any sufficiently advanced blogging is indistinguishable from blather

Over the weekend Best Buy had a great deal on a really slow Gateway laptop computer, somewhere around $300. So my brother and my father and I split the bill and bought the thing, which I’ll be able to take to school on Mondays and Wednesdays. It will help me stay awake in class.

Oh, I also got Dr. Robert Epstein’s The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen from my university’s library (I had them order it). If you look at the reviews on Amazon, you’ll see the reviewers tend to either love it (5 stars) or hate it (1 star). I’m only about 40 pages into it, but I think I’ll be on the love side. (Though most of the bad reviews seem to have something to do with one point the author makes about corporal punishment… they are probably completely missing the point of the book, but I haven’t reached that part in the book yet.) I couldn’t agree more with some of the negative opinions mentioned about the modern schooling system.

One thing you might not even think about, especially when actually going to elementary school, is how students are split up for the most part entirely by age, and that determines your curriculum for a year. Does that really make any sense? Does it come from an attempt to make the dumb kids not so jealous of the smarter ones? While I can imagine that could be a real issue in education, I don’t think making the smarter children suffer for it is a good idea. (And, for the record, I do not really believe “slow learner = dumb”.)

Who decides on the curriculum anyway? A vast majority of what is taught remains unused and is forgotten, making the teaching of it a waste of time. Why do so many dedicate their lives to continuing the cycle without question? Jay Leno likes to go around and make fools of people who do not know trivial facts, but, besides some politics related trivia, do the answers really matter? I might be considered an idiot if I didn’t know what photosynthesis was, but knowing it doesn’t really gain me anything. A student’s interest should guide their curriculum to a greater extent, but first ending useless curriculum material is a greater priority. There is no such thing as learning for the sake of learning. Learning for the sake of interest, yes. Nobody goes around reading everything they get their hands on, it would be impossible. Instead, what we choose to read is guided by our interests. I know adults might be scared that without a school and busy work, children would just watch TV all the time, but if their interests are supported, I think most students would be quite motivated to learn and work quite a lot.

“I like to see their eyes light up when they finally figure something out,” said a teacher once upon a time. This reason is inappropriate for becoming a teacher. The subject of what you’re teaching should be more important then how students look at you.

“This plays DVDs really slow… it keeps having to buffer.”
“You mean you have to be connected to the Internet everytime you want to watch a DVD?!”

As I was driving to weekly time-wasting (college), I heard some excellent music on the classical radio (the less art your kids get, the more it shows) so when I got to my university I looked up the radio’s playlist and discovered the music I enjoyed so much was Respeghi’s 2nd “Ancient Airs and Dances” Suite for orchestra. Seems the old composer stole, I mean used old lute melodies and orchestrated them for an orchestra. The end results sound wonderful, especially that last movement of Suite No 2. I was able to check out the album from my university’s library, one of the only good things about being at a university.

In other news, one of my old high school English teachers had his book published! According to the school’s website, the book is being published by PublishAmerica! A vanity press… I am afraid that is not exactly much of an achievement… their website excited me a couple years ago, but after a bit of research one can see it’s a very misleading company. Be warned! Now, that doesn’t mean the company is necessarily bad if you know what you’re getting into. PublishAmerica will publish just about anyone, despite what their website may say, so don’t feel too accomplished if they accept your novel. And they’re probably not going to really edit it like a real publishing company would. They will not spend any money to promote your book either, other than listing it on its website, so you, the author, will have to do all the marketing yourself… so it’s basically a lot like self-publishing.

Last time I looked into it (about 1.5 years ago or so, maybe things have changed) the company would publish your book free of charge, but request that you tell friends and family members about your book so they could buy it. It was then their money that truly paid for the print-on-demand publishing. If you really got published by a real publishing company, you’d get free copies to hand out to loved ones.

So… hopefully my old English teacher didn’t get tricked (maybe it’s a different “publishamerica”?) and for now I’ll spare this blog a rant about how useless and wasteful high school English classes is… er… are. But someday…

Anyway, check out Writer Beware for all your publishing warning needs. And Google “PublishAmerica hoax” for more warning tales.

I’m still working on my fantasy novel, I’ll have an update about that tomorrow… or the next day.

