Learning for the Future

In preparing students for the twenty-first century we need to educate them in certain ways. Skills in certain areas will be necessary because of recent advances in technology, for example, the human race will need to accept that computers and robots may do our jobs better than we do. In other words we must learn humility. Other skills will become the norm as well, for example it will be necessary in day-to-day life to have basic programming skills in all the major languages, we will also need to be able to service the hardware side of things too.

I believe this video is the newest version, correct me if I’m wrong. It was originally made by Karl Fisch (see his blog at The Fischbowl) for a presentation on how his high school should be teaching kids. It has been remade so many times it’s not even worth mentioning who else helped.

I’ve always loved this kind of video – words that shock you along with some quiet music. This goes along with someone talking made into animations, such as Alan Watt’s videos. This was actually assigned to be watched, which is progress in our school system, however it was also assigned that we fill out a sheet and analyze the video, which totally ruined all the progress. The writing in the top paragraph is actually one answer of what I’m handing in! Even this is a connection to the video. If the right steps are made soon all classes will be on computers, and, even further along, blogs, which is why I like including my homework into something I consider fun.

This video makes me think. If a laptop available in 2049 will surpass the combined technological power of the human race put together, than what are we left to do? As much as anybody I wouldn’t like an “I, Robot” situation however this may be for the better. I choose to see these advances as an opportunity; with all the “menial” (think open heart surgery) jobs out of the way our kind will have all the time we need to express ourselves in ways we can’t program computers to; such as the arts. Think about it.

Tip II coming soon.

Tip I

Alright, I was a bit tired when I wrote my last post, so I failed to reveal that I was to include tips about school life. And thus, tired again, I will do my best to write the first.

Tip I:

Don’t be too prepared.

Having recently spent a day at Walmart (among other places, thank god), I should know that preparing is hard. It can be a bit fun, fighting the crowds, sifting through the piles of stuff, squeezing into tight places to let that obnoxious person past to the checkout lane… But enough is too much. Get in, get out, and try to do it early. Later they may give you back to school prices, but they will wear you and your patience out very quickly.

After the ride home look at your items. Consider how much stuff you have. You’re not going to want more than one binder per class, so if you have too many discard or save them. Notebooks are essential for some classes but not others, find out from your teacher or maybe a friend. Pencils and maybe pens are obviously a must, but erasers are usually not necessary, the pencil ones will suffice. Your teacher may have recommended a calculator, even if this is not a requirement it is a very good idea for math classes. I suggest the TI-84, be it plus, silver, plus silver edition, or something else I have not yet heard of, it works very well for anything up to and even past college and the investment might as well be made now. Other than that accessories such as post-its and pencil sharpeners are surplus and not recommended by me, because they become clutter.

These are my main recommendations for materials for the beginning of the school year. I will take no responsibility if anyone gets in trouble their first day because of these, I am not forcing you to use these guidelines, merely suggesting. It’s rather ironic that as I type I am in my first day of high school, right before lunch, but this underlines my point that I do have experience and so am not a total dimwit when it comes to school preparation. It’s debateable as to whether this applies to blogging, but anyway… Try to enjoy or at least get through without mishap your first day at school.

A Perfect Way To Start My Day

I know that I have not been very vigilant in keeping up the number of posts on Betaphor. As a solution, however short they may be, I have decided that as soon as I get up in the morning, I will try to write. This hopefully will help.

8 Random Facts

Thanks for tagging me with a new meme, Arthus! I’ll gladly respond. Firstly, the rules, which will explain to you why I’m even listing them.

• Players start with 8 random facts about themselves.
• Those who are tagged should post these rules and their 8 random facts.
• Players should tag eight other people and notify them that they have been tagged.

