Dillards 93: Counting the Cost - Indeed

[Bassett Lady]

16 hours ago, karenb4729 said:

none of her siblings really had much education past the seventh grade. A

Several of the older children earned a GED.  While the GED exam was very easy 30-40 years ago, which earned the GED a bad reputation as a result, the modern test is quite rigorous and not likely to be passed by someone with only a 7th grade education. 
 

I believe that the middle children likely had little to no education past 7th grade. Since the demise of the show some of the youngest kids might have had more time in their schedules for education.

 

[JermajestyDuggar]

34 minutes ago, Bassett Lady said:

Several of the older children earned a GED.  While the GED exam was very easy 30-40 years ago, which earned the GED a bad reputation as a result, the modern test is quite rigorous and not likely to be passed by someone with only a 7th grade education. 
 

I believe that the middle children likely had little to no education past 7th grade. Since the demise of the show some of the youngest kids might have had more time in their schedules for education.

 

I agree. The oldest kids had to help with homeschooling the younger kids. They probably have a better education. I bet all those middle boys have terrible educations. 

[HeartsAFundie]

4 hours ago, Giraffe said:

I hope she’ll go back to school, too. It’ll be interesting if she goes for legitimate midwifery or if that was just the IBLP approved “education.”

I also could see her enrolling at a community college for a 2-year RN program.  She would do very well as a nurse.  

26 minutes ago, JermajestyDuggar said:

I agree. The oldest kids had to help with homeschooling the younger kids. They probably have a better education. I bet all those middle boys have terrible educations. 

Remember Jill helping James with multiplication tables?  And he was around 11 or 12!

In his defense, and which I can totally relate to, James did say "I don't like math, and math doesn't like me" which may explain why math is not his strongest suit.  However, I knew my multiplication tables in Grade 3 at age 8.  And that was in a lower-income area public school.     

Also, who knows if James-or any of the Duggars for that matter-has a learning disability that makes learning math or any other school subject more difficult?  So not only have they been deprived of formal education, they have also been deprived of getting any help they need to make learning easier.     

Edited September 29, 2023 by HeartsAFundie

[Bassett Lady]

Northeast Tech Center, in the somewhat hilariously named small town of Kansas, Oklahoma, offers an LPN program that takes 12-15 months to complete.

It is only about a 20 minute drive from their house in Siloam Springs to the school. 

At a cost of only $6,587 for the program she could be an LPN with a relatively small financial and time investment. She could be a school nurse and work in the same district as her boys. 
 

 

[SassyPants]

IIRC, James was actually 13 when Jill was quizzing him on his MTs. Didn’t Michelle say that several of the kids and JB had learning disabilities (am I miss remembering this?) And really, learning the MTs really isn’t about Math (what they are used for involves math), but learning them is basic memorization.

I don’t think any of the Duggars has more than a 7th grade education, and that is criminal. Sad that DD didn’t realize this before he and Jill married. What that tells me is that they really had no true discussions or spent no quality time together before they were wed. They wed as strangers. Those dates must have been mighty awkward. Were they just talking Jesus all the time? How could DD not tell by talking to Jill that her life experiences and knowledge were so limited?

[nolongerIFBx]

On 9/23/2023 at 8:30 PM, Giraffe said:

He just gets worse and worse, doesn’t he? 

From Jill’s book

The final straw before JB took them out of a church was seeing a Christmas program which included “female members of the youth group” dancing. That night when all the children went to bed JB told them he was sorry, “addressing us all but looking particularly at the boys. ‘You should not have had to have seen that. I was wrong to take us there tonight. We won’t be going back to that church event again.’”

I’m absolutely revolted by this. Does that mean JB got an erection at children dancing and therefore deemed it evil? God I hope his skeletons come out sooner rather than later. 
 

(eta, I understand how biological processes work and that erections can happen at any time for any reason and not only for sexual arousal. My disgust is that he places the blame on literal children!)