I finished reading Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes today. (Took me long enough, it was quite an easy read.) I love Bradbury’s style and the plot itself was great, fantastical, and memorable, but in the eternal words of a cartoon George Lucas “he didn’t really capture Something Wicked… the way I would have.” As I said, the book was a quick read, but I think it might have been better if it were a slower read… I mean, if there were more details, more delicious style to savor, more insight into what the characters are thinking and what they’re going through and what they choose and how they change. Then again, it really wouldn’t match Bradbury’s rhetoric style to do such a thing, but still, the book conjures ideas for stories in my mind with similar themes yet a much different handling of them. In the end, it’s certainly one of the better books I’ve read this year.

I randomly chose my next book: Eyes of Silver by Michael A. Stackpole. This does not look like it will be a quick read at all, at least not for slow-reading me. It’s 450 pages with small text and thin pages. I’m almost through with the prologue and I’m already confused… too many names and history and information… isn’t Stackpole supposed to be against prologues?

Oh well, bit by bit, putting it together, only way to make a work of art…

I recently asked my university’s library to order this book called The Case Against Adolescence: Rediscovering the Adult in Every Teen by Dr. Robert Epstein. (I recently blogged about an article featuring his ideas in “Stuff I Found”.) The book looks very interesting, especially since it seems to echo, in some respects, arguments I’ve made earlier somewhere in this blog about the uselessness of the teenage education system.

Speaking about useless education systems, I’m taking a required computer science course this semester having to do with computer architecture in which we learn how a processor and such process instructions, such as assembly instructions. This course is a perfect example of a complete and utter waste of my time. If there’s a job out there that requires this sort of knowledge, I don’t want it. There is no good reason for this course to be required, many of us CS majors will get along fine without it for the rest of our lives. There is no good purpose for making this course a requirement. This, like many other courses, are a complete waste of my time and tuition! But it’s not just the universities that I think are to blame, it’s the industry… the companies who hire graduates with a BS in computer science. Instead of searching for actual signs of a skill in something, they seem to put more emphasis on a piece of paper representing that you got a C or better in a bunch of courses.

The professor went around the room of and asked each of us why were in the course. Some students were genuinely interested in the subject… good for them, somebody’s gotta carry on doing this nitty-gritty work in the future! Some students seemed to fake answers to please the professor. I, like about a third or a fourth of the class, was honest and said I was there because it was a required course. The professor didn’t seem very pleased, I’m sure he’d rather be teaching students who cared a bit more. Oh well.

To continue ranting…

I once asked in a game programming forum which was more important, a degree or a portfolio? Obviously a portfolio should be more important, but employers for some reason don’t always agree. According to this website:

the asker is showing his laziness, trying to find a way to get out of having to have both a portfolio and a degree. And the asker has the naïve belief that there is a cut-and-dried preference for one over the other. Life just ain’t that simple!

Not doing something that is not needed is not laziness. But unfortunately the answerer is correct in that there is no cut-and-dried preference… but there should be, and it’s employers’ fault that there’s not and it’s because of them I’m stuck in some boring class wasting my time and energy. Life is very simple, it’s just not easy.

Why are so many people so scared to admit that most of the stuff learned in high school and college is useless? I feel like I’m countering the evil of Ayn Rand’s “secondhanders” … I guess because I am.

Maybe it has to do with red hair.

Last night I was happily working on my computer. I had heard earlier on the radio that a severe thunderstorm was on its way. The sky looked fine to me, so what did I care? Then, a couple hours later… zzzzt. My computer flickers and restarts and I lose most of what I’m working. Two seconds later thunder crashes in the distant mountains. (Okay, actually there are no mountains near here, and the thunder wasn’t distant.) So I shut my computer down and sadly call it a night. How am I supposed to get any work done if these stupid thunderstorms keep coming? I only blog this becuse I just heard thunder rumble in the distant mountains and if it gets closer my computer’s power will get farther away (because I’ll unplug it). I was relieved when the power flickered and restarted my computer yesterday that it didn’t wipe its memory or blow it up.

Tomorrow is the first day of college and I’m commuting from home, woohoo!

Oh, and please don’t believe wrong things about the Coriolis force.