Now for the actual facts:

1. I have four iPods. Technically, one of them belongs to my mother and isn’t really an iPod, and one belongs to my dad’s company and it’s really old, but I myself own a blue 4G mini and a silver 2G nano. In other words, I don’t really have a useful iPod.
2. I like being sick. This is, some would say, an unusual trait, but not so if you look at it. Going to school and learning while almost falling asleep because you are so bored versus staying home, eating popsicles and other sweet, aqueous solutions, watching many hours of TV and countless movies, and almost falling asleep because you are so tired. Which one do you think wins? This comes with a long list of unusual physical traits, one other related one being that I love being tired. You know how you read in fiction many times that a character is too tired to go on? I have never experienced this until I was sick recently, and tried to get off the couch and go upstairs. I couldn’t do it because I was so tired, my muscles were literally not in my control. It was pretty cool to me (and you thought you were weird).
3. I have never read the LOTR series (thought I’ve seen the movies), 1984, Big Wide World (or whatever you said it was, Arthus), Fahrenheit 451, and many other books that Arthus considers good literature, and I consider crap, mainly because he says they’re classics. Correct me if I’m wrong, but books that are supposedly oldies-but-goodies and are a staple of high school education are pretty boring, especially to people at my age. I’ll try them anyway, though.
4. Just like Arthus, “I live in a small, rural town nestled in the foothills of the Green Mountains. My previous school has about 400 students and the one I will be attending has about 1,400 students.” Sorry, had to include that.
5. My computer usage is timed; I’m not even supposed to be writing this. Though I suppose writing is a bit different than gaming, I only get and hour and a half a day. However, as we all know the practice of parental figures limiting something only succeeds in raising an addict, therefor I savor all the time I can get and some that I can’t (or at least am not supposed to). I have gotten in trouble at school many a time for gaming and will many a time in the future, and am proud of it.
6. I am currently running a mass produced eMac with a (*pauses to click “About This Mac”*) 800 MHz PPC processor and 1 GB of ram. Yes, yes, pity me. Do it now! However, I’m not as rich as Arthus, so I plan to get a nice new Macbook at the end of high school.
7. I carry an ongoing belief that one IS prime. I will not believe otherwise (my math grades in certain units are very fine examples of this) until someone gives me one good reason why. If you want to try your hand keyboard at it, go ahead.
8. I am stubborn to a fault. I nearly killed myself one fine summer morning in preschool when I insisted on eating a berry (which was conveniently placed in the playground of a preschool… someone is pretty smart over there) which I thought was a blueberry and my mother later found out was poisonous. I got a good reprimanding and a bad stomachache, even after she made me spit it out.

I don’t know any bloggers, so I’ll have to talk to Arthus about reading some good blogs and getting acquainted. Instead, why don’t you comment if you read this? Then I’ll know who you are, and will gladly tag you.

Summertime has come!

This will only be a short post because I am doing many things in the summer, including being bored, reading, being bored, biking, swimming, being bored, reading some more, using the computer, being lazy, being bored, and sleeping. With the occasional burst of eating every now and then.

Other than that, well, it’s pretty much obvious that school is now out, therefor summer has started in the minds of most non-insane people, however, the calendar says that summer starts June 21st, or something like that… So, even with legal technicalities, summer has started.

Have a good one!

More Writing

I haven’t posted in a while, and it seems like Arthus’ writing section stimulates me, because once again I have seen it and chosen to post a piece of writing. Again I am doing a poem. Please forgive me if it is a bit sappy and way too hormone influenced. (only arthus understands the title and it’s classified information so sorry for any confusion)

Frodo

I see her walking by
And my heart pounds
In a metaphorical sense, of course
I don’t see the use in talking to her (I would just make myself a fool more)
Except for the occasional comment
I watch from a distance
I am no stalker, just a teenager
I chat once in a while
And that’s okay with me
I don’t really want anything to happen
People offer me help, to get to know her
But I am okay where I am now, watching
I decline.
I listen to my techno music while thinking
Should I do anything?
I know that is is only a “puppy love” situation
But I also know that I like her
In most songs I hear
They talk of love
It is a touchy thing, and all of them get it wrong
All of us can feel it
But never describe it
I cannot describe it either.
All we can do is try to explain how we feel
And mess it up and try and try again
Nobody really understands how it feels for any person other than themselves
And we know this
We all know this
So why am I even trying?
I know nothing will ever happen with us, except maybe a dance or two, because I am just a stupid teenager in this gigantic planet full of them. I am just a stupid geek, damn it, I’m typing this on my blog on the internet, but still…
So I sit back in the chair and think some more.

