courses (they make good use of equipment that used to be used by shop class). The school district has a school for technical information, which many college headed students took advantage. This included auto mechanics, airplane maintenance (they have a traineor), coking and all sorts of courses. The biggest challenge is traveling from one’s high school to the tech school during the school day.
My point (if there is one) is that today’s schools don’t fit the stereotype often handed out. There is plenty of hands on stuff, often with tech ed starting in middle school. Also home ec (though emphasis might be on “life skills”) and course are open to both boys and girls. A greater variety and I think less of push to track kids and push them to certain courses based on class and race. In my high school a fellow student who is black and successful in finance said that our guidance counselor discouraged him from going to college and suggested he become a ditch digger. I saw him once after high graduation and he was enjoying college.
Meanwhile I know people my age and a little older who know nothing about the low gears on automatic transmissions (never mind driving shift). Just never interested them.
As for TV. Maybe its just because I don’t watch reality TV but I find much TV today much better than what I grew up with. And I had the luxury of 7 TV channels in pre-cable days.
My stay at home mom had me making scrambled eggs and toast plus reading at a second grade level by age 4. My 2 year old Granddaughter was choosing a book for me to read to her in her home library. She pointed to her mom’s old calculus textbook. I told her I didn’t think she would enjoy me reading calculus to her. She replied: “Yes Grampa, cacalus to scary”. When I told her Math Major mom she cracked-up and confirmed that calculus was very scary at first.
I don’t think it was ever about cars but nostalgic and fun for some of us.
One of the most dangerous things in the Army. A 2LT with a map! One National Guard drill morning there were 8 2LTs sitting at the flight planning table. One of my flight operations specialists asked if it would be a flock or a herd of lieutenants? I only had to ponder a couple seconds to respond. “A plague”.
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Green Acres seems like a recent TV show to me. We were the last people in our neighborhood to get a television. My dad finally bought a television set in the fall of 1954. I was in 8th grade. I watched Herbert A. Philbrick foil the Communists on “I Led 3 Lives”. He always drove a bottom of the line Plymouth Cambridge, Chevrolet 150 or Ford Mainline. I watched Sgt. Joe Friday and Officer Frank Smith get the bad guys in Los Angeles and Sgt. Joe Friday always noted the exact time. Officer Frank Smith always drove the 1954 Ford. Up in San Francisco, Lt. Ben Guthrie and Inspector Matt Greb had a 1951 Ford to drive around San Fransisco and stop at the call boxes the police department used in those days. That show was called “The Lineup” with the reruns labelled as San Francisco Best". Out in the boonies of California, people were protected by Dan Matthews of the “Highway Patrol”. My brother and I were fascinated by his 1955 Buick Century patrol car with its “3 on the tree” manual transmission.
I think by the time I graduated from high school in 1959, I was bored with television. When I have watched these shows on the internet, the plots were pretty hokey.