I can tell my kids whatever I want. They generally trust me, but will retain some level of skepticism until they discover that my advice is valid. In this case her Dad may have suggested, “try x” but she didn’t realize how effective the approach would be until she used it once.











I took three history classes while I was in college. It’s been a while, but I recall most of them having a paper or two and those papers counting for a pretty big chunk of you grade. The author of the article is a history teacher, so essays make some amount of sense.
My engineering classes were basically as you described.