I think you have to be raised in fundamentalism sometimes to have your mind work in a way that understands this. Dancing is bad because it can cause "desires that cannot be righteously fulfilled" in some people so that means it is wrong for all people, all the time, everywhere (exceptions for Carlin though I still don't get why. . . ). You don't have to be the one that gets aroused. And then it just gets boiled down to dancing is wrong period. Doesn't matter the why, it's now a tenet of the faith.

I could totally relate as my mom came to me Sunday afternoon all upset about a song at her church that morning. There was definitely a beat and the person signing (ASL) the song was really getting into it. She worried and worried and didn't get any sleep and finally called he pastor and he said it wouldn't happen again and she wasn't the only one who contacted him. No one was getting an erection in church because of this--certainly not my mom, LOL--but it was wrong just because it was wrong, no one needed to explore why.

BTW- I told her that I understood her concerns as she raised me in fundamentalism but I didn't see anything wrong with it. Opposition to drums has a racist base (they called it a "jungle beat" until racism wasn't cool and they had to invent a new reason why drums were wrong) and heart-felt emotion that causes excess body movement while signing isn't wrong either.

[JDuggs]

I taught math for 5th through 8th graders and I really tried to stress memorizing math facts. Some kids, due to ability or motivation, just never memorized them. It’s harder to do math without knowing them, but people will get by in life okay.

[noseybutt]

28 minutes ago, nolongerIFBx said:

I think you have to be raised in fundamentalism sometimes to have your mind work in a way that understands this. Dancing is bad because it can cause "desires that cannot be righteously fulfilled" in some people so that means it is wrong for all people, all the time, everywhere (exceptions for Carlin though I still don't get why. . . ). You don't have to be the one that gets aroused. And then it just gets boiled down to dancing is wrong period. Doesn't matter the why, it's now a tenet of the faith.

I could totally relate as my mom came to me Sunday afternoon all upset about a song at her church that morning. There was definitely a beat and the person signing (ASL) the song was really getting into it. She worried and worried and didn't get any sleep and finally called he pastor and he said it wouldn't happen again and she wasn't the only one who contacted him. No one was getting an erection in church because of this--certainly not my mom, LOL--but it was wrong just because it was wrong, no one needed to explore why.

BTW- I told her that I understood her concerns as she raised me in fundamentalism but I didn't see anything wrong with it. Opposition to drums has a racist base (they called it a "jungle beat" until racism wasn't cool and they had to invent a new reason why drums were wrong) and heart-felt emotion that causes excess body movement while signing isn't wrong either.

This makes me so sad because an ASL interpreter has to "get into it" in order to fully interpret.

[nolongerIFBx]

On 9/24/2023 at 12:06 PM, Lease257 said:

. . . .

Never blaming Christianity…but outing IBLP throughout the book  I’m still confused by IBLP.  Is it a “religion”? Like…. It’s a list of rules.  Rules that are supposed to follow Christ but morphed into rules Gothard created? If you are IBLP do you go to church, or do you just go to meetings? Do you go to both?  It just seems like the Duggars stopped following God and started following a way of life to make themselves look like a perfect family.   

. . . .

 

The legalistic rules of IBLP (as Coconut Flan so capably explained as a para-church organization) and the IFBx (denomination of the Christian religion) is somewhat similar to the Gezerot (if I've got my terms straight) of the Jewish religion: https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/6646-gezerah. These are not commands from God but sort of a fence around the "bad" thing. If you didn't even pass the fence, you were in no danger of sinning. A good example is in Genesis. God told Adam not to eat the fruit of tree of knowledge of good and evil. That was the law. But when Eve repeated what Adam told her to the serpent, she said "Neither shall ye touch it." God never said don't touch it. But not touching it was a fence that got repeated as fact. After all, if you never touched it, you couldn't accidentally eat it. The problem with this legalism, though, is that they then judge people who touch the fruit even though they aren't actually breaking the law God said. They're only breaching the fence, a fence that humans put there, not God. But the fence has become sacred, and anyone crossing it must be doing so with the intent to get to the bad thing so even touching the fence becomes the equivalent of doing the bad thing.