I don’t like or dislike writing any more (I used to hate it), and it makes me feel strange, especially poetry on touchy subjects. I hope I will gather my courage and ask Frodo to dance after graduation, but I doubt I ever will. But I think we all have and have had our middle school (so sue me if I haven’t had a crush yet, I’m a nerd) crushes, and like it that way.

Mac Ad Spoofs

Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Thus…

Three political ones which aren’t so good:

And one okay one. The sound is pretty crappy but whatever… Note: most information provided by this guy is COMPLETELY false. In fact, I’m wondering if anything he says is true (besides the all-mighty task bar up top).

And many more.

Any harm caused by laughter from the showing of these spoofs is totally justified.

Quizlet

What do you do when it’s 1:37 A.M. the morning of that big Spanish test and you don’t know any of the vocabulary?

You go to Quizlet of course!

Quizlet is the online version of flash cards created by Andrew Sutherland who…

started Quizlet in October 2005. I had just received a list of 111 French Animals to memorize from my magnanimous French teacher. I was puttering along with my dad with some call-and-response type quizzing. “Man, I love doing this” was NOT what I was thinking. So I put my thinking cap on, and the first line of code for Quizlet was written that night.

There you have it. I’ve tried it; it’s pretty fun for a homework help site.

From past experiences, I know that I shouldn’t try to go too in-depth on any subject; it hurts my brain and bores the hell out of most people. But try it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean when I say that Quizlet is the future in vocab memorization.

Some links:

• Brainflare, the company Andrew started to support Quizlet.
• A press release for Quizlet/Brainflare.
• Quizlet (…)

Joost

I have several unfinished posts just waiting for me to polish them up for the public, but for now…

(slightly dampened by the fact that IT DOESN’T WORK FOR DREKKING PPCS)

I’m not going to say a word more…

Beliefs

Sorry about not posting for so long, it’s just that I like being able to just relax of weekends, vacations, snow days, and just whenever I get time to myself.

Anyway, as I said in the previous post, I am going to tell you more about me being agnostic, and also just my whole belief system. This seemed a particularly good time to do it, as we are now studying world cultures in Social Studies and Language Arts, and today we even put down our belief systems down on paper and shared them with the class. This is what I put down (there were supposed to be 20, but I haven’t gotten that many and our teacher hasn’t graded them yet so I should be all right).

1. Luck Bank: This means that I believe that there is a theoretical luck bank somewhere and every time you get lucky your balance suffers. I feel that since I believe my luck to be very bad, I must have used up most of my luck early in life.
2. Life’s unfair.
3. Irresponsible until needed: This means that I believe that I can be irresponsible until I really need to be responsible, such as my room’s cleanliness. I don’t clean it until it really needs to be cleaned, then I go into a cleaning frenzy at about 11 p.m.
4. Existentialism philosophy is scary but true.
5. Bigger vocab means less hassle: This means that I believe that you cannot be hassled, teased, or bullied verbally if your vocab is big. You just dance verbal circles around them.
6. Use it up/wear it out/make it do/or do without.
7. Innocent until proven guilty. (why would I want that? *whistles*)
8. Computers are life: This is literally true at this point on the timeline.
9. A picture’s worth a thousand words, but a song’s worth ten thousand pictures.
10. My karma ran over my dogma.
11. Everything in moderation. Including moderation.
12. Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day, but teach a man to fish and he’ll feed his village forever.
13. Dictionaries are worthless if the definitions only lead you to looking up other words: This came from when I looked up dogma. The definition was something like “A corpus of doctrines set forth by a religion.” Real helpful.
14. It’s all fun and games until someone loses an eye, then it’s hilarious: This was originally “loses a weiner,” but without the picture, it’s a bit strange, and besides, eye works just as well.

Well, that’s my belief list. Like it?