blue11
Joined 13 years ago
Joined 13 years ago
"Ear infection" is often not even a heuristic. Pediatricians sometimes say that when it's not obvious what's wrong with a small child that has a little a bit of fever and is crying. Parents need to hear a reason and "ear infection" sounds more convincing than "probably nothing", and sometimes parents can be, well, difficult. I've even heard a pediatrician admit as much once. On another occasion, a nurse practitioner diagnosed our child with an ear infection without even bothering to check the ears.
Emergency physicians, on the other hand, are always thinking about the worst case scenarios and trying to rule them out.
EDIT: The 90/180 rule is for the Schengen area, not the whole EU, and, yes, that includes Switzerland, which is not in the EU. Not sure what the rules are for the rest of the EU, but he probably cares about Schengen anyway.
(I used to have a CanoScan 8800F.)
As for sources... I am a former international student at a top US university and I know many others too. Almost no one I've met came from a rich foreign family.
That might be true for other universities but not for Harvard and MIT, whose admissions are aid-blind and most international students there receive huge financial aid packages.
There are lower-ranked universities that have programs (usually Masters's ones) that are targeted towards foreign students who can pay a lot of money.
In normal times transferring to another college is a process that takes 9-10 months. The admission rate for transfer applications is really low. And that's just for domestic transfer students. It is not even theoretically possible to transfer to another school in a couple of months. Not to mention that the F-1 student visa and the I-20 form needed to obtain such a visa are for a specific school only, so international students would also have to go back to their home countries and obtain new visas.
I'll just second some of the common recommendation:
- Magnatiles. There are a lot of manufacturers out there, some brand name, some not. The good thing is that at this point they have all standardized on the tile sizes, so they are usually compatible.
- LEGO Duplo. The standard LEGO sizes are too small for most toddlers. Duplos are perfect. Kids (and parents) quickly tire of the set themes, but the good news is that you can mix and match pieces and let the kids build whatever crooked houses they want to build.
- Trains and other vehicles that go on rails.
- Picture books that you can read to them while they can follow by looking at the pictures. This is tricky, because in my experience most children books are not great. The biggest problem is usually the lack of a story. Many books are supposedly educational or teach kids good values, but they are poor at story telling. If there is no good story, kids are not interested. Many books also don't have a good balance between text and pictures. Too little text and there's not much for you to read, they'll flip through the book in seconds. Or pictures that do not have enough detail to match the text. Anyway, the only solution is trial and error.
Admittedly, none of these are exactly "STEM", but I think that's OK. What's more important to stimulate creativity and make learning fun.