[nolongerIFBx]

13 minutes ago, noseybutt said:

This makes me so sad because an ASL interpreter has to "get into it" in order to fully interpret.

It isn't the first time "well-meaning Christians" tried to change a culture to make it fit in their white Christian box.

[SassyPants]

1 hour ago, JDuggs said:

I taught math for 5th through 8th graders and I really tried to stress memorizing math facts. Some kids, due to ability or motivation, just never memorized them. It’s harder to do math without knowing them, but people will get by in life okay.

I am old, so learned basic math a long time ago. In my early school days, we didn’t do timed, math drills. So while I understand math, I make stupid math errors and I can not do mental math beyond basic numbers. I never enjoyed math because everything took so long. Now, I did memorize the MTs because that was easy.

[shesinsane]

4 hours ago, SassyPants said:

I am old, so learned basic math a long time ago. In my early school days, we didn’t do timed, math drills. So while I understand math, I make stupid math errors and I can not do mental math beyond basic numbers. I never enjoyed math because everything took so long. Now, I did memorize the MTs because that was easy.

I'm so old, when I was memorizing my multiplication tables my teacher would warn us "You have to learn these, you won't always have a calculator around when you need to do some math." 

[gobucks]

6 hours ago, nolongerIFBx said:

Dancing is bad because it can cause "desires that cannot be righteously fulfilled" in some people so that means it is wrong for all people, all the time, everywhere (exceptions for Carlin though I still don't get why. . . ). 

Carlin deserves a tiny bit of kudos for having dancing at her wedding and asking her dad to dance too. That had to have been nervewracking to speak up and admit that to her family. 

[SassyPants]

27 minutes ago, shesinsane said:

I'm so old, when I was memorizing my multiplication tables my teacher would warn us "You have to learn these, you won't always have a calculator around when you need to do some math." 

The calculator was not really a thing until I was in college. I’m sure some people had them, but certainly most did not. I always tell my husband (a math phenom) that I would have been good at math if I’d had a calculator.

[Loveday]

Just now, SassyPants said:

The calculator was not really a thing until I was in college. I’m sure some people had them, but certainly most did not. I always tell my husband (a math phenom) that I would have been good at math if I’d had a calculator.

Yeah, me too, maybe. I learned my multiplication tables in 3rd grade in 1966. I was great at memorization back then. I think that was the high point of my math studies, though.😆 I did get a calculator my senior year in high school, but not for higher level math. It was for consumer math--doing taxes, balancing checkbooks, figuring out how much I'd pay on my mortgage in interest. I was good at that, too. It was quite a useful class, actually. And that was the last math class I ever took!😁

[Father Son Holy Goat]

I learned mine from records. Each number had a song with a theme. I remember the 4s were sort of Egyptian/Middle Eastern.

[KSmom]

1 hour ago, shesinsane said:

I'm so old, when I was memorizing my multiplication tables my teacher would warn us "You have to learn these, you won't always have a calculator around when you need to do some math." 

I’m so old calculators didn’t exist when I was learning my multiplication facts. 

[moreorlessnu]

Sigh. I've used a slide rule.....

[kittykay]

I, too, learned MT in third grade.  In my public-school high school Geometry, Algebra 1, and Algebra 2 were required courses to graduate.  Oh, God.  I hated Geometry but passed.  Loved and did well in Algebra 1.  Algebra 2 was waaaaay over my pea brain.  In Algebra 2, I actually had a final grade of C-- and I KNOW that the teachers just felt sorry for me and gave me a passing grade because in reality there was no way I passed that course. In was in high school 70-72 (10th, 11th, and 12th grades).

Should be I was in high school.  Not In was in high school.  I am really old.

Edited September 30, 2023 by kittykay

[AnywhereButHere]

I remember learning multiplication in school by pleating a piece of paper and then writing numbers on it. Math fell into one of the circles of hell for me, so I’ve blocked out how exactly turning a sheet of paper into a fan helped us learn our times tables, but apparently it did! 
 

