On my mind archive
 
 

Oh blah de, oh blah dah Well, let's see. It's Christmas Break! Yeah! Whoppeee! Of course, I have all sorts of work to do over this break, so it's not going to be the very epitome of happiness. Alas. Did you know that the only day the Smithsonian is closed in Christmas? So much for separation of church and state. I mean, that's pretty blatant endorsement of religion, which would seem to violate the establishment clause. Seriously - is it closed for Hannukah? Nope. It's not even closed on the Fourth of July, the one holiday that all Americans should expect to participate in.

Yeah! Our team made it to the ThinkQuest finals. I was sort of worried because our entry wasn't as unique as last year's, although it still did lots of good things. I'm really looking forward to my trip East becasue I can also check out some of the colleges I'm applying to. However, I'm not here to talk about that so much as to talk about a neat page I ran across. One of the other finalist teams apparently went through all of the other finalist teams' sites and emailed the creators. Anyway, I checked out their page and loved it. When you get right down to it, we don't how people in other countries live, even with the power of the Internet to make such information easily shared. What little knowledge we get is filtered through culture textbooks or the media. This site attempts to rectify the situation by letting users post information about their country. It's a cool site, but one that most certainly requires feedback. So I encourage you, especially if you are from outside the US to visit and contribute. Right now, there is stuff in the Japan, Norway, US, UK and Australia sections. Of course, it wouldn't hurt to contribute to my team's entry either, especially the really intriguing difficult situations poll on the camps page.

I watched the much-hyped live ER episode, followed by a live report on the local news from Burbank about the taping of the show. Earlier that evening, I had watched the live news reports from the location of a fire, with an introductory graphic touting that the reporter was not just live, but live via satellite. Sadly, the fact that something is live seems to be endowed with additional value, another tragic symptom of society that builds technology and then finds ways to apply it, instead of starting with problems that genuinely require solution. By way of analogy, I can't help but think of building a better mousetrap on a sinking ship. If things that are live become endowed with more and more virtue, then is literature dead? Do carefully crafted and edited works lack value in comparison to spontaneity, or can a dynamic equilibrium be found? I admit I get an extra thrill when a show actually graces the west coast with a truly live version instead of the typical live on tape. I admit that I prefer chatting with my buddies in college to writing them email, even if the pace of a chat is slower and more mundane. Still, I don't think adrenaline is a substitute for substance.

I went to see a speaker called Alan November. Apparently, our illustrious school district laid out some good money to have him speak to us, and here are some random thoughts on it all. I still haven't completely made up my mind as to what I think of his content. The speech was pretty entertaining, but it seems like it was a bit short on practicality and short-term application beyond many things that are already intuitive. His ideas of informating instead of automating made sense, and certainly computers are misapplied in schools. However, there is no easy way to work in realtime and revolutionize the classroom. This sort of paradigm shift would need to occur first at the regulatory level that keeps all schools within limits. Also, our schools cannot afford new technology when there aren't even enough classrooms to put students in. If schools are given free reign, instead of modernized regulation, it will undermine the assurance of equitable education, and therefore it is necessary that some decisions be made. Beyond this, his approach of speeding up our lives, increasing risk, and being innundated with information is certainly somewhat troubling. There is definite merit to learning at one's pace, but there is also some worth to lecturing. Teachers do need to be more in touch with one another and with their students, as he pointed out. As much as Alan did his best to equivocate or play on emotion and inherent uncertainty in response to questions, it seemed that for all the money he is given to think, he could come up with some better answers. Also, his belief that adding impact to students' work will motivate them more I find flawed. Sometimes it is better, after all, to learn in a vacuum. At the same time, doing labs that just prove something we already know to be true is pretty stupid. Schools are amazing agents for social change, and they should be utilized as such, instead of operating in response to the impersonal trends of the business world. It was troubling that the books he cited as showing the end of the standard job also predicted a future of eighty percent unemployment. Bleak pictures of the future, to be sure.

Forced to go through that orgasmic wonder that is the college admissions process, I feel obligated to share my resounding joy with any random passers by.  It's sickening how much influence a few sheets of paper hold.  People on soc.college.admissions are actually agonizing over whether it is preferable to use ink or typewriter.  And there is even a company that will write your college essays for you, ironically named Personal Best.  Meanwhile, people waste hundreds of dollars just so they can learn a bunch of words they probably will never use or math that they may never need to do better on the SAT.  The enigmatic process long ago ceased to be a measure of student merit, and is now an arbitrary mind game.   Colleges should revaluate their methods of selection, and U.S. News should rethink the way it ranks schools. 

Along the same lines, it seems to me that educated class is a self-perpetuating autocracy, not unlike the one in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  In order to do well in the admissions process, it is more than a slight advantage to be able to take classes to improve your SAT scores, have a computer to do your work for AP classes, or be wealthy enough to afford to go to tournaments with whatever extracirricular you have chosen.  Affirmative action attempts to relive this barrier, but the simple fact remains is that not all people are being educated equally under our school system.  This is why there ought to be school vouchers as well as single comprehensive testing program to locate problem schools or teachers and ensure that students are at least given access to as much learning as much as their peers.