Look, I know the structure is off 'cause there aren't any transitions, but the original essay didn't have many of them either. I also can't mimic her style well enough to write the transitions for her. Though hell, I admit the whole "improved essay" (and dude, even I don't consider it better so much as shorter and still retaining the most important info) was trollish.
They are good when they amplify a high base score, but useless on their own.
That's the key to what Strunk and White were saying, that every word, sentence, etc. needs to have a function in the overall tale. Colorful words are great when they add nuance and flavor, but sometimes it devolves into filler. Most of this girl's essay was pure mood setting, which she didn't need 'cause that's not the story she's really telling. Since this is an MIT essay for an engineering spot, they essay could reduce down to:
My world is eight friends in a bed meant for two, the hidden tunnels of the mall, and semi-weekly trips to ogle gadgets at Best Buy. Widespread panic for Y2K made my father teach me more about system security than I ever wanted to know at the age of ten. I drooled the first time I saw a real G5, and put together my first circuit board when I was seven. The county fair gave me an addiction to funnel cake, the college nearby gave me my first look at a real milling machine, parties at my house gave me Dr. Pepper stains over a large percentage of my clothes, my neighborâ(TM)s dog gave me a hatred of anything smaller than a mailbox that can bark, and my introduction to broadband began a love affair with the world that has yet to die.
As fuzzy logic becomes more and more obsolete (in humans, at least), boolean values have come to rule all. Precision, accuracy, the Styrofoam cup holding your coffee, and the microprocessor in your toaster oven are all a product of infinitely many zeros and ones, a concept I find both irresistibly ridiculous and intriguing.Barring world disaster or a dramatic cult revival, technology is my future.
There's still tons of personality 'cause of her writing style and the great personal details, but all that detail isn't lost in generic reminiscence of suburban/rural living. This is 210 words and could easily be edited down further.
It is for the type of questions these essays are usually supposed to answer. I remember the 124/250 word shorts MIT required back when I applied (didn't get in, but because of grades) being perfectly reasonable. I'm a massive cheerleader for more writing in engineering (I'm a writing tutor/computer engineering student who constantly tells science/engineering kids why the skills they're picking up in an assignment will be useful later), but I thought the girl's critique (and essay) was a perfect example of the kind of pretentious purple prose that nobody, least of all engineers, needs practice in. Short answers force students to get to the point and be careful with their syntax and sentence structure, which are writing valuable skills for engineers and sciences. Good writers can be just as good with 125 words as 500, and horrible writers skill doesn't change with length requirements. I think the articles are blowing this up to be a much bigger deal then it actually is.
I think you've given some of the most sensible suggestions I've seen. Especially about length. LoTR alone would eat up a good month and a half, probably more. The poster could get away with it if he's got a very history focused track, but otherwise not worth it.
He posted the theme, it's in the course description:
Through this course, students will utilize analytical skills and reading strategies to evaluate our current situation and project into the literature of different worlds while sharing and learning of an author's insight.
Paraphrased: find contemporary similarities to sci-fi fantasy worlds. He could probably use any sci-fi book out their, but he's gotta sell the contemporary parallel.
also adding: 3. Use books that are good examples of literature. It's a high school English class, so this is one of the few times to expose students to good uses of language before they hit college. Please make use of this. I adore sci-fi and fantasy, but often the writing wavers between half decent and mediocre.
The author's in his list (Verne, Clarke, Tolkien, Bradbury, and LeGuin, Card, Jordan, and Vinge) will take up a decent amount of the semester, so he can stick to those. Just make sure the books are a good choice for the students in the class. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness is a classic text on sexuality; it's also infamously dense. If the kids don't get the book on any level, it's extra work. Parts of Vinge's stuff borders on soft porn, not a good idea if the school is very conservative.
4. Be careful with anything too contemporary, 'cause sometimes the parallels are so blatent that the students don't really need to think about them. (Harry Potter comes to mind, as does Neal Stephanson's Snow Crash.) Sci-fantasy novels set on present day earth (like much of Neil Gaimen's stuff) are also problematic for this reason.
HP's recommended generic linux printer driver (it's open source) works for practically their whole line (I switch between personal and workgroup printers and haven't had to install more than one package) and I find the linux tools to be less fussy than the windows set.
Talking about dysfunctional, though, it seems strange that your kid feels the need to turn up the stereo.
It's just a matter of boundaries/personal space and intrusiveness. Listening to other people have sex feels voyeuristic, and voyeurism on parents is a level of ick. I prefer my brother's stereo blaring for the same reason when he's fooling around with his gf. (Our beds are on opposite sides of a really pathetic wall.)
