The article 8 Awesome Cases of Internet Vigilantism is from www.cracked.com, written by Ian Fortey. If you have time, read it.
Make the links, and dream.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Thursday, April 16, 2009
What if schoolweeks were shorter...?
...say, only two days long?
While many other schools, public and private have just opted to give an entire week off, CSMB and CSL have decided to keep the movable ped days firmly anchored to pointless random days of the year and give us a taste of a two day week instead. Either to taunt us (like the completely iced-up school yard in winter featured at the end of the linked article) or to prove a point that we're harder workers or some equally weird crap, it's anybody's guess. It's an extreme headscratcher, especially when you factor in the fact that the school knew that many people are on trips now anyways and most classes can't learn anything new until they come back. It's like going on a camping trip and forgetting the tent, or preparing food for twenty people and have only two show up.
If you feel that this is going to be part of the "whining and complaining" category as the school could have given us no days off as opposed to 3, you're absolutely right. Face it, humans excel at doing two things: making mistakes and complaining. That's what got us this far. So gear up and prepare to endure some more. I excel at fucking up and complaining.
What if all our "workweek" were only 2 or 3 days long, Pok Kai asks. Well...it's actually an idea worthy to be considered. Considering that 25% to 50% of our days at school are spent doing nothing (as in chatting, throwing stuff, recesses, sleeping, evacuating waste, etc.) Why not reduce that and compress it into 2 days? Another issue making this plausible is the notion of all those 'secondary' classes , aka, ethics, gym, art, his, that are not super important, and with the amazing amount of interchangeable competencies/disciplines (also referred to as 'making links' or 'extraneous bullshit to add difficulty'), we could integrate all of that into the 'primary' classes, aka language, math and sci and get away with it anyways. So we'll all be more efficient and still leave time for more interesting stuff. Imagine mixing math with gym, sci with ethics, language and history and well, art , we may need a separate class for that. Believe it or not, depending on your teacher, we are already doing quite a lot of this on a daily basis. Chamby does it with his humorous and pessimistic approaches to science and life, french class, with constant, bleak and repetitive reminders of the history of France, New France and the French language and the infertility of quebeckers, English class with general life etiquette, gym, with lessons about [Fiorito] democracy, and ethics with the big load of philosophy the Next Gen Teacher is entertaining us with.
By the way, the NGT is still busy at it at our school, substituting teachers in numerous subjects and spreading words of wisdom, philosophical bullshit, computer game examples, and the effectiveness of wikipedia, youtube and twitter. It's a stunning contrast when you get him in English class, or in ethics instead of the usual teacher. It's eye-opening.
BEHOLD! THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION! [Pity, by then you will be out of school huh?]
While many other schools, public and private have just opted to give an entire week off, CSMB and CSL have decided to keep the movable ped days firmly anchored to pointless random days of the year and give us a taste of a two day week instead. Either to taunt us (like the completely iced-up school yard in winter featured at the end of the linked article) or to prove a point that we're harder workers or some equally weird crap, it's anybody's guess. It's an extreme headscratcher, especially when you factor in the fact that the school knew that many people are on trips now anyways and most classes can't learn anything new until they come back. It's like going on a camping trip and forgetting the tent, or preparing food for twenty people and have only two show up.
If you feel that this is going to be part of the "whining and complaining" category as the school could have given us no days off as opposed to 3, you're absolutely right. Face it, humans excel at doing two things: making mistakes and complaining. That's what got us this far. So gear up and prepare to endure some more. I excel at fucking up and complaining.
What if all our "workweek" were only 2 or 3 days long, Pok Kai asks. Well...it's actually an idea worthy to be considered. Considering that 25% to 50% of our days at school are spent doing nothing (as in chatting, throwing stuff, recesses, sleeping, evacuating waste, etc.) Why not reduce that and compress it into 2 days? Another issue making this plausible is the notion of all those 'secondary' classes , aka, ethics, gym, art, his, that are not super important, and with the amazing amount of interchangeable competencies/disciplines (also referred to as 'making links' or 'extraneous bullshit to add difficulty'), we could integrate all of that into the 'primary' classes, aka language, math and sci and get away with it anyways. So we'll all be more efficient and still leave time for more interesting stuff. Imagine mixing math with gym, sci with ethics, language and history and well, art , we may need a separate class for that. Believe it or not, depending on your teacher, we are already doing quite a lot of this on a daily basis. Chamby does it with his humorous and pessimistic approaches to science and life, french class, with constant, bleak and repetitive reminders of the history of France, New France and the French language and the infertility of quebeckers, English class with general life etiquette, gym, with lessons about [Fiorito] democracy, and ethics with the big load of philosophy the Next Gen Teacher is entertaining us with.
