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high school life

Gimme a break… Gimme a break….

And so I have received, and am loving it.
It’s kind of odd. School is out for a week, and the best thing I can/do do is study for AD and practice tuba. School is supposed to be the motivation to work, the motivation to study, and yet, I find more motivation when not in school to be working on stuff. Odd? Yes. Surprising? No.
We had a discussion about the education system during a Shellum discussion (yes, she had a minor “society sucks” rant), and it was interesting to actually talk to/with a teacher about the various failures of education. Usually that’s just students bitching around lunch, but apparently these sentiments reach a bit further than that.
It’s sad to see the anti-motivation of school. Instead of extending myself into a CS project, spending more time on AD, or practicing tuba more, I spend 8 hrs sitting in classrooms, enduring the distinctly uninspiring experience presented by my teachers and environment. Even in a great as class as Ferland’s, we sit around learning how to plug numbers into an equation. It’s algebra 1 word problems. In history, we get the wonderful experience of learning about American politics. Not so much is the focus on their way of life and society, but how the past war or social conflict affected the outcome of the next election. Instead of our teachers empowering us to go out and learn ourselves, we do (or don’t) it because we know that all it really means is a grade. We’re not that interested in what we’re doing; we care only for the glimmer of hope that our sufferings now will result in a more fufilling experience later.
All this would be fine if it didn’t have to happen. If we couldn’t learn more applicable things, if we couldn’t learn about things that we cared about for its own sake, it would be more endurable. So sad that it doesn’t work that way. Our education system is simply too fixated on teaching us things, not motivating us to learn things.
So the holiday season is kicking off, with stores getting ready for the shopping, decorations coming up, and launchcast playing the holiday tunes with greater frequency. It’s funny how much you can read of our society by our holiday seasons. A few years ago, all the rage was the tickle-me-elmo, an overpriced toy that brought an extremely limited time of enjoyment. Today: xbox 360. (and yes, I do think it’s part of microsoft’s scheme to destroy pc gaming)
Video games have made huge headway over the past couple years, to where people will line up a day in advance to buy a known overpriced device with only limited application. Just another “toy” that makes minor improvement over past devices of similar design, and yet will create the uproar of underproduction.
Perhaps it isn’t so revolutionary.
But I guess if they want to waste their money that way, who am I to stop them?

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