'cause they never offer to help the other boys and never let the girls learn how to do it by themselves. It's a "girl's shouldn't use tools" things, even when it's just trying to be chivalrous. I've been in plenty of situations where some hardware task needed to get done and all the guys were busy and they still told a girl don't bother, while telling the guy standing next to her to go do it. (this wasn't a task which only the guy knew how to do.)
Sexual harassment can take a dozen forms and boils down to well harassing someone (treating 'em unfairly) 'cause of there sex, (in the name, really) and playing keep away with the tools is a form of harassment. I've also heard more blatant "our robotics team needs some cheerleaders" from guys who didn't believe girls could be useful, but seriously the attitude's the same. But fine, I screwed up wrong term. I'll still second him though 'cause it sometimes gets uncomfortable being the only girl in the room when boys go into creepy/slimy convo territory.
Seconding this. Teach the boys that letting the girls use the tools is a good thing. If you do hardware/mechanical projects, please pay attention to the class and call the boys on their sexism. It may have gotten better since I was in high school (graduated 5 years ago), but I remember lots of boys doing the mechanical stuff for the girls, sometimes due to misguided chivalry but often plain old sexism.
Digging into programming microcontrollers will be a stretch for a lot of your students at that grade (though admittedly I don't know what programming interfaces the devices mentioned use... If it's straightforward enough, go for it).
Programming a pic using C or assembly probably would be torture, an arduino using python not so much. I think it'd be awesome, and could actually be useful if any of the kids become engineers. Many (probably most) of the EE/CompE senior projects require at least some level of microcontroller programming, and most students are just woefully unprepared, and most of the CS students at my school have never done any real hardware programming; Some exposure on the high school level could be really beneficial to the kids who think they want to go into tech fields and those that don't. And blinky LED projects are always fun (I was so excited I got it working in my lab 'cause I'd never done any pic programming before.)
I'm a tech-inclined guy myself, and that sounds boring as hell, so I can only imagine what someone without a predisposition toward the subject matter will think.
They think it's the coolest thing ever 'cause they don't really play with it. Most of the kids in my high school's equivalent of wood shop (called science technique lab) wanted to do the soldering projects, and I know a psych grad student who's itching to get her hands on a soldering iron. You think it's boring precisely 'cause it's such a standard tool to you. I though the multimeter's was lots of fun to fool around with, comparing internal voltages and what not, when I first started really using one. (Now I'm sick of it 'cause it usually tells me things I don't really wanna know.)
Seriously... do you think about what the implications are?
It'll also screw up the kid royally when he/she has to deal with the rest of the world again. I know plenty of "honors" kids who can't interact properly with non-honors kids 'cause they actually believe the brain washing about being better than anyone else. It makes group situations even more horrific than they already are, and really every person should learn how to have patients when dealing with people who are slower on the up tick. I've done the crazy honors track for ages and learned as much (probably more) from the people who weren't on it for one reason or another than those who were in my cohort.
Has ANYONE used the "Add/Remove" function in Windows to INSTALL something?
back in the good old days when cds where much more common for installing stuff, (around the ME days, some what into the XP era), some games wanted to be installed by way of the add/remove toolbar. Mostly kids games. This was common if the autorun was for launching, not installing, and cd's were locked from exploration.
My daughters like them too - but there really aren't too many girl themed sets that are very good.
So encourage 'em to build with the base sets. I built homes, furniture and vehicles and collected sets with people so that I could have my own little lego soap operas while my brother rammed legos into other legos. I sympathize that the girl specific sets are lousy, but most of the sets are pretty gender neutral anyway.
pull from the pool of people that occupies the majority of the bell curve
Which itself is another reason for the subject pool. I know a lot of psychology researchers and one of their biggest gripes is that they can't find subjects for most of their experiments, especially anything that requires a more select population. They try almost everything out on college students first 'cause it's a pool they have relatively easy access to, and anything that gives halfway decent results is thrown into proposals for funding for more complicated experiments. This could totally be the pilot study for a whole series on cognitive deficiencies due to sexual orientation, and they just started with heterosexual college kids 'cause they're the easiest to get in numbers large enough to get statistically significant results.
Except the male/female split is 45/55, and men and women tweet at the same rate. (Source) (critique of source) Another study has a 47/53 split (source 2). Dunno, I think it'd be cool if the washing machine sent a twit (or any alert) when it's done so that I know when to run to the basement to check on it.