Geometry was the worst. I failed an open book final. I almost feel worse for the kid behind me who tried to cheat off my paper. Geniuses, the both of us. 😂

[marmalade]

10 hours ago, Bassett Lady said:

Several of the older children earned a GED.  While the GED exam was very easy 30-40 years ago, which earned the GED a bad reputation as a result, the modern test is quite rigorous and not likely to be passed by someone with only a 7th grade education. 
 

I believe that the middle children likely had little to no education past 7th grade. Since the demise of the show some of the youngest kids might have had more time in their schedules for education.

 

The GED started cracking down about 15 years ago, explaining why only the older kids have it. 

[Hera]

Just finished the book. 

My first thought was when I looked at the family tree at the beginning was “Oh, yeah - Jordyn.” Poor Jordyn!

More seriously, I thought it was well written. I appreciate that Jill kept it to her and sometimes, but not always, Derick’s POV. She didn’t dish out inter-family  gossip. She protected her siblings’ privacy. She clearly only shared her and Derick’s conversations when he consented. This was Jill telling Jill’s perspective and I respect that she respected everyone else’s privacy. 

That said, the throwaway description of Anna during one of those meetings as a rabbit frozen and hoping the predator will move on is so apt. 

Pops is a nasty piece of work. It’s hard to read how badly he treated his daughter. And because Jill told her POV only, we don’t see how Derick evolved. But it seems clear he wasn’t really 100% in, ever. Not really. I’d kinda like to hear his POV, but think it might really damaging to Jill to put it out there. Not because I think it’s bad about her. Just that they’re not there yet. 

I’m impressed by Jill putting this out there despite the obvious anxiety she still feels. I grew up not fundy but steeped in religion as a kid and it’s HARD to reprogram yourself. Can’t imagine how Duggars without a fully supportive spouse can do the work to get out. But Jill put herself out there as a beacon.

Finally Dr. Ray has been an amazingly positive influence in Jill’s life. May he remain anonymous and continue to help her as she needs.
 

(p.s. the only thing that bothered me in the book from a hypocrisy standpoint was Jill being outraged at “Pops” thinking he had a say about her uterus post Samuel’s birth…while being (as far as I know) pro-life to legislate other women’s uteruses.)
 

 

 

[Cults-r-us]

4 hours ago, Father Son Holy Goat said:

I learned mine from records. Each number had a song with a theme. I remember the 4s were sort of Egyptian/Middle Eastern.

A teacher at my daughter's school years ago knew about a jillion little rhymes and songs and sayings for math rules.

[Kiki03910]

The Duggar kids would probably be far better educated if all they had ever done was watch those old 70s "Schoolhouse Rock" videos. But that evil, evil music ...

[St.Clara]

7 hours ago, Hera said:

Pops is a nasty piece of work. It’s hard to read how badly he treated his daughter. And because Jill told her POV only, we don’t see how Derick evolved. But it seems clear he wasn’t really 100% in, ever. Not really. I’d kinda like to hear his POV, but think it might really damaging to Jill to put it out there. Not because I think it’s bad about her. Just that they’re not there yet. 

 

I agree. In this interview (around 2 minutes)

Spoiler

 

Derick says that, in his opinion, it was partly the fault of Jill´s parents that the abuse was made public because they continued the show but that he and Jill feel differently about that.

I think that is a good example for what you are saying. Imo, Derick´s take here is just logic 1X1 but Jill is emotionally not at a point to admit that. It is her right to have control over how she views and tells her story. A short remark by Derick here and there isn´t a problem but if  we had his POV it might well override hers in the public perception because it is closer to the known facts. That could be a subtle way to take Jill´s story away from her, again. So I do think that they made a good decision in letting us just have Jill´s POV.

That being said, I do take Jill´s account with a huge grain of salt. Her way of perceiving things tends to be very black and white (e.g. happy childhood -> TV-show made it all bad). That is a very useful survival strategy that I will freely admit to having used myself. But it tends to somewhat distort reality.