By the way, the NGT is still busy at it at our school, substituting teachers in numerous subjects and spreading words of wisdom, philosophical bullshit, computer game examples, and the effectiveness of wikipedia, youtube and twitter. It's a stunning contrast when you get him in English class, or in ethics instead of the usual teacher. It's eye-opening.
BEHOLD! THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION! [Pity, by then you will be out of school huh?]
Monday, April 13, 2009
Sexiness of technology
With the only special thing today being the return of Prick, [Welcome back, by the way] the subjects waiting in line on the right are finally being...processed. [into cheap, high fat meat loaf]
Technology is sexy. Still, perhaps learning to prioritize is something CSL should learn. You buy food, medicine, and pay your bills all BEFORE you head out to Futureshop and buy that 300$ ipod touch, huh? Everybody knows that! Except, you guessed it, the school!
Every year, everybody—staff and students —whine like whupped puppies about how our budget is freaking low, and that we're a public school low on the CSMB attention list, and that we're not a neighborhood school blablabla, in short, excuses galore. Every year, most parents will dish out an extra 50$ to the 'fondation CSL'. But as everybody knows, money at CSL suffers from ice disorder. (It disappears faster than ice in a sauna) Although this is slightly untrue now, as the 'fondation CSL' has supplied us with between 64 new chairs and 64 new desks (give or take a few), we still wonder, as perplexed as children stumbling on our parents in the middle of the act of love, why in the freaking world is there a goddamn 20000$, high tech, tactile projector thingymajig hanging on the wall of a sec 3 math classroom!? Aside from the obvious question of WTF did the wacky, mentally unstable sec 3s do to deserve that, why was the money spent there? It was definitely not on the very long wishlist of things CSL would like to acquire some way or other at last check.
It could have been spent on more pressing things that would benefit everybody, such as: (by priority, no less!)
It seems like the sec 3s whine a little about the amount of homework, petition, scream, and jump out of windows, and they immediately get a 20,000$ new toy complete with sound effects to encourage them to no longer whine/petition/scream/jump out of windows. One can imagine the nauseating, canned, "Good job, you did it!" they hear when they complete a task.
Even with the 20,000$, ahem, investment, (definition here), they still do everything mentioned above except for jumping out of windows.
Weekly Double:
England doesn't have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
The magician got so mad he pulled his hare out.
Technology is sexy. Still, perhaps learning to prioritize is something CSL should learn. You buy food, medicine, and pay your bills all BEFORE you head out to Futureshop and buy that 300$ ipod touch, huh? Everybody knows that! Except, you guessed it, the school!
Every year, everybody—staff and students —whine like whupped puppies about how our budget is freaking low, and that we're a public school low on the CSMB attention list, and that we're not a neighborhood school blablabla, in short, excuses galore. Every year, most parents will dish out an extra 50$ to the 'fondation CSL'. But as everybody knows, money at CSL suffers from ice disorder. (It disappears faster than ice in a sauna) Although this is slightly untrue now, as the 'fondation CSL' has supplied us with between 64 new chairs and 64 new desks (give or take a few), we still wonder, as perplexed as children stumbling on our parents in the middle of the act of love, why in the freaking world is there a goddamn 20000$, high tech, tactile projector thingymajig hanging on the wall of a sec 3 math classroom!? Aside from the obvious question of WTF did the wacky, mentally unstable sec 3s do to deserve that, why was the money spent there? It was definitely not on the very long wishlist of things CSL would like to acquire some way or other at last check.
It could have been spent on more pressing things that would benefit everybody, such as: (by priority, no less!)
- fixing/renovating the bathrooms
- new chairs
- new desks
- proper heating controls in classrooms
- projectors in classrooms
- dry boards instead of blackboards and chalk
- new computers
- Getting rid of the previous school's emblem embedded in the marble floor
It seems like the sec 3s whine a little about the amount of homework, petition, scream, and jump out of windows, and they immediately get a 20,000$ new toy complete with sound effects to encourage them to no longer whine/petition/scream/jump out of windows. One can imagine the nauseating, canned, "Good job, you did it!" they hear when they complete a task.
Even with the 20,000$, ahem, investment, (definition here), they still do everything mentioned above except for jumping out of windows.
Weekly Double:
England doesn't have a kidney bank, but it does have a Liverpool.
The magician got so mad he pulled his hare out.
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