If that's the case why did the Jewish guy named Lot give his daughters to some visiting men and basically say, "Enjoy"
Massively ot but:
a) Judaism (as a religion) didn't exist yet. Lot's mostly in the bible 'cause he's a relative of Abraham, but the religion doesn't get established 'til Sinai. (Until then all the Jews are just Abraham's family and people who married in.)
b) Lot wasn't the one "pure man", he was the only one not completely deserving of death 'cause he didn't quite stoop to the levels of everyone else in Sodom. It was relative, not absolute, goodness.
c) The men wanted to rape a set of visiting angels (yeah, sodomy's a worse sin then regular sex, but that's a different issue) whom Lot was trying to protect 'cause they were visitors (he didn't know that they were angels) and he doesn't get off scot free for that either.
d) His daughters weren't the most innocent creatures either, as evinced by the story where they got Lot drunk and basically raped him.
why is ok for you and her but not for kids? if sex isn't dirty and naked bodies aren't dirty - why this arbitrary restriction to expose children to something so 'wonderful'?
Because they're not emotionally mature enough to understand it, so for them it's either a no biggie gonna go over their head kind of thing (like teaching the average 4 year old calculus) or information that could hurt 'em 'cause they can't properly process it. Kid's learn by modeling, and the average porn flick probably doesn't have the best behavior to model.
The Jewish variant (which is basically the Christian variant without the whole sex is dirty insanity) boils down to: sex is a special/holy act to be shared with a spouse (bonus points if it's for the production of children) and therefore viewing/reading/doing it outside of marriage cheapens the act/takes away its specialness/etc. There's also all sorts of old testament stuff about viewing immodest acts/immodestly dressed women that porn also falls under for hardliners.
"Hello, I am required by law to inform you that when I was a senior in high school, I had consensual sexual relations with a female two years my junior. To help inform the community about the possibility of me having consensual relations with women two years younger than myself, I am registered as a sex offender. I apologize for the waste of both our time that the government has imposed."
Lots of people are just gonna assume he's lying through his teeth, so he could risk doing himself more harm than good if he says any more than absolutely necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, I know the structure is off 'cause there aren't any transitions, but the original essay didn't have many of them either. I also can't mimic her style well enough to write the transitions for her. Though hell, I admit the whole "improved essay" (and dude, even I don't consider it better so much as shorter and still retaining the most important info) was trollish.
Response favouring brevity: 163 words.
'cause I didn't edit and was backing up the position with anecdotal evidence.
short version:
125 words prevent answers containing lots of filler.
7 words
They are good when they amplify a high base score, but useless on their own.
That's the key to what Strunk and White were saying, that every word, sentence, etc. needs to have a function in the overall tale. Colorful words are great when they add nuance and flavor, but sometimes it devolves into filler. Most of this girl's essay was pure mood setting, which she didn't need 'cause that's not the story she's really telling. Since this is an MIT essay for an engineering spot, they essay could reduce down to:
My world is eight friends in a bed meant for two, the hidden tunnels of the mall, and semi-weekly trips to ogle gadgets at Best Buy. Widespread panic for Y2K made my father teach me more about system security than I ever wanted to know at the age of ten. I drooled the first time I saw a real G5, and put together my first circuit board when I was seven. The county fair gave me an addiction to funnel cake, the college nearby gave me my first look at a real milling machine, parties at my house gave me Dr. Pepper stains over a large percentage of my clothes, my neighborâ(TM)s dog gave me a hatred of anything smaller than a mailbox that can bark, and my introduction to broadband began a love affair with the world that has yet to die.
As fuzzy logic becomes more and more obsolete (in humans, at least), boolean values have come to rule all. Precision, accuracy, the Styrofoam cup holding your coffee, and the microprocessor in your toaster oven are all a product of infinitely many zeros and ones, a concept I find both irresistibly ridiculous and intriguing.Barring world disaster or a dramatic cult revival, technology is my future.
There's still tons of personality 'cause of her writing style and the great personal details, but all that detail isn't lost in generic reminiscence of suburban/rural living. This is 210 words and could easily be edited down further.
Also, 500 words is not a long essay
It is for the type of questions these essays are usually supposed to answer. I remember the 124/250 word shorts MIT required back when I applied (didn't get in, but because of grades) being perfectly reasonable. I'm a massive cheerleader for more writing in engineering (I'm a writing tutor/computer engineering student who constantly tells science/engineering kids why the skills they're picking up in an assignment will be useful later), but I thought the girl's critique (and essay) was a perfect example of the kind of pretentious purple prose that nobody, least of all engineers, needs practice in. Short answers force students to get to the point and be careful with their syntax and sentence structure, which are writing valuable skills for engineers and sciences. Good writers can be just as good with 125 words as 500, and horrible writers skill doesn't change with length requirements. I think the articles are blowing this up to be a much bigger deal then it actually is.
