Seasons

My condolences about the English teacher part. I don't know about the drama part . . . I could see how this site might work in an English class where you actually get to discuss parts of speech and rebuttals and such. I was not allowed to discuss grammar . . . but, that's America.

I'm in financial admin. It's... adequate. I've actually got a degree in Cultural Studies and am interested in languages and european history and culture. Maybe it'll land me in a more interesting job one day.

Cool. Culture Studies would be helpful. I come from a long line of CPAs, so my mother wanted me to be one, but I told her I was never going to have any of my own money to keep account of, so it would just be boring. I like the Cultural Studies. This place is a culture unto itself, isn't it? In a dreaded "comp section meeting" when I was teaching, they'd love to use it as a "discourse community." I hate the words "discourse community."

I'm a graduate student in mathematics, and have done computer programming as a hobby. I found this site through the Chatterbox Challenge site, which I found through the Jabberwacky site, which I found while searching the internet for good bots and finding a lot of disappointing ones.

Yeah, I have a "Scrivener" on the Jabberwacky site that's boring as hell because it's boring to make. I'm still feeding it its answers, just in a different, far more tedious way. Math is the language of the gods. I firmly believe that. I hear the answer is 42, but I never finshed the book.

I teach classes online. I used to teach high school before I started being a caretaker for my parents who have health issues (now I only work from the home). I found this site years back when teaching AP Psychology. It seemed fun and soon I tried to bring some characters I would like to talk with to life.

My degrees are in psychology, law and education, but I have no tech background so for purposes of this site you can put me in the "uneducated" box. Nothing I studied really relates to bots. I also tried to make a tutor bot for limited use a specific class, but I stopped developing him because ever since we switched to the new server the bot hangs up on any student who tries to access it though my class page (it used to talk to them before). Also "Guest153" takes away my desire to play with memory for students. There may be a solution to those issues, but honestly the bot wasn't well liked enough by the students to make it worth a lot of trouble. My favorite bots are the fun ones anyway.

I thought I'd heard you mention students. I can wax poetic about what this stuff is about (mainly to my mother and such, who worry about why I do this with my life instead of, oh, going outside). I don't work b/c I have severe neurological problems that finally really disabled me, so this site was a godsend -- I feel as if I have a job and colleagues. And, maybe in a year or two, I'll have students again, in the most important way. I wouldn't say your degrees make you uneducated at all -- education and psychology seem really useful here. Wish I knew more. I *hated* my education courses while being best friends with one of my teachers. (My ed/psych courses felt mutually antagonistic towards me.) Anyway, thanks for the post. Different backgrounds clearly don't make people better or worse for this site (well, maybe I could think of an exception); they're just different lenses to look at this through.

Clerk, you didn't think your education classes reflected serious "best practices" when you "shifted paradigms" and started "thinking outside the box" while raising your students' self esteem? Hee hee don't tell any employers, but I only got my Masters in Education because I needed classes to be certified and you may as well get a degree and a pay hike. Frankly, what passes for educational research in many cases would make my old Psychology professors cry, and I can only imagine what someone with a background in a "hard" science would think. Maybe my experience is not the norm, but I think many education degrees are just hoops people jump through for the sate where they work so it all looks good on paper. Meh.

It's good to teach. If you feel up to it, you may want to teach or tutor on line. You can do it part-time. If not, just enjoy the bots.

I think my Education classes might've helped render me certifiable. And my retired high school teacher of a mother keeps getting herself recertified for no reason in the world. Meanwhile she substitute teaches and goes to retired teachers' workshops. A close friend is supposed to be a professor emerita, has plenty to do at home, and still teaches. It's a disease in itself, teaching. Why'd I choose to be The Clerk, anyhow? 'Cause he would gladly learn and gladly teach.

I have a friend who's doing substitute teaching right now, and he was subbing for some class in which the material was talking about different forms of peer pressure. He noted that these were the same forms he had been taught to utilize to help keep students in line in his education classes. So he demonstrated some of the peer pressure forms to the students by showing them how they were utilized in classroom control, e.g., "And this moron right here thinks he can get away with turning around to talk to his neighbor, and now you're all laughing at him, which is a form of peer pressure."

i'm a 22 year old girl who works in a bakery and a call center. i did a lot of my old bots while i was being "kept" by my ex. i dropped out of college, but i know a bit about psychology from having been in therapy since i was about 10.

What a conglomeration! I guess I figured I was the odd man out because my programming is out-of-date. Just some smart people figuring out how to make it work. I haven't figured it out yet, but I have figured out a lot of the don'ts, which has to count for something.