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Drinkable Languages Offered At LA Time-Travel Mart
An anonymous reader writes "Via the sci-fi blog io9 comes a fantastic project that not only has a great premise but backs a great cause. The San Francisco writing center called 826 Valencia works to teach kids passion for the written word. The program really works, and has expanded to other cities across the country in an effort to get more young people writing. To fund these outreach programs, the organization has opened some ... unique businesses in their new locales. The LA chapter, for example, features a Time Travel mart. The imaginative place features dozens of products like Robot Milk, Viking Oderant, and Olde Fashioned English Gunpowder. Other centers around the country offer similar themed experiences, like the NYC Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co. or Seattle's Greenwood Space Travel Supply Corporation."
I would have loved a place like that as a kid. The anti-robot fluid made me laugh.
Whoever made all those -- those people are creative geniuses and deserve applause.
With all due respect to the moderators and not withstanding above AC's lack of tact -- that article really is fucking drivel.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
anyway, this is actually a pretty good idea- the current educational system tends to destroy any interest in writing/math/the sciences so perhaps this will spark some interest where there was none before.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
This is actually not too far off from my experience. I went to the military language school in California, and all the people in the various languages would struggle the whole 6 months to a year or whatever the requirement for that language was. Put a few drinks in them though and they would lose all that fear, and their minds would "clear" up allowing the language barrier to fall. Towards the end of the course, people would be able to speak fluently and without hesitation sometimes!
Hell if I know. All I know is that it's a lot of wasted effort to "get kids to read".
You know how you get kids to read? You start reading to them when they're very young. Then they'll want to start reading on their own. And if your home is full of books and the adults in it are always reading, the kids will naturally tend to have a passion for it as well.
Otherwise... I don't know... send them to a vocational school so they can clean pools or something.
The individual sentences are coherent enough. It's just when you put them all together that the English language goes to hell. Part A: They started a program to get kids to read. Part B: People opened weird stores selling Robot Turds and Ye Olde Fashioned Internal Combustion Engines. What Part A has to do with Part B, I don't know. I get the feeling RTFAing won't make the answer much clearer either.
Sig unrelated.