I think you've given some of the most sensible suggestions I've seen. Especially about length. LoTR alone would eat up a good month and a half, probably more. The poster could get away with it if he's got a very history focused track, but otherwise not worth it.
He posted the theme, it's in the course description:
Through this course, students will utilize analytical skills and reading strategies to evaluate our current situation and project into the literature of different worlds while sharing and learning of an author's insight.
Paraphrased: find contemporary similarities to sci-fi fantasy worlds. He could probably use any sci-fi book out their, but he's gotta sell the contemporary parallel.
also adding:
3. Use books that are good examples of literature. It's a high school English class, so this is one of the few times to expose students to good uses of language before they hit college. Please make use of this. I adore sci-fi and fantasy, but often the writing wavers between half decent and mediocre.
The author's in his list (Verne, Clarke, Tolkien, Bradbury, and LeGuin, Card, Jordan, and Vinge) will take up a decent amount of the semester, so he can stick to those. Just make sure the books are a good choice for the students in the class. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness is a classic text on sexuality; it's also infamously dense. If the kids don't get the book on any level, it's extra work. Parts of Vinge's stuff borders on soft porn, not a good idea if the school is very conservative.
4. Be careful with anything too contemporary, 'cause sometimes the parallels are so blatent that the students don't really need to think about them. (Harry Potter comes to mind, as does Neal Stephanson's Snow Crash.) Sci-fantasy novels set on present day earth (like much of Neil Gaimen's stuff) are also problematic for this reason.
and ALL of them are proprietary drivers.
HP's recommended generic linux printer driver (it's open source) works for practically their whole line (I switch between personal and workgroup printers and haven't had to install more than one package) and I find the linux tools to be less fussy than the windows set.
Talking about dysfunctional, though, it seems strange that your kid feels the need to turn up the stereo.
It's just a matter of boundaries/personal space and intrusiveness. Listening to other people have sex feels voyeuristic, and voyeurism on parents is a level of ick. I prefer my brother's stereo blaring for the same reason when he's fooling around with his gf. (Our beds are on opposite sides of a really pathetic wall.)
'cause they never offer to help the other boys and never let the girls learn how to do it by themselves. It's a "girl's shouldn't use tools" things, even when it's just trying to be chivalrous. I've been in plenty of situations where some hardware task needed to get done and all the guys were busy and they still told a girl don't bother, while telling the guy standing next to her to go do it. (this wasn't a task which only the guy knew how to do.)
Sexism isn't the same thing as sexual harassment.
Sexual harassment can take a dozen forms and boils down to well harassing someone (treating 'em unfairly) 'cause of there sex, (in the name, really) and playing keep away with the tools is a form of harassment. I've also heard more blatant "our robotics team needs some cheerleaders" from guys who didn't believe girls could be useful, but seriously the attitude's the same.
But fine, I screwed up wrong term. I'll still second him though 'cause it sometimes gets uncomfortable being the only girl in the room when boys go into creepy/slimy convo territory.
Sexual harassment awareness(seriously)
Seconding this. Teach the boys that letting the girls use the tools is a good thing. If you do hardware/mechanical projects, please pay attention to the class and call the boys on their sexism. It may have gotten better since I was in high school (graduated 5 years ago), but I remember lots of boys doing the mechanical stuff for the girls, sometimes due to misguided chivalry but often plain old sexism.
Digging into programming microcontrollers will be a stretch for a lot of your students at that grade (though admittedly I don't know what programming interfaces the devices mentioned use... If it's straightforward enough, go for it).
Programming a pic using C or assembly probably would be torture, an arduino using python not so much. I think it'd be awesome, and could actually be useful if any of the kids become engineers. Many (probably most) of the EE/CompE senior projects require at least some level of microcontroller programming, and most students are just woefully unprepared, and most of the CS students at my school have never done any real hardware programming; Some exposure on the high school level could be really beneficial to the kids who think they want to go into tech fields and those that don't. And blinky LED projects are always fun (I was so excited I got it working in my lab 'cause I'd never done any pic programming before.)
Ack, grammar failure due to changing parts of sentences and not proofreading the changes.
I though the multimeter's was
should read
I thought that the multimeter was
I'm a tech-inclined guy myself, and that sounds boring as hell, so I can only imagine what someone without a predisposition toward the subject matter will think.
They think it's the coolest thing ever 'cause they don't really play with it. Most of the kids in my high school's equivalent of wood shop (called science technique lab) wanted to do the soldering projects, and I know a psych grad student who's itching to get her hands on a soldering iron. You think it's boring precisely 'cause it's such a standard tool to you. I though the multimeter's was lots of fun to fool around with, comparing internal voltages and what not, when I first started really using one. (Now I'm sick of it 'cause it usually tells me things I don't really wanna know.)
Seriously... do you think about what the implications are?
It'll also screw up the kid royally when he/she has to deal with the rest of the world again. I know plenty of "honors" kids who can't interact properly with non-honors kids 'cause they actually believe the brain washing about being better than anyone else. It makes group situations even more horrific than they already are, and really every person should learn how to have patients when dealing with people who are slower on the up tick. I've done the crazy honors track for ages and learned as much (probably more) from the people who weren't on it for one reason or another than those who were in my cohort.
You can't sell porn to minors under obscenity laws.
Even facebook has semi-private tools like chat and messages. Just use either of those instead of a wall post/status update.
You have a very good point.
Has ANYONE used the "Add/Remove" function in Windows to INSTALL something?
back in the good old days when cds where much more common for installing stuff, (around the ME days, some what into the XP era), some games wanted to be installed by way of the add/remove toolbar. Mostly kids games. This was common if the autorun was for launching, not installing, and cd's were locked from exploration.
My daughters like them too - but there really aren't too many girl themed sets that are very good.
So encourage 'em to build with the base sets. I built homes, furniture and vehicles and collected sets with people so that I could have my own little lego soap operas while my brother rammed legos into other legos. I sympathize that the girl specific sets are lousy, but most of the sets are pretty gender neutral anyway.
pull from the pool of people that occupies the majority of the bell curve
Which itself is another reason for the subject pool. I know a lot of psychology researchers and one of their biggest gripes is that they can't find subjects for most of their experiments, especially anything that requires a more select population. They try almost everything out on college students first 'cause it's a pool they have relatively easy access to, and anything that gives halfway decent results is thrown into proposals for funding for more complicated experiments. This could totally be the pilot study for a whole series on cognitive deficiencies due to sexual orientation, and they just started with heterosexual college kids 'cause they're the easiest to get in numbers large enough to get statistically significant results.
Except the male/female split is 45/55, and men and women tweet at the same rate. (Source) (critique of source) Another study has a 47/53 split (source 2).
Dunno, I think it'd be cool if the washing machine sent a twit (or any alert) when it's done so that I know when to run to the basement to check on it.
If that's the case why did the Jewish guy named Lot give his daughters to some visiting men and basically say, "Enjoy"
Massively ot but:
a) Judaism (as a religion) didn't exist yet. Lot's mostly in the bible 'cause he's a relative of Abraham, but the religion doesn't get established 'til Sinai. (Until then all the Jews are just Abraham's family and people who married in.)
b) Lot wasn't the one "pure man", he was the only one not completely deserving of death 'cause he didn't quite stoop to the levels of everyone else in Sodom. It was relative, not absolute, goodness.
c) The men wanted to rape a set of visiting angels (yeah, sodomy's a worse sin then regular sex, but that's a different issue) whom Lot was trying to protect 'cause they were visitors (he didn't know that they were angels) and he doesn't get off scot free for that either.
d) His daughters weren't the most innocent creatures either, as evinced by the story where they got Lot drunk and basically raped him.
why is ok for you and her but not for kids? if sex isn't dirty and naked bodies aren't dirty - why this arbitrary restriction to expose children to something so 'wonderful'?
Because they're not emotionally mature enough to understand it, so for them it's either a no biggie gonna go over their head kind of thing (like teaching the average 4 year old calculus) or information that could hurt 'em 'cause they can't properly process it. Kid's learn by modeling, and the average porn flick probably doesn't have the best behavior to model.
Is that in the bible or something?
The Jewish variant (which is basically the Christian variant without the whole sex is dirty insanity) boils down to: sex is a special/holy act to be shared with a spouse (bonus points if it's for the production of children) and therefore viewing/reading/doing it outside of marriage cheapens the act/takes away its specialness/etc. There's also all sorts of old testament stuff about viewing immodest acts/immodestly dressed women that porn also falls under for hardliners.
A childfree t-shirt (or acting like a pothead) should have the same effect without making you totally unemployable for the rest of your life.
"Hello, I am required by law to inform you that when I was a senior in high school, I had consensual sexual relations with a female two years my junior. To help inform the community about the possibility of me having consensual relations with women two years younger than myself, I am registered as a sex offender. I apologize for the waste of both our time that the government has imposed."
Lots of people are just gonna assume he's lying through his teeth, so he could risk doing himself more harm than good if he says any more than absolutely necessary.